Socialism or Communism? (1)

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 94-95:

Such apocalyptic proletarianism is, however, inadequate if we want to deserve the name of "communist." The ongoing enclosure of the commons concerns both the relation of people to the objective conditions of their life processes as well as the relation between people themselves: the commons are privatized at the expense of the proletarianized majority. But there is a gap between these two kinds of relation: the commons can also be restored to collective humanity without communism, in an authoritarian-communitarian regime; likewise the de-substantialized, "rootless" subject, deprived of content, can also be counteracted in ways that tend in the direction of communitarianism, with the subject finding its proper place in a new substantial community. In this precise sense, Negri's anti-socialist title, Goodbye Mr. Socialism, was correct: communism is to be opposed to socialism, which, in place of the egalitarian collective, offers an organic community (Nazism was national socialism, not national communism). In other words, while there may be a socialist anti-Semitism, there cannot be a communist form. (If it appears otherwise, as in Stalin's last years, it is only an indicator of a lack of fidelity to the revolutionary event.) Eric Hobsbawm recently published a column with the title: "Socialism Failed, Capitalism Is Bankrupt, What Comes next? The answer is communism. Socialism wants to solve the first three antagonisms without addressing the fourth--without the singular universality of the proletariat. [The four antagonisms, from p. 91 of Žižek's First as Tragedy, then as Farce, are "the looming threat of an ecological catastrophe; the inappropriateness of the notion of private property in relation to so-called 'intellectual property'; the socioethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics); and, last but not least, the creation of new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums." Socialism doesn't address new forms of apartheid.] The only way for the global capitalist system to survive its long-term antagonism and simultaneously avoid the communist solution, will be for it to reinvent some kind of socialism--in the guise of communitarianism, or populism, or capitalism with Asian values, or some other configuration. The future will thus be communist ... or socialist.

Our Only Hope

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 156-157:

[....] from the US to India, China and Japan, from Latin America to Africa, the Middle East to Western and Eastern Europe. They are disparate and speak different languages, but they are not as few as may appear--and the greatest fear of the rulers is that these voices will start to reverberate and reinforce each other in solidarity. Aware that the odds are pulling us towards catastrophe, these actors are ready to act against all odds. Disappointed by twentieth-century Communism, they are ready to "begin from the beginning" and reinvent it on a new basis. Decried by enemies as dangerous utopians, they are the only people who have really awakened from the utopian dream which holds most of us under its sway. They, not those nostalgics for twentieth-century "Really Existing Socialism," are our only hope.

The fact that Deleuze, just before he died, was in the middle of writing a book on Marx, is indicative of a wider trend. In the Christian past, it was common for people who had led dissolute lives to return to the safe haven of the church in old age, so they might die reconciled with God. Something similar is happening today with many anticommunist Leftists. In their final years, they return to communism as if, after their life of depraved betrayal, they want to die reconciled with the communist Idea. As with the old Christians, these late conversions carry the same basic message: that we have spent our lives rebelling vainly against what, deep within us, we knew all the time to be the truth. So, when even a great anti-communist like Kravchenko can in a certain sense return to his faith, our message today should be: do not be afraid, join us, come back! You've had your anti-communist fun, and you are pardoned for it--time to get serious once again!

We Are the Ones We Have Been Waiting For

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 154-155:

[....]

There is only one correct answer to those Leftist intellectuals who desperately await the arrival of a new revolutionary agent capable of instigating the long-expected radical social transformation. It takes the form of the old Hopi saying, with a wonderful Hegelian twist from substance to subject: "We are the ones we have been waiting for." (This is a version of Gandhi's motto: "Be yourself the change you want to see in the world.") Waiting for someone else to do the job for us is a way of rationalizing our inactivity. But the trap to be avoided here is that of a perverse self-instrumentalization: "we are the ones we have been waiting for" does not mean we have to discover how it is we are the agent predestined by fate (historical necessity) to perform the task--it means quite the opposite, namely that there is no big Other to rely on. In contrast to classical Marxism where "history is on our side" (the proletariat fulfils the predestined task of universal emancipation), in the contemporary constellation, the big Other is against us: left to itself, the inner thrust of our historical development leads to catastrophe, to apocalypse; what alone can prevent such calamity is then, pure voluntarism, in other words, our free decision to act against historical necessity. In a way, the Bolsheviks found themselves in a similar predicament at the end of the civil war in 1921: two years before his death, when it became clear that there would be no imminent European-wide revolution and that the idea of building socialism in one country was nonsense, Lenin wrote:

"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 civilization in a different way from that of the West European countries?" (V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 33, Moscow: Progress Publishers 1966, p. 479.

