Zizek: First as Tragedy, Then as Farce Part III: The Communist Hypothesis!

So where were we? Oh yeah, capitalism bankrupt, injustice rampant, democracy gridlocked. Where to turn? Communism! This would be where you stop reading if you’re anything like a lot of people. But you’re not! And it’s worth hearing Zizek out on this point, because his goal is not to resurrect the old hammer and sickle, but to distill the essence of Communism, and use the tools this perspective offers us to evaluate our present day crises and opportunities. In his own words he “endeavors to locate aspects of our situation which open up the space for new forms of communist praxis.” He argues that the question is not: “are Hegel and Marx still relevant to us? But rather, ‘what our contemporary situation might be in their eyes, how our epoch would appear to their thought.” And refreshingly, Zizek makes absolutely no claims to be “objective” or some sort of neutral observer. Instead, he tells us that this book offers, “not a neutral analysis but an engaged and extremely ‘partial’ one—for truth is partial, accessible only when one takes sides, and is no less universal for this reason.”

            The “partial” truth that Zizek offers is that today’s Left is a pathetic and paltry mess. He points out that “[i]t is as if recent events were staged with a calculated risk in order to demonstrate that, even at a time of shattering crisis, there was no viable alternative to capitalism.” Instead of using the utter failure of Bush administration policies and a market system that had vastly enriched and bloated the rich and powerful like a bunch of mosquitoes as a moment reevaluate a broken system and radically change it, both liberals and conservatives were terrified and used tax-payer money to stop the economy’s bleeding. As Zizek describes it, “[t]he best indicator of the Left’s lack of trust in itself is its fear of crisis; such a Left fears for its own comfortable position as a critical voice fully integrated into the system, ready to risk nothing.”

            So now that the moment has passed and we are on the “road to recovery,” the focus is on creating jobs and “getting the economy back on track.” Zizek thinks that this was the ultimate missed opportunity, arguing, “a true Left takes a crisis seriously, without illusions, but as something inevitable, as a chance to be fully exploited.” Quoting Mao: “Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent.”  However, a missed opportunity for the radical Left leaves a hole open to other, more sinister elements to capitalize. We are reminded that “[w]hile crises do shake people out of their complacency, forcing them to question the fundamentals of their lives, the most spontaneous first reaction is panic, which leads to a ‘return to the basics’: the basic premises of the ruling ideology, far from being put into doubt , are even more violently reasserted.” There are countless examples of this, from the rise of Hitler after the collapse of the Weimar Republic to the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan to the current phenomenon of the “Tea Party” activists in America. Zizek deftly reminds us of Walter Benjamin’s old thesis, which holds true today and is more pertinent than ever: “every rise of Fascism bears witness to a failed revolution.”

           But what has the Left been doing all these years? Aren’t they fighting the noble fight? Zizek uses an off-color joke, popular with Russian dissidents during Communist times, to illustrate how he feels about efforts thus far to fight the effects of capitalist ideology mentioned in the previous section. I’ll let the reader check out the book (page 7) for the whole joke, but here’s the punch line: all critical Leftists have done is slightly soiled the ruling elites’ testicles while they have carried on raping the people. For Zizek, the real point is to castrate them. However, Zizek does not advocate direct and violent confrontation/castration, not wanting “to conduct the castration in direct climactic confrontation, but to undermine those in power with patient ideologico-critical work, so that although they are still in power, one all of a sudden notices that the powers-that-be are afflicted with unnaturally high-pitched voices.” Now to me, this sounds like a total cop-out and reversion back to exactly what the Left has been doing this whole time. On the one hand Zizek’s yelling: “Quit being such weenies! We’ve got to castrate these powerful motherfuckers!” On the other hand it’s: “So let’s…patiently undermine them while they remain in power…” WTF? This sounds like the sort of reasoning that stymied the French Communist Party (PCF) during the events of May ’68, where they decided not to side with the student protestors because they didn’t think the time was right.

           But, perhaps I’ve been asking more from Zizek than he claims to give. I set up this review of his book, by saying that he’s going to show us a way out at the end.  But Zizek is a philosopher, and doesn’t claim to have the answers, and doesn’t offer political prescriptions or programs. He’s more of a provocateur. His conception of philosophy seems to be more concerned with opening up new perspectives from which to critique from, interpreting current events through a critical Marxist/Lacanian lens, and cutting through the bullshit ideology that our culture would have us swallow hook, line and sinker.

