It's the libidinal economy, stupid!

The box-office hit "The Wolf of Wall Street" is more than just a film about the irrationalities of the financial elites.

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/01/it-libidinal-economy-stupid-201411991730302886.html

By Srećko Horvat

Srećko Horvat is a philosopher from Croatia. His latest books include "After the End of History. From the Arab Spring to the Occupy Movement" (2013) and "What Does Europe Want?" (2013), co-authored with Slavoj Žižek and translated into ten languages.

The newest box-office hit "The Wolf of Wall Street" is much more than only a movie about the irrationalities of the financial elites

During Bill Clinton's successful 1992 presidential campaign against sitting President George Bush Senior, the most memorable slogan was definitely "It's economy, stupid". If after the 2008 financial crisis Slavoj Zizek could rephrase it into "It's the political economy, stupid", with the newest Martin Scorsese's film we could say: "It's the libidinal economy, stupid!" Desires and drives not only form and govern individuals, they underlie capitalism, too.

Is greed fun?                                                                      

If the iconic Oliver Stone's "Wall Street" (1987) proclaimed that "greed is good" and the sequel "Money Never Sleeps" (2010) - that "greed is legal", then the "Wolf of Wall Street" showed that "greed is fun". After all, audiences all around the world laugh when Leonardo DiCaprio is crawling trying to reach his Ferrari or even when it comes to misogynistic relationships with women.

Whether the most recent work of Martin Scorsese is a brilliant work of satire or it is just glorification of casino-capitalism, one thing is beyond doubt: It's about the deepest human drives and desires.

During a regular screening in a crowded movie theatre in Belgrade, with continuous rustling of popcorn and laughter in the background, the film found its ideal audience. Almost all spectators around me were literally dying from laughter for three hours. At the other corner of the world, during a pre-screening near the Goldman Sachs building in New York, bankers and brokers, having with popcorn and martinis, were cheering the main protagonist.

Although we are all aware that brokers like Gordon Gekko ("Wall Street") already caused several financial crises, even today, when he is at some restaurant, young brokers approach Michael Douglas and say: "Thanks, man, you're the reason why I'm working at Wall Street." Jordan Belfort, the real protagonist of "Wolf of Wall Street", also admitted that Gekko was his role model.

How do we explain that Gordon Gekko, this ultimate symbol of greed, became a good guy? We could say: No one is immune to wanting to earn more money. But how can we explain the strange overlapping of reactions to the "Wolf of Wall Street?" between a "normal" crowd living in a post-socialist impoverished country like Serbia and a crowd of bankers who all see Jordan Belfort as a hero?

First let us recall the story.

A wolf in broker's clothes

Based on true events, Scorsese's film follows the rise and fall of a young broker, portrayed in the film by Leonardo DiCaprio who is employed by a prominent firm on Wall Street in 1987.

After he loses his job on Black Monday, the young Belfort decides to set up his own business in a garage, and instead of operating with regular stocks, he chooses to work with penny stocks. He pumps up the price of shares worth a few cents to transform them into thousands of dollars and later to millions. And here starts the real rollercoaster ride for our anti-hero, which can be summed up as an everlasting wild orgy.

The point of the film is revealed by a detail that throws us back into the libidinal economy just after the narrator rationally tries to explain how he gained such wealth in the first place. Leonardo DiCaprio, in the best manner of characters from the early Woody Allen films, breaks the "fourth wall" and after trying to explain what an IPO (Initial Public Offering) is, stops and looks directly at the camera - and us, the audience - and says: "You know what, you're probably not following what I'm saying. The question is, 'was it legal?'"

"Titanic on drugs"

And exactly this is the "truth" of the film. "The Wolf of Wall Street" explains almost nothing. It's not the "Inside Job" or "Margin Call", which tried to show what's hidden behind the closed doors of Wall Street. Behind the doors of Stratton Oakmont lies nothing but a perpetual orgy, or in Jean-Francois Lyotard's vocabulary - "libidinal investments".

With 506 f-words, "The Wolf of Wall Street" has set a new record for a non-documentary film that was previously set by Spike Lee's "Summer of Sam". It's around 2.81 f-words a minute. And it's not only the f-word that is in excess. Sex and drugs are everywhere. The libidinal climax of the film is certainly a huge yacht that sinks just because our main hero wanted to get to Monaco during a dangerous storm.

And what does Belfort do when the yacht, once owned by Coco Chanel, starts to sink? Just before a wave hits the yacht he will take a dose of his favourite "Quaaludes", a sedative-hypnotic drug popular during the early 1970s, because "it makes no sense to die sober". And that's the moment when the Belgrade audience, in an almost unanimous approval, burst out laughing, sympathising with the rich and licentious broker. This is the point when "The Wolf of Wall Street" turns into a "Titanic on drugs": Even when it is clear that the yacht will sink, the concern of Leonardo DiCaprio's character is not his wife's safety, but that last dose of "Quaaludes" to celebrate an almost certain act of self-destruction.

