Austerity is not “too
radical”, as some leftist critics claim, but, on the contrary, too superficial,
an act of avoiding the true roots of the crisis, says Slavoj Žižek.
After the electoral triumph
of the anti-immigrant eurosceptic parties in countries like France and UK, many
liberals expressed their shock and worry. However, there was something of a
feigned naivety in their surprise and indignation, in their wonder at how the
victory of the populist right was possible. What one should wonder about is why
it took the anti-immigrant right so long to make a decisive breakthrough.
When Jean-Marie Le Pen made
a tasteless gas-chamber joke about a French Jewish pop singer – “we’ll do an
oven load next time” (Le Pen denies this
was intended to be anti-Semitic) – his daughter Marine Le Pen publicly
criticised him, thereby promoting her image as her father’s human face. It is
irrelevant if this family conflict is staged or real – the oscillation between
the two faces, the brutal one and the civilised one, is what defines today’s
populist right. Beneath the civilised public face, there lurks its obscene,
brutal underside, and the difference concerns only the degree to which this
underside is openly admitted. Even if this obscene underside remains totally
out of sight, even if it there are no slips in which it breaks through, it is
there as a silent presupposition, as an invisible point of reference. Without
her father’s spectre, Marine Le Pen doesn’t exist.
There is no surprise in Le
Pen’s message: the usual anti-elitist working class patriotism which targets
trans-national financial powers and the alienated Bruxelles bureaucracy. And,
effectively, Le Pen forms a clear contrast to the sterile European technocrats:
addressing the worries of ordinary people, she brings passion back to politics.
Even some disoriented leftists succumbed to the temptation to defend her: she rejects
the non-elected Bruxelles financial technocrats who brutally enforce the
interest of the international financial capital, prohibiting individual states
prioritising the welfare of their own population; she thus advocates a politics
that would be in contact with worries and cares of the ordinary working people
– her party’s fascist outbursts are a thing of the past. . . What unites Le Pen
and the European leftists who sympathise with her is their shared rejection of
a strong Europe, and the return to the full sovereignty of nation states.
The problem with this shared
rejection is that, as they say in a joke, Le Pen is not looking for the causes
of the distresses in the dark corner where they really are, but under the
light, because one sees better there. It begins with the right premise: the
failure of the austerity politics practised by the Bruxelles experts. When the
Romanian leftist writer Panait Istrati visited Soviet Union in the 1930s, the
time of the big purges and show trials, a Soviet apologist tried to convince
him of the need for violence against enemies, evoking the proverb “You can’t
make an omelette without breaking eggs”, to which Istrati tersely replied: “All
right. I can see the broken eggs. Where’s this omelette of yours?” We should
say the same about the austerity measures imposed by the Bruxelles technocrats:
“OK, you are breaking our eggs all around Europe, but where’s the omelette you
are promising us?”
The least one can say is
that the economic crisis of 2008 offers large proofs of how is it not the
people but these experts themselves who, in their large majority, don’t know
what they are doing. In western Europe, we are effectively witnessing a growing
inability of the ruling elite – they know less and less how to rule. Look at
how Europe is dealing with the Greek crisis: putting pressure on Greece to
repay debts, but at the same time ruining its economy through imposed austerity
measures and thereby making it sure the Greek debt will never be repaid. At the
end of December 2012, the IMF itself released research showing that the
economic damage from aggressive austerity measures may be as much as three
times larger than previously assumed, thereby cancelling its own advice on
austerity in the eurozone crisis. Now, the IMF admits that forcing Greece and
other debt-burdened countries to reduce their deficits too quickly would be
counterproductive… now, after hundreds of thousands of job have been lost
because of such “miscalculations”.
It is as if the providers
and caretakers of debt accuse the indebted countries of not feeling enough
guilt – they are accused of feeling innocent. Recall the ongoing EU pressure on
Greece to implement austerity measures – this pressure fits perfectly what
psychoanalysis calls superego. Superego is not an ethical agency proper, but a
sadistic agent which bombards the subject with impossible demands, obscenely
enjoying the subject’s failure to comply with them; the paradox of the superego
is that, as Freud saw it clearly, the more we obey its demands, the more we
feel guilty. Imagine a vicious teacher who gives his pupils impossible tasks,
and then sadistically jeers when he sees their anxiety and panic. This is what
is so terribly wrong with the EU’s demands and commands: they don’t even give a
chance to Greece, because Greek failure is part of the game.
Therein resides the true
message of the “irrational” popular protests all around Europe: the protesters
know very well what they don’t know, they don’t pretend to have fast and easy
answers, but what their instinct is telling them is nonetheless true – that
those in power also don’t know it. In Europe today, the blind are leading the
blind. Austerity politics is not really science, not even in a minimal sense;
it is much closer to a contemporary form of superstition – a kind of gut
reaction to an impenetrable complex situation, a blind common sense reaction of
“things went wrong, we are somehow guilty, we have to pay the price and
suffers, so let’s do something that hurts and spend less…”. Austerity is not
“too radical”, as some leftist critics claim, but, on the contrary, too
superficial, an act of avoiding the true roots of the crisis.