           With this in mind, let’s return to his argument that the Left has found itself hamstrung in the face of catastrophe.  Here’s the moral of the story: “the time for liberal-democratic moralistic blackmail is over. Our side no longer has to go on apologizing while the other side had better start soon.” It seems as if the Left is constantly playing defense, while the Right never dreams of apologizing and is constantly on the attack. Thus, Zizek thinks we must begin from the beginning and reject “any sense of continuity with what the Left meant over the last two centuries.”

           So where to begin? How do possibly restart from the beginning and convince anyone that the communist idea is the way to go? A very common argument, which Zizek confronts is, “[i]f liberal-democratic capitalism obviously works better than all known alternatives, if liberal-democratic capitalism is, if not the best, then at least the least worst form of society why do we not simply resign ourselves to it in a mature way, even accept it wholeheartedly? Why insist, against all hope, on the communist idea?” In America, people either get angry or laugh when you bring up socialism or communism. The Cold War is still entrenched in the psyche of the populace in the simple rubric: Capitalism = Good, Communism = Bad. According to Zizek, what you have to do is locate within the historical reality antagonisms, which give this (Communist) Idea a practical urgency. For him, “[t]he only true question today is: do we endorse the predominant naturalization of capitalism, or does today’s global capitalism contain antagonisms which are sufficiently strong to prevent its indefinite reproduction.”

            Zizek counts four major antagonisms:

1. The looming threat of an ecological catastrophe
2. The inappropriateness of the notion of private property in relation to so-called “intellectual property”
3. The socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics)
4. The creation of new forms of apartheid (Walls & Slums)

Zizek describes the focal point of the first three antagonisms as what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call “the commons,” a term that refers to “the substance of our social being, the privatization of which involves violent acts and should when necessary, be resisted with violent means.” The 4^th antagonism, the new forms of apartheid, separates the “Included from the Excluded,” and as Zizek emphasizes, “[it] is qualitatively different than the first three.” It is this reference to the Excluded, Zizek says, that justifies his use of the term communism.

           Today when we think of communism, we should be thinking more along the lines of global citizenship and common concern, terms referred to when dealing with truly global problems such as climate change. Zizek takes this even further, suggesting:

“[i]t is the reference to the ‘commons’ which justifies the resuscitation of the notion of communism: it enables us to see the progressive ‘enclosure’ of the commons as a process of proletarianization of those who are thereby excluded from their own substance. We should certainly not drop the notion of the proletariat, or of the proletarian position; on the contrary, the present conjuncture compels us to radicalize it to an existential level well beyond Marx’s imagination. We need a more radical notion of the proletarian subject, a subject reduced to the evanescent point of the Cartesian cogito.

What Zizek seems to be getting at is that there is effectively no resistance that we can make to the manufacture of our own social substance, the privatization or “enclosure” of the commons (environment, media, literature, public space, genetic information etc.) without recognizing that we are all proletarians now, and share a common purpose. As Zizek puts it, “[w]hat unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletariat who have “nothing to lose but their chains,” we are in danger of losing everything: the threat is that we will be reduced to abstract subjects devoid of all substantial content, dispossessed of our symbolic substance, our genetic base heavily manipulated, vegetating in an unlivable environment.”

           While the first three antagonisms all seem fairly dire if left unresolved, it is the fourth that is the key element. Zizek argues, “the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded is the crucial one. Without it, all others lose their subversive edge—ecology turns into a problem of sustainable development, intellectual property into a complex legal challenge, biogenetics into an ethical issue.”  He points out “one can sincerely fight to preserve the environment, defend a broader notion of intellectual property, or oppose the copyrighting of genes, without ever confronting the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded.” The difference is that the first three concern “questions of the (economic, anthropological, even physical) survival of humanity, but the fourth is ultimately a question of justice”. One could imagine resolving the first 3 antagonisms with authoritarian measures that strengthen social hierarchies, divisions and exclusions. Here China comes to mind.

           Of course, Zizek lays out a very complex argument here that I cannot fully simplify for the sake of this post, but what becomes clear is that the Left has never fully taken this “proletarian” position as its base and instead tried instead to include every minority position into the traditional liberal-democratic framework through negotiation, compromise and permissions, leaving the antagonism between Included and Excluded in tact. So when and how can things change? For the sake of posting new content, we’ll have to leave that subject to another day. There’s a lot of good stuff on revolution and change toward the end of the book, but it could fill a steamer trunk! The goal here is simply to get the reader to think. There is no answer for us to take and act upon. Prescriptive answers are the stuff of sophistry and not philosophy. I’ll try to finish up in a final post on this book, but next up is going to be Tao of Wu by RZA… 
           To keep up with Zizek go to: http://zizek.us/