The unbearable lightness of Slavoj Žižek’s communism
The Year of Dreaming Dangerously - review.
The Year of Dreaming Dangerously
Slavoj Žižek
Verso, 142pp, £7.99
Marxism has always been, since the first collaborations of
Marx and Engels, a thoroughgoing critique of capitalist society from the
standpoint of a far less developed concept of socialism or communism. In this
sense, its premise is a utopian conclusion never yet demonstrated – namely,
that there can be a better form of modern society, based on a different regime
of property, than one dominated by the accumulation of private capital. No one
can in fairness require a detailed picture of this future condition but the
vision has to enjoy some minimum plausibility. Otherwise, only a description of
capitalism can be offered and some suggestions for reform but no fundamental
critique.
Since the 1970s – and especially since 1991 – perhaps the
greatest challenge for Marxism has been to keep alive the belief in the
possibility of a superior future society. The belief was trampled almost to
extinction by miscarried Third World revolutions, capitalist transformation in
China, the capitulations of European socialist parties, Soviet collapse and the
ostensible triumph of liberal capitalism.
The scepticism that replaced it was twofold. The would-be
revolutionary left seemed to possess neither a serious strategy for the
conquest of power nor a programme to implement, should power be won. In this
context, the maximalism of the left at its high-water marks could only ebb into
a kind of survivalist minimalism. The pith of minimalism lay in the
alter-globalisation slogan: “Another world is possible.” Its most eloquent
expression may have been Fredric Jameson’s book on Utopia, Archaeologies
of the Future (2005), which sought to preserve the concept of a break with
capitalism in conditions under which neither the bridge across the chasm nor
the institutions lying on the other side could be imagined.
These are the reduced circumstances in which the Slovenian
philosopher Slavoj Žižek has been, for at least the past dozen years or so, the
world’s best-known Marxist thinker. With graphomaniacal productivity and
postmodern range, Žižek writes mainly about contemporary ideology and culture
in the broad sense that covers everything from an animated Hollywood
blockbuster such as Kung Fu Panda to the forbidding ontology of Alain
Badiou. Corrugated with dialectical reversals and seeming at times to consist
exclusively of digressions, Žižek’s writing is often described, with some
justice, as elusive. Even so, his basic analysis of the end-of-history ideology
that swept the world after 1991 has been simple enough.
Žižek ventriloquised the mindset in First as Tragedy,
Then as Farce (2009), one of his many entertaining, funny and shamelessly
repetitive books: “Capitalism is a system which has no philosophical
pretensions . . . The only thing it says is: ‘Well, this functions.’ And if
people want to live better, it is preferable to use this mechanism, because it
functions.” As he went on to argue in his own voice, “The very notion of
capitalism as a neutral social mechanism is ideology (even utopian ideology) at
its purest.” In fact, neoliberal “post-ideology” resembled nothing so much as a
caricature of Marxist historical determinism. It merely substituted liberal
capitalism for communism in claiming that here we beheld the final form of
human society, as legitimated by science – in this case, sociobiology and
neoclassical economics – and as certified on the proving ground of history.
Such a view was often declared after the cold war in a
triumphalist spirit. Lately, with the outbreak, still uncontained, of the worst
economic crisis since the 1930s, it has persisted in a more resigned key. In
his latest book, Žižek quotes David Simon, creator, in the television epic The
Wire, of as damning a portrait of class-riven America as any Marxist could wish
for: “I accept that [capitalism] is the only viable way to generate wealth on a
wide scale.”
Žižek not only rejects this nearly unanimous conclusion but
discerns in unexpected places – whether in the chauvinist eruptions of the
political right or the low-grade commercial output of US cinema – the abiding
wish, however disfigured and denied, for a “radical emancipatory politics”. In
recent years, Žižek’s name for such a politics has been simply “communism”. He
has carried out this dual operation – against the supposed necessity of
capitalism, in favour of the renewed possibility of communism – by invoking a
remarkable roster of thinkers. Hegelian in philosophy, Marxist in economics,
Leninist in politics and an exponent of Jacques Lacan’s particularly baroque
strain of psychoanalysis, Žižek combined these ways of thinking at a time when
all of them separately, let alone together, had fallen into disrepute. He knew
the reaction this courted, as can be seen in a line from In Defence of
Lost Causes (2008): “What should have been dead, disposed of, thoroughly
discredited, is returning with a vengeance.” Nor did this foul-mouthed wise
guy, with an eastern bloc accent out of Central Casting, baiting his detractors
with talk of “good old Soviet times” and plucking at his black T-shirt with
Tourettic insistence, make himself much more presentable to conventional
opinion as a personality.