[....]

Contingency, Necessity, and the Act

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 151-152:

If--accidentally--an event takes place, it creates the preceding chain which makes it appear inevitable: this, and not commonplaces on how underlying necessity expresses itself in and through the accidental play of appearances, is in nuce the Hegelian dialectic of contingency and necessity. In this sense, although we are determined by destiny, we are nonetheless free to choose our destiny. According to Dupuy, this is also how we should approach the ecological crisis: not to appraise "realistically" the possibilities of catastrophe, but to accept it as Destiny in the precise Hegelian sense--if the catastrophe happens, one can say that its occurrence was decided even before it took place. Destiny and free action (to block the "if") thus go hand in hand: at its most radical, freedom is the freedom to change one's Destiny.

This, then, is how Dupuy proposes to confront the disaster: we should first perceive it as our fate, as unavoidable, and then, projecting ourselves into it, adopting its standpoint, we should retroactively insert into its past (the past of the future) counterfactual possibilities ("If we had done this and that, the calamity that we are now experiencing would not have occurred!") upon which we now act today. We have to accept that, at the level of possibilities, our future is doomed, that the catastrophe will take place, that it is our destiny--and then, against the background of this acceptance, mobilize ourselves to perform the act which will change destiny itself and thereby insert a new possibility into the past. Paradoxically, the only way to prevent the disaster is to accept it as inevitable. For Badiou too, the time of the fidelity to an event is the futur anterieur: overtaking oneself vis-a-vis the future, one acts now as if the future one wants to bring about were already here.

What this means is that one should fearlessly rehabilitate the idea of preventive action (the "pre-emptive strike"), much abused in the "war on terror": if we postpone our action until we have full knowledge of the catastrophe, we will have acquired that knowledge only when it is too late. That is to say, the certainty on which an act relies is not a matter of knowledge, but a matter of belief: a true act is never a strategic intervention in a transparent situation of which we have full knowledge; on the contrary, the true act fills in the gap in our knowledge.

Žižek Talk Cut Short by Bomb Threat

Slavoj Žižek’s book tour gets a serious interruption at Cooper Union.

By Jan Frel / AlterNet

October 15, 2009, 7:36 AM GMT

From philosopher and culture critic Slavoj Žižek's personal site:

Slavoj Žižek, dubbed the ‘most dangerous philosopher in the west’ by The New Republic, was rudely cut short by a bomb scare as he spoke to an audience of 800 at Cooper Union last night. Expounding on his new book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Žižek was forced by police to round up his talk and exit the Great Hall along with his hundreds of fans.

Amid the kerfuffle outside Cooper Union as police and security guards made efforts to get stragglers out of the building—several refused to be torn away from a bookstall inside selling copies of Žižek’s numerous books—the renowned Slovenian philosopher continued his talk for a time, signing copies of his newly launched book.

First as Tragedy, Then as Farce is a call for the Left to reinvent itself in the light of our desperate historical situation. And in the aftermath of last night’s bomb threat, one line in particular from the book’s jacket is worth noting:

The time for liberal, moralistic blackmail is over.

Unfazed by yesterday’s interruption, Slavoj Žižek can be heard on today’s Democracy Now, speaking to Amy Goodman.

http://www.alternet.org/story/143304/%27most_dangerous_philosopher_in_the_west%27_has_speech_cut_short_by_bomb_threat_in_nyc

Three Divisions of the Proletariat

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 147-148:

It is as if the three components of the production process--intellectual planning and marketing, material production, the provision of material resources--are increasingly autonomized, emerging as separate spheres. In its social consequences, this separation appears in the guise of the "three main classes" in today's developed societies, which are precisely not classes but three fractions of the working class: intellectual laborers, the old manual working class, and the outcasts (the unemployed, those living in slums and other interstices of public space). The working class is thus split into three, each fraction with its own "way of life" and ideology: the enlightened hedonism and liberal multiculturalism of the intellectual class; the populist fundamentalism of the old working class; more extreme and singular forms of the outcast fraction. In Hegelese, this triad is clearly the triad of the universal (intellectual workers), the particular (manual workers), and the singular (outcasts). The outcome of this process is the gradual disintegration of social life proper, of a public space in which all three fractions could meet, and "identity" politics in all its forms is a supplement for this loss. Identity politics acquires a specific form within each fraction: multicultural identity politics among the intellectual class; regressive populist fundamentalism among the working class; semi-illegal groupings (criminal gangs, religious sects, etc.) among the outcasts. What they all share is recourse to a particular identity as a substitute for the missing universal public space.

