Yes, Le Pen is a threat, but
if we throw all our support behind Macron, do we not get caught into a kind of
circle and fight the effect by way of supporting the very neoliberalism that
fuels the far right?
by Slavoj Žižek
The title of a comment piece
which appeared in The Guardian, the UK voice of the
anti-Assange-pro-Hillary liberal left, says it all: “Le Pen is a
far-right Holocaust revisionist. Macron isn’t.
Hard choice?”
Predictably, the text proper
begins with: “Is being an investment banker analogous with being a Holocaust
revisionist? Is neoliberalism on a par with neofascism?” and mockingly
dismisses even the conditional leftist support for the second-round Macron
vote, the stance of: “I’d now vote Macron – VERY reluctantly.”
This is liberal blackmail at
its worst: one should support Macron unconditionally; it doesn’t matter that he
is a neoliberal centrist, just that he is against Le Pen. It’s the old story of
Hillary versus Trump: in the face of the fascist threat, we should all gather
around her banner (and conveniently forget how her side brutally outmanoeuvred
Sanders and thus contributed to losing the election).
Are we not allowed at least to
raise the question: yes, Macron is pro-European – but what kind of Europe does
he personify? The very Europe whose failure feeds Le Pen populism, the
anonymous Europe in the service of neoliberalism. This is the crux of the affair:
yes, Le Pen is a threat, but if we throw all our support behind Macron, do we
not get caught into a kind of circle and fight the effect by way of supporting
its cause? This brings to mind a chocolate laxative available in the US. It is
publicised with the paradoxical injunction: “Do you have constipation? Eat more
of this chocolate!” – in other words, eat the very thing that causes
constipation in order to be cured of it. In this sense, Macron is the
chocolate-laxative candidate, offering us as a cure the very thing that caused
the illness.
Our media present the two
second-round contestants as standing for two radically opposed visions of
France: the independent centrist versus the far-right racist – yes, but do they
offer a real choice? Le Pen offers a feminised/softened version of brutal
anti-immigrant populism (of her father), and Macron offers neoliberalism with a
human face, while his image is also softly feminised (see the maternal role his
wife plays in the media). So the father is out and femininity is in – but,
again, what kind of femininity? As Alain Badiou pointed out, in today’s
ideological universe, men are ludic adolescent outlaws, while women appear as
hard, mature, serious, legal and punitive. Women today are not called
by the ruling ideology to be subordinated, they are called – solicited,
expected – to be judges, administrators, ministers, CEOs, teachers, policewomen
and soldiers. A paradigmatic scene occurring daily in our security institutions
is that of a feminine teacher/judge/psychologist taking care of an immature
asocial young male delinquent. A new figure of femininity is thus
arising: a cold competitive agent of power, seductive and manipulative,
attesting to the paradox that “in the conditions of capitalism women can do better
than men” (Badiou). This, of course, in no way makes women suspicious as agents
of capitalism; it merely signals that contemporary capitalism invented its own
ideal image of woman who stands for cold administrative power with a human
face.
Both candidates present
themselves as anti-system, Le Pen in an obvious populist way and Macron in a
more much interesting way: he is an outsider from existing political parties
but, precisely as such, he stands for the system as such, in its indifference
to established political choices. In contrast to Le Pen who stands for proper
political passion, for the antagonism of Us against Them (from the immigrants
to the non-patriotic financial elites), Macron stands for apolitical
all-encompassing tolerance. We often hear the claim that Le Pen’s politics
draws its strength from fear (the fear of immigrants, of the anonymous
international financial institutions), but does the same not hold for Macron?
He finished first because voters were afraid of Le Pen, and the circle is thus closed;
there is no positive vision with either of the candidates, they are both
candidates of fear.
The true stakes of this vote
become clear if we locate it into its larger historical context. In Western and
Eastern Europe, there are signs of a long-term rearrangement of the political
space. Until recently, the political space was dominated by two main parties
which addressed the entire electoral body, a Right-of-centre party
(Christian-Democrat, liberal-conservative, people’s) and a left-of-centre party
(socialist, social-democratic), with smaller parties addressing a narrow
electorate (ecologists, neofascists, etc). Now, there is progressively emerging
one party which stands for global capitalism as such, usually with
relative tolerance towards abortion, gay rights, religious and ethnic
minorities, etc; opposing this party is a stronger and stronger anti-immigrant
populist party which, on its fringes, is accompanied by directly racist
neofascist groups. The exemplary case is here Poland: after the disappearance
of the ex-Communists, the main parties are the “anti-ideological” centrist
liberal party of the ex-prime-minister Donald Tusk and the conservative
Christian party of the Kaczynski brothers. The stakes
of the radical centre today are: which of the two main parties,
conservatives or liberals, will succeed in presenting itself as embodying the
post-ideological non-politics against the other party dismissed as “still
caught in old ideological spectres”? In the early Nineties, conservatives were
better at it; later, it was liberal leftists who seemed to be gaining the upper
hand, and Macron is the latest figure of a pure radical centre.
We have thus reached the
lowest point in our political lives: a pseudo-choice if there ever was one.
Yes, the victory of Le Pen would bring dangerous possibilities. But what I fear
no less is the assuagement that will follow Macron’s triumphant victory: sighs
of relief from everywhere, thank God the danger was kept at bay, Europe
and our democracy are saved, so we can go back to our liberal-capitalist sleep
again. The sad prospect that awaits us is that of a future in which, every four
years, we will be thrown into a panic, scared by some form of “neofascist
danger”, and in this way blackmailed into casting our vote for the “civilised”
candidate in meaningless elections lacking any positive vision. This is why
panicking liberals who are telling us that we should now abstain from all
criticism of Macron are deeply wrong: now is the time to bring out his
complicity with a system in crisis. After his victory it will be too late,
the task will lose its urgency in the wave of self-satisfaction.
In the hopeless situation we
are in, facing a false choice, we should gather the courage and simply abstain
from voting. Abstain, and begin to think. The commonplace “enough talking,
let’s act” is deeply deceiving – now, we should say precisely the opposite:
enough of the pressure to do something, let’s begin to talk seriously, ie, to
think! And by this I mean we should also leave behind the radical leftist
self-complacency of endlessly repeating how the choices we are offered in the
political space are false, and how only a renewed radical left can save us –
yes, in a way, but why, then, does this left not emerge? What vision has the
left to offer that would be strong enough to mobilise people? We should never
forget that the ultimate cause of the act that we are caught into – the
vicious cycle of Le Pen and Macron – is the disappearance of the viable leftist
alternative.
‘Disparities’ by Slavoj Zizek
is published by Bloomsbury
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