However, can the idea of a
united Europe be reduced to the reign of the Bruxelles technocrats? The proof
that this is not the case is that the US and Israel, two exemplary nation
states obsessed with their sovereignty, at some deep and often obfuscated level
perceive European Union as the enemy. This perception, kept under
control in the public political discourse, explodes in its underground obscene
double, the extreme right Christian fundamentalist political vision with its
obsessive fear of the New World Order (Obama is in secret collusion with the
United Nations, international forces will intervene in the US and put in
concentration camps all true American patriots – a couple of years ago, there
were already rumors that Latino American troupes are already in the Midwest
planes, building concentration camps. . .). This vision is deployed in
hard-line Christian fundamentalism, exemplarily in the works of Tim LaHaye et
consortes – the title of one of LaHaye’s novels points in this direction: The
Europa Conspiracy. The true enemy of the US are not Muslim terrorists,
they are merely puppets secretly manipulated by the European secularists, the
true forces of the anti-Christ who want to weaken the US and establish the New
World Order under the domination of the United Nations… In a way, they are
right in this perception: Europe is not just another geopolitical power block,
but a global vision which is ultimately incompatible with nation-states, a
vision of a transnational order that guarantees certain rights (welfare, freedom,
etc). This dimension of the EU provides the key to the so-called European
“weakness”: there is a surprising correlation between European unification and
its loss of global military-political power.
So what is wrong with the
Bruxelles technocrats? Not only their measures, their false expertise, but even
more their modus operandi. The basic mode of politics today is a
depoliticised expert administration and coordination of interests. The only way
to introduce passion into this field, to actively mobilise people, is through
fear: fear of immigrants, fear of crime, fear of godless sexual depravity, fear
of the excessive state itself, with its burden of high taxation, fear of
ecological catastrophe, fear of harassment (Political Correctness is the exemplary
liberal form of the politics of fear). Progressive liberals are, of course,
horrified by populist racism; however, a closer look soon reveals how their
multicultural tolerance and respect for (ethnic, religious, sexual) others
shares a basic premise with anti-immigrants: the fear of others clearly
discernible in the liberals’ obsession with harassment. The other is fine, but
only insofar as his presence is not intrusive, insofar as this other is not
really other. . .
No wonder the topic of
“toxic subjects” is gaining ground recently. While this notion originates from
popular psychology that warns us against the emotional vampires who prey on us
out there, this topic is expanding much further than immediate interpersonal
relations: the predicate “toxic” covers a series properties which belong to
totally different levels (natural, cultural, psychological, political). A
“toxic subject” can be an immigrant with a deadly disease who should be
quarantined; a terrorist whose deadly plans should be prevented and who belongs
to Guantanamo, the empty zone exempted from the rule of law; a fundamentalist
ideologue who should be silenced because he is spreading hatred; a parent,
teacher or priest who abuses and corrupts children. What is toxic is ultimately
the foreign neighbour as such, so that the ultimate aim of all rules governing
interpersonal relations is to quarantine or at least neutralise and contain
this toxic dimension.
On today’s market, we find a
whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without
caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol. . . And the list goes on:
what about virtual sex as sex without sex, the Colin Powell doctrine of warfare
with no casualties (on our side, of course) as warfare without warfare, the
contemporary redefinition of politics as the art of expert administration as
politics without politics, up to today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism as
an experience of the other deprived of its otherness – the decaffeinated other
who dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically sound holistic approach
to reality, while features like wife beating remain out of sight. . .
Is this detoxification of
the immigrant Other not the main point of Nigel Farage’s Ukip programme? Farage
repeatedly emphasises that he is not against the presence of foreign workers in
the UK, that he highly appreciates the hard-working Poles and their
contribution to the British economy. When he was asked on LBC about why he said
that people wouldn't like to have Romanians living in the appartment next to
their own, the contrast was immediately drawn with German neighbours – what
worried him, he said, were people with criminal records being allowed to enter
the UK. This is the stance of the “civilised” anti-immigrant right: the
politics of the detoxified neighbour – good Germans versus bad Romanians or
Roma. This vision of the detoxification of the Neighbour presents a clear
passage from direct barbarism to barbarism with a human face. In what
conditions does it arise?
Walter Benjamin’s old thesis
that behind every rise of fascism there is a failed revolution not only still
holds today, but is perhaps more pertinent than ever. Rightist liberals like to
point out similarities between left and right “extremisms”: Hitler’s terror and
camps imitated Bolshevik terror, the Leninist party is today alive in al-Qaeda
– does this not rather indicate how fascism replaces (takes the place of) a
failed leftist revolution? Its rise is the left’s failure, but simultaneously a
proof that there was a revolutionary potential, a dissatisfaction which the
left was not able to mobilise. And does the same not hold for today’s so-called
“islamo-fascism”? Is the rise of radical Islamism not correlative to the
disappearance of the secular left in Muslim countries? Today, when Afghanistan
is portrayed as the utmost Islamic fundamentalist country, who still remembers
that, 30 years ago, it was a country with strong secular tradition, up to a
powerful Communist party which took power there independently of the Soviet Union?
As Thomas Frank has shown, the same goes for Kansas, the homegrown US version
of Afghanistan: the very state which was till the 1970s the bedrock of radical
leftist populism, is today the bedrock of Christian fundamentalism. And the
same goes for Europe: the failure of the leftist alternative to global
capitalism gives birth to anti-immigrant populism.
Even in the case of clearly
fundamentalist movements, one should be careful not to miss the social
component. The Taliban are regularly presented as a fundamentalist Islamist
group enforcing its rule with terror – however, when, in the spring of 2009,
they took over the Swat Valley in Pakistan, New York Times reported
that they engineered “a class revolt that exploits profound fissures between a
small group of wealthy landlords and their landless tenants”. If, by taking
advantage of the farmers’ plight, the Taliban are “raising alarm about the
risks to Pakistan, which remains largely feudal”, what stops liberal democrats
in Pakistan as well as the US similarly “taking advantage” of this plight and
trying to help the landless farmers? The sad implication of this fact is that
the feudal forces in Pakistan are the “natural ally” of the liberal democracy.
. . And, mutatis mutandis, the same goes for Farage and Le Pen: their rise
is the obverse of the demise of the radical left.
