Capitalism as (inherently-ethical) Drive?
Slavoj Zizek: Capitalism is . . . and this, almost
I’m tempted to say is what is great about it, although I’m very critical of it
. . . Capitalism is more an ethical/religious category for me. It’s
not true when people attack capitalists as egotists. “They don't
care.” No! An ideal capitalist is someone who is ready,
again, to stake his life, to risk everything just so that production grows,
profit grows, capital circulates. His personal or her happiness is
totally subordinated to this. This is what I think Walter Benjamin,
the great Frankfurt School companion, thinker, had in mind when he said
capitalism is a form of religion. You cannot explain, account for, a
figure of a passionate capitalist, obsessed with expanded circulation, with
rise of his company, in terms of personal happiness.
I am, of course, fundamentally
anti-capitalist. But let’s not have any illusions
here. No. What shocks me is that most of the critics of
today’s capitalism feel even embarrassed, that's my experience, when you
confront them with a simple question, “Okay, we heard your story . . . protest
horrible, big banks depriving us of billions, hundreds, thousands of billions
of common people's money. . . . Okay, but what do you really
want? What should replace the system?” And then you get one
big confusion. You get either a general moralistic answer, like “People
shouldn't serve money. Money should serve people.” Well,
frankly, Hitler would have agreed with it, especially because he would say,
“When people serve money, money’s controlled by Jews,” and so on, no? So
either this or some kind of a vague connection, social democracy, or a simple
moralistic critique, and so on and so on. So, you know, it’s easy to
be just formally anti-capitalist, but what does it really mean? It’s
totally open.
This is why, as I always repeat, with all my sympathy for
Occupy Wall Street movement, it’s result was . . . I call it a Bartleby
lesson. Bartleby, of course, Herman Melville’s Bartleby, you know,
who always answered his favorite “I would prefer not to” . . . The message of
Occupy Wall Street is, I would prefer not to play the existing
game. There is something fundamentally wrong with the system and the
existing forms of institutionalized democracy are not strong enough to deal
with problems. Beyond this, they don't have an answer and neither do
I. For me, Occupy Wall Street is just a signal. It’s like
clearing the table. Time to start thinking.
The other thing, you know, it’s a little bit boring to
listen to this mantra of “Capitalism is in its last stage.” When this
mantra started, if you read early critics of capitalism, I’m not kidding, a
couple of decades before French Revolution, in late eighteenth
century. No, the miracle of capitalism is that it’s rotting in
decay, but the more it’s rotting, the more it thrives. So, let’s
confront that serious problem here.
Also, let’s not remember--and I’m saying this as some kind
of a communist--that the twentieth century alternatives to capitalism and
market miserably failed. . . . Like, okay, in Soviet Union they did try to get
rid of the predominance of money market economy. The price they paid
was a return to violent direct master and servant, direct domination, like you
no longer will even formally flee. You had to obey orders, a new
authoritarian society. . . . And this is a serious problem: how to abolish
market without regressing again into relations of servitude and domination.
My advice would be--because I don't have simple answers--two
things: (a) precisely to start thinking. Don't get caught into this
pseudo-activist pressure. Do something. Let’s do it, and so
on. So, no, the time is to think. I even provoked some of
the leftist friends when I told them that if the famous Marxist formula was,
“Philosophers have only interpreted the world; the time is to change it” . . .
thesis 11 . . . , that maybe today we should say, “In the twentieth century, we
maybe tried to change the world too quickly. The time is to
interpret it again, to start thinking.”
Second thing, I’m not saying people are suffering, enduring
horrible things, that we should just sit and think, but we should be very
careful what we do. Here, let me give you a surprising
example. I think that, okay, it’s so fashionable today to be
disappointed at President Obama, of course, but sometimes I’m a little bit
shocked by this disappointment because what did the people expect, that he will
introduce socialism in United States or what? But for example, the
ongoing universal health care debate is an important one. This is a
great thing. Why? Because, on the one hand, this debate
which taxes the very roots of ordinary American ideology, you know, freedom of
choice, states wants to take freedom from us and so on. I think this
freedom of choice that Republicans attacking Obama are using, its pure
ideology. But at the same time, universal health care is not some
crazy, radically leftist notion. It’s something that exists all
around and functions basically relatively well--Canada, most of Western
European countries.
So the beauty is to select a topic which touches the
fundamentals of our ideology, but at the same time, we cannot be accused of
promoting an impossible agenda--like abolish all private property or
what. No, it’s something that can be done and is done relatively
successfully and so on. So that would be my idea, to carefully
select issues like this where we do stir up public debate but we cannot be
accused of being utopians in the bad sense of the term.