The rationality of irrationalities

And here is why "normal" crowds can cheer such a guy, even though he is responsible for their bankruptcies and miserable fates. It is "libidinal economy", the term coined by the French philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard. If Gordon Gekko was the symbol of (greedy) rationality on Wall Street, then Jordan Belfort is the symbol of its irrationality. But it would be wrong to conclude they stand in contradiction. The question of subjectivity, which is inseparable from enjoyment, is located in the very heart of political economy.

Take the famous experiment conducted by John Maynard Keynes in 1936, in his major work The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, where he imagined a fictional newspaper contest in which participants have to choose six most beautiful women from a hundred photographs. The winner is the one whose six pictures come closest to the most popular combination of all participants' choices. The trick is not to choose the women who we think are the most beautiful, but rather the women that others would consider beautiful.

According to Keynes, it's a similar situation in the stock exchange: The winner is not the one that makes the greatest investment, but the one that understands the psychology of the masses, which is to say the subjectivity of other players. In other words, the price of a stock is not determined by its fundamental value, but rather by the opinion of others as to the value of those shares.

So, what necessarily comes with excessive elements of the system such as Jordan Belfort is the "administration" of subjectivity - "the micropolitics of desire" parallels the macropolitical economy of capitalism which functions exactly like the Keynes experiment.

Isn't the best proof of that found in the reactions to the last Greek elections? The day after the elections, newspapers triumphantly raved "Disaster Avoided", "Europe is saved", and "The world is relieved", while talking about "positive responses from stock markets around the world" and "the outcome that the markets most wanted to see". Markets today are like human beings: They have "expectations", can "see", and above all "react" simply on the basis of words.

If "The Wolf of Wall Street taught us anything, it's not only that desires and drives structure the very core of political economy, but that what looks like excess is not really excess. The excess is already part of the system.

Srećko Horvat is a philosopher from Croatia. His latest books include "After the End of History. From the Arab Spring to the Occupy Movement" (2013) and "What Does Europe Want?" (2013), co-authored with Slavoj Zizek and translated into ten languages.

Godot Arrives in Sarajevo

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/19/opinion/godot-arrives-in-sarajevo.html?_r=1

By Srećko Horvat

FEB. 18, 2014

SARAJEVO, Bosnia and Herzegovina — A BOY, his voice heavy with embarrassment and regret, was performing Samuel Beckett in Serbo-Croatian. “Mr. Godot,” he said, “told me to tell you that he won’t come this evening, but surely tomorrow.”

It was 1993 in Sarajevo. Outside, the only sounds came from a United Nations vehicle rolling by and, in the distance, a mortar shell exploding.

The staging of the play, “Waiting for Godot,” was managed by Susan Sontag, and her choice was apt: Despite the United Nations presence, the war-torn country felt as if it was waiting for a resolution that would never arrive.

Almost 20 years later, Bosnia and Herzegovina is once more torn by strife, but this time it is different. Frustrated with corruption, political inaction, unpaid wages and youth unemployment around 60 percent, workers started a protest in the northern town of Tuzla on Feb. 4. Within days, the unrest had spread nationwide. By the time I arrived in Sarajevo a week later, scores of government buildings had been set on fire.

Around the country, protesters are not just occupying streets and public squares but organizing plenums to create alternative governments. In Sarajevo, one such assembly was taking place at the youth center, which before the wars of the 1990s was one of the most popular Western-style clubs in Yugoslavia. During the war it was hit by artillery shells and caught fire.

Now I watched as more than 1,000 people — mothers without a job, former soldiers, professors, students, desperate unpaid workers — gathered here to discuss the future of the country.

In the best tradition of direct democracy, after hours of discussion, the participants agreed to set up a completely new government, to curtail the salaries and benefits of politicians, and rein in the privatization process, which many in this country consider hopelessly corrupt.

The same day, the plenum in Tuzla forced the local government to fulfill one of its demands: eliminating the practice of paying “white bread,” or salaries of politicians after they leave office — savings of some $700,000 a year, enough to cover about 130 average annual pensions.

Aside from these small but important victories, the people’s assemblies have succeeded in what the international community and the awkward, tripartite government it imposed failed to do over the last 20 years — namely, overcoming the rifts among the country’s Croats, Serbs and Bosnians that have haunted it since the end of the war.

During the first day of protests in Sarajevo, one young man, among 50 others, had been pushed into the river by the police. A few days later, I watched as he appeared with a broken leg in front of the plenum. “I am a Catholic, I am a Jew, I am a Muslim, I am all the citizens of this country,” he said.

Another man added: “If I am a Muslim, and he is a Serb or a Croat, if we are hungry, aren’t we brothers? We are at least brothers-in-stomach.” Then he muttered, “I am not smart, but I just wanted to say this.” From the other corner of the fully packed hall, someone replied: “If you’re here, you’re smart!”

As Andrej Nikolaidis, a Sarajevo-born writer who escaped the city while it was under siege by Serbian forces in the early 1990s, said, “The citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina are these days greater Europeans than the Europeans themselves, they are now the ones who are serious about European ideals, while the E.U. created a museum of abandoned ideals.”

These plenums are attracting ever more people and are now part of the daily routine. During the day people protest in the streets, and afterward they gather in the assemblies.