For many fellow leftists, it has been both a winning
performance and a vexing one. Žižek isn’t exactly to blame for his press, much
less for the failure of the media to pay similar attention to other left-wing
thinkers. Even so, his intellectual celebrity has seemed a symptom of the very
intellectual impasse he has diagnosed. A ruthless criticism of capitalism, it
turned out, could still be contemplated outside the academy – but only on condition
that it appear as the work of a jester or provocateur. In this way, the figure
of Žižek seemed to represent, encouragingly, the lifting of the post-cold-war
embargo on radical thought and at the same time, discouragingly, its
reimposition.
A similar ambiguity attaches to The Year of Dreaming
Dangerously, a brief consideration of several of the revolts and convulsions of
2011, from the Arab spring and Anders Behring Breivik’s massacre in Norway to
the London riots and Occupy Wall Street in the US. Did last year’s dreams, with
their conscious or unconscious emancipatory content, pose a danger to
contemporary capitalism or mainly to the dreamers themselves? In other words,
did they prefigure a revolutionary challenge to the system or merely
demonstrate that such an awakening remains all but inconceivable?
The book begins with Zizek’s general presentation of a
capitalism marked by “the long-term trend of shifting from profits to rents”,
“the much stronger structural role of unemployment” and the rise of a ruling
class defined more by high salaries than direct capital income. Only the last
of these features, however, is integrated into Žižek’s explanation of political
rebellion: some but not all protesters are recent graduates angry that a
college degree no longer assures them a good salary. More relevant to the rest
of The Year of Dreaming Dangerously is Žižek’s contention that
capitalism can’t be reformed. He disdains the idea, characteristic of “the
archetypal left-liberal European moron”, that we need “a new political party
that will return to the good old principles” and “regulate the banks and
control financial excesses, guarantee free universal health care and education,
etc, etc”.
He proceeds to examine last year’s rebellions not
chronologically but in order, it seems, of increasing approximation to his own
politics. For Žižek, the xenophobic Breivik’s intellectual error (not to speak
of his obvious moral catastrophe) is to misunderstand his own ideology: genuine
fidelity to Europe’s heritage of Christian universalism would seek to redeem,
for Muslim immigrants as well as all others, the “legacy of radical and
universal emancipation”.
Next, Žižek discusses the London riots. These illustrate not
an inversion of universalism but a post-ideology devoid of transpersonal
meaning; looters were, like other capitalist subjects, merely grabbing what
they could. “One danger,” Žižek writes, “is that religion will come to fill
this void and restore meaning.”
Precisely this danger has already been realised in much of the
Muslim world. Yet, in Žižek’s account, the popular overthrow of Arab
autocracies, even when couched in Islamist terms, contained a “radically
emancipatory core” to which the secular left should remain “unconditionally
faithful”.
Finally, in a chapter that revises a talk given before the
Occupy encampment in Lower Manhattan, Žižek explains something of what he
takes radical emancipation to mean. He praises Occupy for “two basic insights”.
The first is that the principal political problem is capitalism “as such, not
any particular corrupt form of it”. The second is that “the contemporary form
of representative multiparty democracy” can’t address the problem; therefore,
“Democracy has to reinvented.” My sense, as a participant in several Occupy
demonstrations and one of last’s years affiliated “working groups”, is that
disenchantment with representative democracy, at least in its American
travesty, does pervade the movement. The belief that capitalism can and should
be surmounted, on the other hand, is hardly unknown among Occupiers but doesn’t
seem general either.
Žižek sees in various popular discontents the chauvinist
misprision, the consumerist absence, the communalist disguise or the
anti-capitalist incipience of his own politics. Radical politics at its most
basic consists of two elements: strategy and programme or how to get power and
what to do with it. Žižek’s programme is straightforward: the replacement of
capitalism by communism. It’s not necessary to disclaim this ambition, however,
to see that his concept of capitalism is inadequately specified and his notion
of communism barely articulated at all.
