Žižek, Slavoj. “From Democracy to Divine Violence” Democracy in What State, (Démocratie dans quel état. (2009)) New York: Columbia University Press, 2011. 100-120.
Page 100: Starts off by citing Martin Luther King, he was not only advocate of racial equality but also delved into issues regarding worker’s rights. Shot in 1968 while supporting striking sanitation workers. Now racial equality is a given in every liberalistic creed, “however, in the 1920s and 1930s the Communists were the ONLY political force that argued for complete equality between the races.” states Žižek
Page 102: Žižek is already into the relationship of knowledge to power. We know too much, its not that we are not acting on ecology issues because we don’t know enough, rather is “the fact that we know too much and do not know what to do with this mass of inconsistent knowledge, how to subordinate it to a Master- Signifier? This brings us to a more pertinent level, that of the tension between S1 and S2: the chain of knowledge is no longer totalized/quilted by Master-Signifiers.” Knowledge is getting out of control. But really this tangent quickly peters out.
Page 103: China. Žižek argues that capitalism=democracy, no longer holds. What China is today is liberal capitalism in Europe in its very early stages. “All the features we identify today with liberal democracy and freedom (trade unions, universal vote, free universal education, freedom of the press, etc.) were won in a long, difficult struggle of the lower classes throughout the nineteenth century, they were far from a natural consequence of capitalist relations. Recall the list of demands with which The Communist Manifesto concludes: most of them, but for the abolition of private property with the means of production, are today widely accepted in “bourgeois” democracies — the result of popular struggles.” And then Žižek sums up this point nicely adding, “There is thus nothing exotic in today s China: what happens there merely repeats our own forgotten past.”
Page 105: Citing Ralph Dahrendorf’s argument that countries emerging into capitalism have first to dismantle the securities of welfare state and in the example of Eastern Europe, communist measures that provided certain securities and welfare to the populace, so that a market can be instituted. But this takes time and the tendency is to forego this pain, and elect a slate of politicians who will ameliorate this pain and thus interfere with the market discipline. So Žižek wonders, is not the logical conclusion of D’s argument that “an enlightened elite should take power, even by nondemocratic means, to enforce the necessary measures and thus lay the foundations for a truly stable democracy?”
Page 106: So developing countries that “prematurely democratize” can only end up in catastrophe. “no wonder today’s most economically successful Third World countries (Taiwan, South Korea, Chile) embraced full democracy only after a period of authoritarian rule. Is this line of reasoning not the best argument for the Chinese way to capitalism as opposed to the Russian way? After the collapse of communism, Russia adopted a “shock therapy” and threw itself directly into democracy and the fast track to capitalism—with economic bankruptcy the result.” And further stating, “The Chinese, on the contrary, followed the path of Chile and South Korea, using unencumbered authoritarian state power to control the social costs of the passage to capitalism, thus avoiding the chaos. In short, the weird combination of capitalism and communist rule, far from a ridiculous anomaly proved a blessing (not even) in disguise; China developed so fast not in spite of authoritarian communist rule but because of it. So, to conclude with a Stalinist-sounding suspicion: what if those who worry about the lack of democracy in China really worry about the fast development of China that makes it the next global superpower, threatening Western primacy?”
Page 107: Žižek finally makes the point he’s been harping on for the past 5 years now. He points out the unsettling fact regarding China today: “the suspicion that its authoritarian capitalism is not merely a reminder of our past, the repetition of the process of capitalist accumulation that, in Europe, went on from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, but a sign of the future? What if “the vicious combination of the Asian knout and the European stock market” proves itself to be economically more efficient than our liberal capitalism? What if it signals that democracy, as we understand it, is no longer a condition and driver of economic development, but its obstacle?”
Page 108: Haiti, here Žižek makes some good points: Firstly when Haiti declared independence in 1804 it was more of an Event that the French Revolution itself. “It was the first time that the colonized rebelled not on behalf of returning to their precolonial “roots” but on behalf of the very modern principles of freedom and equality And the sign of the Jacobins’ authenticity is that they immediately recognized the slaves’ uprising—the black delegation from Haiti was enthusiastically received in the National Assembly (As expected, things changed after the Thermidor: Napoleon quickly sent the army to reoccupy Haiti.)” Now because of the ‘failed’ revolution, France the former colonial occupier, demanded that Haiti pay France a restitution for the loss of its slaves. ” Haiti HAD thus to be made an exemplary case of economic failure, to dissuade other countries from taking the same path. The price—LITERAL price—of the “premature” independence was horrible: after two decades of embargo, France, the previous colonial master, established trade and diplomatic relations only in 1825, and for this Haiti had to agree to pay the sum of 150 million francs as a “compensation” for the loss of its slaves. This sum, roughly equal to the French annual budget at the time, was later cut to 90 million, but it continued to be a heavy burden that prevented any economic growth: at the end of the nineteenth century Haiti’s payments to France consumed around 80 percent of the national budget, and the last installment was paid in 1947. When, in 2004, celebrating the bicentennial of the independence, the Lavalas president Jean-Baptiste Aristide demanded that France return this extorted sum, his claim was flatly rejected by a French commission (whose member was also Regis Debray)—so while U.S. liberals ponder the possibility of reimbursing U.S. blacks for slavery Haiti’s demand to be reimbursed for the tremendous amount the ex-slaves had to pay to have their freedom recognized was ignored by liberal opinion, even if the extortion here was double: the slaves were first exploited, then had to pay for the recognition of their hard-won freedom.”