The proletariat is thus divided into three, each part being played off against the others: intellectual workers full of cultural prejudices against "redneck" workers; workers who display a populist hatred of intellectuals and outcasts; outcasts who are antagonistic to society as such. The old cry "Proletarians, unite!" is thus more pertinent than ever: in the new conditions of "postindustrial" capitalism, the unity of the three fractions of the working class is already their victory. This unity, however, will not be guaranteed by any figure of the "big Other" prescribing it as the "objective tendency" of the historical process itself--the situation is thoroughly open, divided between the two versions of Hegelianism.

Privatization of the "General Intellect"

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 145-147:

To grasp these new forms of privatization, we need to critically transform Marx's conceptual apparatus. Because he neglected the social dimension of the "general intellect," Marx failed to envisage the possibility of the privatization of the "general intellect" itself--and this is what lies at the core of the struggle over "intellectual property." Negri is right on this point: within this framework, exploitation in the classical Marxist sense is no longer possible, which is why it has to be enforced more and more by direct legal measures, that is, by non-economic means. This is why, today, exploitation increasingly takes the form of rent: as Carlos Vercellone puts it, postindustrial capitalism is characterized by the "becoming rent of profit." (See Capitalismo cognitivo, edited by Carlo Vercellone, Rome: Manifestolibri) And this is why direct authority is needed: in order to impose the (arbitrary) legal conditions for extracting rent, conditions which are no longer "spontaneously" generated by the market. Perhaps therein resides the fundamental "contradiction" of today's "postmodern" capitalism: while its logic is de-regulatory, "anti-statal," nomadic, deterritorializing, and so on, its key tendency to the "becoming-rent-of-profit" signals a strengthening of the role of the state whose regulatory function is ever more omnipresent. Dynamic deterritorialization co-exists with, and relies on, increasingly authoritarian interventions of the state and its legal and other apparatuses. What one can discern at the horizon of our historical becoming is thus a society in which personal libertarianism and hedonism co-exist with (and are sustained by) a complex web of regulatory state mechanisms. Far from disappearing, the state is today gathering strength.

To put it another way: when, due to the critical role of the "general intellect" (knowledge and social cooperation) in the creation of wealth, forms of wealth are increasingly "out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production," the result is not, as Marx seems to have expected, the self-dissolution of capitalism, but rather the gradual relative transformation of the profit generated by the exploitation of labor-power into rent appropriated by the privatization of this very "general intellect." Take the case of Bill Gates: how did he become the richest man in the world? His wealth has nothing to do with the cost of producing the commodities Microsoft sells (one can even argue that Microsoft pays its intellectual workers a relatively high salary). It is not the result of his producing good software at lower prices than his competitors, or of higher levels of "exploitation" of his hired workers. If this were the case, Microsoft would have gone bankrupt long ago: masses of people would have chosen programs like Linux, which are both free and, according to the specialists, better than Microsoft's. Why, then, are millions still buying Microsoft? Because Microsoft has succeeded in imposing itself as an almost universal standard, (virtually) monopolizing the field, in a kind of direct embodiment of the "general intellect." Gates became the richest man on Earth within a couple of decades by appropriating the rent received from allowing millions of intellectual workers to participate in that particular form of the "general intellect" he successfully privatized and still controls. Is it true, then, that today's intellectual workers are no longer separated from the objective conditions of their labor (they own their PC, etc.), which is Marx's description of capitalist "alienation"? Superficially, one might be tempted to answer "yes," but, more fundamentally, they remain cut off from the social field of their work, from the "general intellect," because the latter is mediated by private capital.

And the same goes for natural resources: their exploitation is one of the great sources of rent today, marked by a permanent struggle over who is to receive this rent, the peoples of the Third World or Western corporations. The supreme irony is that, in order to explain the difference between labor-power (which, when put to work, produces surplus-value over and above its own value) and other commodities (the value of which is consumed in their use and which thus involve no exploitation) Marx mentions as an example of an "ordinary" commodity oil, the very commodity which is today a source of extraordinary "profits." Here also, it is meaningless to link the rise and fall of oil prices to rising or falling production costs or the price of exploited labor--the production costs are negligible; the price we pay for oil is a rent we pay to the owners and controllers of this natural resource because of its scarcity and limited supply.