[Julius Gavroche: With
political and theoretical differences aside (Leninism, reifications
of History, etc.) we share, in translation, a short essay by Slavoj Žižek,
originally published in Le nouveau magazine littéraire (Nº 1, January
2018).]
One of the great contributions
of American culture to dialectical thought is a series of more or less vulgar
doctor jokes, of the type, “there is good news and there is bad news”.
For example: “The bad news is that you have terminal cancer and you will die
within a month. The good news is that we also discovered that you have
Alzheimer’s, and you will have forgotten the bad news once you get home.”
Perhaps we should have the same approach with regards to radical
politics. After so much “bad news” – after having seen so much hope
brutally crushed in the space of radical action, torn between the two extreme
cases of Maduro and Tsipras -, one would be tempted to affirm that no action of
this kind had a chance to succeed, that it was condemned from the beginning,
that all hope for any real and effective change for the better was but an
illusion. Rather than looking to oppose to this signs of “good news”, we
should learn to distinguish the good news contained in the bad, by considering
it from another point of view. Consider the automation of production that
frightens so many, as it diminishes the need for labour and contributes to mass
unemployment. But why fear this possibility? Doesn’t this open up
the possibility of a new society in which all of us will have to work
less? On what kind of society will we embark upon if the good news is
automatically transformed into bad?
If Marx provided an
unsurpassed analysis of the way in which capitalism perpetuates itself, his
mistake consisted of counting on its final collapse and in not understanding
that it emerges stronger from every crisis. As the sociologist Wolfgang
Streeck described, Marxism correctly saw the “final crisis” of capitalism, into
which we have entered today, but this crisis is only a prolonged process of
decadence and disintegration, without a Hegelian overcoming in sight, without
any agent to give a positive turn to this decadence and convert it into a
superior level of social organisation.
The paradox of our situation
is the following: while the resistances to globalised capitalism fail again and
always to arrest its rise, they remain strangely disconnected from the numerous
manifestations that nonetheless signal the progressive disintegration of
capitalism. It is as if two tendencies (resistance and self-destruction)
advanced on two different planes and could not meet, such that we end up with
futile protests parallel to self-destruction, without finding the means to have
these two converge in a coordinated action with the aim of an emancipatory
overcoming of capitalism. How did we get here? While the greater
part of the Left tries desperately to protect the old rights of workers against
the assaults of globalised capitalism, it is almost exclusively the most
“progressive” of the capitalists themselves (from Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg)
who speak of post-capitalism, as if the very goal of the passage from capitalism
as we know it to a new post-capitalist order was annexed by capitalism …
How then can a radical social
transformation be brought about? Certainly not in the manner of a triumphal
victory or even as the result of one of these catastrophes amply debated and
announced in the media, but “like a thief in the night”: “For yourselves know
perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the
night. For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden
destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they
shall not escape.” (The First Epistle of Paul to the Thessalonians,
5:2-3) Is this not already the situation of our own societies, obsessed
precisely by “peace and safety”? The same holds for psychoanalytic cure,
where the resolution comes always “like a thief in the night”, as an unexpected
by-product, and not as the realisation of an expressly formulated
project. The order of capitalist globalisation is a concrete totality
capable of countering all attempts at subversion, and the anti-capitalist
struggle can only be effective if it takes into account these counter-measures,
if it transforms into weapons the very instruments of its defeat. If one
waits for the right moment when a smooth transition will be possible, then it will
never arrive; history never offers us a clear opportunity. One has to
take risks and to intervene even if the goal to be attained appears (and is, in
a certain sense) unreachable. Only from such interventions can the
situation be modified, to render the impossible possible, and in a totally
unpredictable way. Lenin can be enlightening here. Two years before
his death, when it becomes clear to him that there will not be a revolution at
the European level, he writes:
“What if the complete hopelessness
of the situation, by stimulating the efforts of the workers and peasants
tenfold, offered
us the opportunity to create the fundamental
requisites of civilisation in a different way from that of
the west European countries?”
Giorgio Agamben said in an interview
that “thought is the courage of hopelessness” – a particularly pertinent
intuition in relation to the historical moment that we are living, where even
the most pessimistic diagnoses often conclude by an allusion to the proverbial
light that would await us at the end of the tunnel. True courage lies not
in imaging an alternative, but in accepting the consequences of the fact that
there is no easily identifiable alternative. The dream of alternatives is
a sign of theoretical cowardliness; it functions as a fetish that impedes us
from thinking through our impasse. In short, true courage is to admit
that the light at the end of the tunnel is only the light of another train
running in the opposite direction.
One thing is nevertheless
certain: the ultimate utopia, today, consists of thinking that if we do nothing
and simply look to maintain prudently the existing order, the world will
continue as it is.