Instead of waiting for Godot — for Ms. Sontag, it was the “international community” that was supposed to stop the war; today it is the European Union, which is supposed to bring an end to economic despair — they have taken the future into their own hands.

But unlike the 1990s, when international action was the only solution, today the people are uninterested in European Union intervention. When Valentin Inzko, the union’s high representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina, said the unrest might require international troops to quell it, protesters lashed out at him, too.

Of course, the cynics among us could pose the legitimate question: What happened after the Arab Spring? What happened after Occupy Wall Street? And the answer might sound disappointing for anyone hoping to see something come of these new protests: In Egypt, we had first a stronger Muslim Brotherhood, and then military rule again; in the United States we find the same financial system again. So why would Bosnia and Herzegovina be different?

But this time, protesters are up against not a military dictatorship or a financial hegemon, but an ill-conceived, poorly run government that few people, in or out of it, believe in. And it would be wrong to say that the protesters are new to this game. The people of Bosnia and Herzegovina have been struggling, in one way or another, for decades to construct a better country for themselves. In that sense, the best answer we might give, for now, also comes from Samuel Beckett: Try again, fail again, fail better.

Srecko Horvat is a Croatian philosopher and the author, with Slavoj Zizek, of “What Does Europe Want? The Union and Its Discontents.”

Ukraine's fallen statues of Lenin are not just a rejection of Russia

Some attack them and others guard them. Yet if Ukrainians looked at Yugoslavia, they'd see neither Russia nor the EU is the way forward

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/16/ukraine-lenin-statues-rejection-russia-eu

Srećko Horvat

Sunday 16 March 2014

A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Lenin.

Back in 2011 Ukraine was preparing to host Euro 2012. The government decided to release a promotional video titled Switch On Ukraine. Among the sites shown in the video was Liberty Square in the north-eastern city of Kharkiv. But something was missing. When the sun rose over the square, instead of an 8.5 metre-high statue of Lenin there was only an empty plinth. Someone had digitally erased the politically problematic icon.

In 2013 another statue of Lenin, this time in Kiev's central plaza – once known as October Revolution Square and now known as Euromaidan – was smashed by angry protesters using sledgehammers. Many have correctly identified this as the key point in Ukraine's political crisis. According to one estimate, of the nearly 1,500 Lenin memorials across Ukraine, protesters have destroyed around 100 of them, from Poltava to Chernihiv, from Zhytomyr to Khmelnytskyi.

This is nothing new of course. During the very beginning of the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia, I remember vividly how communist and anti-fascist monuments were torn down by nationalists who believed that democracy had finally arrived. Some urinated on them, others blew them up. In the period from 1990 to 2000 at least 3,000 monuments were torn down in Croatia alone.

Is the monument mayhem in Ukraine any different? It is: last week, residents of Kharkiv – the same town where the symbolic erasure of Lenin started in 2011 – installed barricades around the statue of Lenin after fending off an attack by Euromaidan revolutionaries. Even if the protesters weren't defending the image of Lenin so much as exhibiting their attachment to Putin this is a remarkable state of affairs.

To return to the former Yugoslavia for the moment: according to the last statistics from the World Bank, the unemployment rate among young people in Bosnia and Herzegovina is 57.9%. This ex-Yugoslav state is not yet part of the European Union, but is already approaching Greece's 60% rate. The newest member of the EU, neighbouring Croatia, is third in the union when it comes to youth unemployment, at 52%.

So this is what we got by getting rid of communism and entering the EU. Croatia and Slovenia are part of the EU, but according to the latest news, Russia's Rosneft hopes to take over Croatian oil and gas firm INA along with its Slovenian counterpart Petrol. In another ex-Yugoslav state, Serbia, Gazprom is already present and holds 56% shares of the Petroleum Industry of Serbia.

Here, an insight from Hegel's Philosophy of History might be useful. He said that "by repetition that which at first appeared merely a matter of chance and contingency becomes a real and ratified existence". What Hegel teaches us is the following: the first act of "erasing" Lenin in Kharkiv, in 2011, wasn't a matter of chance but an indication of thing to come – the real demolition of Kiev's Lenin in 2013. Similarly, the total failure of the "transition" of ex-Yugoslav states from communism to the "democratic" EU might well prefigure the real failure of Ukraine's "transition".

The current fight in Ukraine is not only a fight over closer ties with Russia or the EU. It's – even if the protesters don't realise it – a fight over Lenin's heritage.

Some 75 years ago, Leon Trotsky described the situation as though he was writing about today's deadlock: "Ukraine is in a state of confusion: where to turn? What to demand? This situation naturally shifts the leadership to the most reactionary Ukrainian cliques who express their 'nationalism' by seeking to sell the Ukrainian people to one imperialism or another in return for a promise of fictitious independence."

So what was his answer? A united, free and independent worker's and peasants's Ukraine.

It is for this reason the spectre of Lenin is still haunting Europe: the fallen statues all around Ukraine don't symbolise merely Putin's Russia or the failed project of communism. They demonstrate, through correspondences with fallen statues elsewhere, that neither Russia nor the EU can be the answer.