The only true question today is: do we endorse the predominant naturalization of capitalism, or does today’s global capitalism contain antagonisms powerful enough to prevent its indefinite reproduction? 212
Žižek, Slavoj. “How to Begin from the Beginning.” The Idea of Communism. Eds. Costas Douzinas, and Slavoj Žižek, New York: Verso, 2011. 209-226. Print.
There are four such antagonisms:
- the looming threat of ecological catastrophe,
- the inappropriateness of the notion of private property for so-called ‘intellectual property’,
- the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments(especially in biogenetics),
- new forms of apartheid,new Walls and slums. 212-213
There is a qualitative difference between the last feature — the gap that separates the Excluded from the Included — and the other three, which designate the domains of what Hardt and Negri call the ‘commons’, the shared substance of our social being, the privatization of which involves violent acts which should also, where necessary, be resisted with violent means:
— the commons of culture, the immediately socialized forms of ‘cognitive’ capital, primarily language, our means of communication and education, but also the shared infrastructure of public transport, electricity, post, etc. (if Bill Gates were to be allowed a monopoly, we would have reached the absurd situation in which a private individual would literally own the software texture of our basic network of communication);
— the commons of external nature, threatened by pollution and exploitation (from oil to rain forests and the natural habitat itself);
— the commons of internal nature (the biogenetic inheritance of humanity); with new biogenetic technology, the creation of a New Man in the literal sense of changing human nature becomes a realistic prospect.
… one should give all weight to the terms ‘global citizenship’ and ‘common concern’ — the need to establish a global political organization and engagement which, neutralizing and channelling market mechanisms, expresses a properly communist perspective.
Today’s historical situation not only does not compel us to drop the notion of proletariat, of the proletarian position — on the contrary, it 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, deprived of its substantial content. 213
For this reason, the new emancipatory politics will no longer be the act of a particular social agent, but an explosive combination of different agents. What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletarians having ‘nothing to lose but their chains’, we are in danger of losing everything: the threat is that we will be reduced to an abstract empty Cartesian subject deprived of all substantial content, dispossessed of our symbolic substance, our genetic base heavily manipulated, vegetating in an unlivable environment.
This triple threat to our entire being makes us all in a way proletarians, reduced to ‘substanceless subjectivity’, as Marx put it in the Grundrisse.
The figure of the ‘part of no-part’ confronts us with the truth of our own position, and the ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure — in a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance. Today, we are all potentially a homo sacer,and the only way to defend against actually becoming so is to act preventively. 214
There can be a socialist anti-Semitism, there cannot be a communist one. 214
Socialism wants to solve the first three antagonisms without the fourth one, without the singular universality of the proletariat.
The only way for the global capitalist system to survive its long-term antagonism and simultaneously to avoid the communist solution, will be to reinvent some kind of socialism — in the guise of communitarianism, populism, capitalism with Asian values, or whatever. The future will be communist… or socialist. 214
This is why we should insist on the qualitative difference between the last antagonism, the gap that separates the Excluded from the Included, and the other three: it is only the reference to the Excluded that justifies the term communism. There is nothing more ‘private’ than a State community which perceives the Excluded as a threat and worries how to keep them at a proper distance.
In other words, in the series of the four antagonisms, that between the Included and the Excluded is the crucial one: without it, all others lose their subversive edge. 214-215
- Ecology turns into a problem of sustainable development,
- intellectual property into a complex legal challenge,
- biogenetics into an ethical issue.
One can sincerely fight to preserve the environment, defend a broader notion of intellectual property, oppose the copyrighting of genes, without confronting the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded.
Whats more, one can even formulate some of these struggles in terms of the Included being threatened by the polluting Excluded. In this way, we get no true universality, only private’ concerns in the Kantian sense of the term. 215
In short, without the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded, we may well find ourselves in a world in which Bill Gates is the greatest humanitarian fighting poverty and diseases and Rupert Murdoch the greatest environmentalist, mobilizing hundreds of millions through his media empire. 215