Page 110: Here’s something I’ve never heard from Žižek before: “Leftist political movements are like “banks of rage”: they collect rage investments from people and promise them large-scale revenge, the reestablishment of global justice. Since, after the revolutionary explosion of rage, full satisfaction never takes place and an inequality and hierarchy reemerge, a push always arises for the second—true, integral— revolution that will satisfy the disappointed and truly finish the emancipatory work: 1792 after 1789, October after February . . . The problem is simply that there is never enough rage capital. That is why it is necessary to borrow from or combine with other rages: national or cultural. In fascism the national rage predominates; Mao’s communism mobilizes the rage of exploited poor farmers, not proletarians. In our own time, when this global rage has exhausted its potential, two main forms of rage remain: Islam (the rage of the victims of capitalist globalization) plus “irrational” youth outbursts, to which one should add Latino American populism, ecologists, anticonsumerists, and other forms of antiglobalist resentment: the Porto Allegre movement failed to establish itself as a global bank for this rage, since it lacked a positive alternate vision.”
Page 115: I’m picking up the thread here because he goes on a tangent regarding communists in ex-Yugoslavia who wait for the precise moment to strike and then banish democracy. Now he returns to his argument in support of Aristide in Haiti. Now Žižek gets to the important crux of his argument. Citing Aristide’s use of violence, particularly the use of what is called Pere Lebrun, or necklacing that kills a political opponent through the use of a burning tire or necklace, “Liberals immediately draw the parallel between chimeres, the Lavalas popular self-defense units, and tonton macoutes, the notorious murderous gangs of the Duvalier dictatorship—their preferred strategy is always the one of equating leftist and rightist “fundamentalists” so that, as with Simon Critchley, al Qaeda becomes a new reincarnation of the Leninist party, etc. Asked about chimeres, Aristide said: “the very word says it all. Chimeres are people who are impoverished, who live in a state of profound insecurity and chronic unemployment. They are the victims of structural injustice, of systematic social violence. . . . It’s not surprising that they should confront those who have always benefited from this same social violence.” These desperate acts of violent popular self-defense were examples of what Benjamin called “divine violence“: they are to be located “beyond good and evil” in a kind of politico-religious suspension of the ethical. Although we are dealing with what, to an ordinary moral consciousness, cannot but appear as “immoral” acts of killing, one has no right to condemn them, since they replied to years—centuries even—of systematic state and economic violence and exploitation.”
Žižek goes on to defend violence, as described here, a violence of the ‘part of no part’ and then goes to to identify what he terms a class bias to the very form of democracy. His big point being that the choice between either struggling for state power or withdrawing to resist from a distance not getting involved in the state, is for Žižek a false choice: “Here one should shamelessly repeat the lesson of Lenin’s State and Revolution: the goal of revolutionary violence is not to take over the state power but to transform it, radically changing its functioning, its relation to its base, etc.” The dictatorship of the proletariat is less a ruling class than a form of people’s power.
But here is the absolute nerve centre of Žižek’s article. He cites an absolute moment of truth in totalitarianism. And that is the fact the people are necessarily split. It is not as if they know what they want and tell their representative who then represents them. Žižek argues that the split between the in-itself and for-itself of political demands, the former are the interests of the people still in unarticulate inchoate form, and the latter are these demands universally expressed,
“they only know it “in itself; it is their representative who formulates their interests and goals for them, making them “for-itself “ The “totalitarian” logic thus makes explicit, posits “as such,” a split that always already cuts from within the represented “people.” This is called the TOTALITARIAN EXCESS and as long as it is on the side of the people, that is more specifically the ‘part of no part’ that one could say the democratic form is truly expressive and universal.
It is at this level that the concept of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” functions: in it the “totalitarian excess” of power is on the side of the “part of no part,” not on the side of the hierarchical social order — to put it bluntly, ultimately, they are in power in the full sovereign sense of the term, i.e., it is not only that their representatives temporarily occupy the empty place of power, but, much more radically, they “twist” the very space of state re-presentation in their direction.
This ‘twisting’ fo the very space of state power is a way of expressing the way in which to combat what Žižek perceives as the inherent class bias in the democratic form.
“That is why when radical leftists came to power through elections, their signe de reconnaissance is that they move to “change the rules,” to transform not only electoral and other state mechanisms but also the entire logic of the political space (relying directly on the power of the mobilized movements; imposing different forms of local self-organization; etc.) to guarantee the hegemony of their base, they are guided by the right intuition about the “class bias” of the democratic form.“