In his brief against reformism, Žižek scorns the idea that
capitalism can be regulated “so that it serves the larger goals of global
welfare and justice . . . accepting that markets have their own demands which
should be respected”. This suggests that he has confused the existence of
markets with that of capitalism. The same goes for Žižek’s rudimentary positive
notion of communism. In Living in the End Times (2010), he describes
a future society in which the “exchange of products” would give way to “a
direct social exchange of activities”. This seems to imply that individuals
would no longer come by goods and services through market exchange but instead
in some immediate, “social” way, obviating the use of money.
Markets long predate capitalism. Capitalism is better
understood as designating a society that subordinates all processes – notably
the metabolism between humanity and nature, the production and distribution of
goods and services and the function and composition of government – to the
private accumulation of capital. As for communism, perhaps it goes without
saying, since Žižek doesn’t say so, that it means eliminating private capital
on any large scale and realising the Marxist goal of common ownership of the
means of production. Yet would productive enterprises be owned by those who
worked for them or by society at large – or somehow jointly between the two
groups? Žižek doesn’t ask, let alone answer, such questions.
Imagine, in any case, a society whose productive assets are,
in one way or another, the property, as Marx said, of “the associated
producers”. Such a society might also entail, let’s say, strict depletion
quotas for both renewable and non-renewable natural resources; welfare
guarantees not only for workers but for people too young, old or ill to work;
and democratic bodies, from the level of the enterprise and locality up to that
of the state, wherever it hadn’t withered away. These institutions might or
might not be complemented by the market. For now, however, to rule markets out
of any desirable future while saying next to nothing else about its
institutional complexion is to reproduce the intellectual blockage that Žižek
and others ascribe to a capitalism that simply can’t imagine how another kind
of society might “function”.
In The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, even the “direct
exchange of activities” has vanished. Here Žižek counsels refusing capitalism
from the point of view of “a communism absconditus” without worldly
instantiation or conceptual content. He defends this featureless vision by
warning, with compact incoherence, against “the temptation of determinist
planning”: determinism refers to inevitability, while planning implies
voluntarism. Yet it requires no creed of either historical predestination or
revolutionary infallibility to hazard an idea, presumably subject to revision
both before and after the rupture with capitalism, of a better society. Whether
such a hypothesis is called communist is a secondary question; as the poet (and
revolutionary) John Milton put it in another context: “The meaning, not the
name I call.” At the moment, Žižek’s communism is a heavy name very light on
meaning.
His strategic notions, meanwhile, are various and
incompatible. At times, as in his advice to Occupy, he seems to advocate the
accomplishment of revolution through democracy, though he rejects parliamentary
democracy for a “reinvented” kind otherwise undescribed. More often he favours a
sort of Leninist quietism, according to which “those who refuse to change
anything are effectively the agents of true change”: withdrawal from the system
will speed its collapse. Yet he allows that: “A strategically well-placed,
precise, ‘moderate’ demand can trigger a global transformation.” The options at
least display Žižek’s dialectical facility. Apparent passivity can be the
highest form of activity; then again, moderation can have immoderate effects.
Despite this last caveat, Žižek is most often an enemy of
reform. However, the experience of western societies since the Second World War
suggests that the old opposition between reformism and revolution is no longer
useful. The heyday of the welfare state was accompanied, after all, by far more
worker and student radicalisation than the era of neoliberalism that followed
it, which demoralised radicals and reformers alike.
Projects of reform, in other words, have tended to nourish
hopes of revolution and vice versa. In present circumstances, the achievement
of reforms might well pave, rather than bar, the way to a new society, not to
mention relieving some of the human misery to be endured before the advent of
the communist millennium. If, on the other hand, the system were to prove
incapable of incorporating any serious reforms, this would demonstrate the need
for revolution that Žižek merely asserts.
This perspective, in which reform and revolution are allied,
can no doubt be intelligently contested. But the time is past for the left to
content itself with the blank proposition that another world is possible. What
traits, other than its otherness, would such a world possess? As liberal
capitalism saps its ecological foundations, defaults on its economic promises
and forfeits its political legitimacy, another world is becoming inevitable.
Which one do we want? And can we make this one into that one before it’s too
late?
[...]
