Category: lacan

Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy Then as Farce. New York: Verso, 2009. Print.

Saving endangered species, saving the planet from global warming, saving AIDS patients and those dying for lack of funds for expensive treatments, saving the starving children . . . all this can wait a little bit. The call to “save the banks!” by contrast, is an unconditional imperative which must be met with immediate action. The panic was so absolute that a transnational and non-partisan unity was immediately established, all grudges between world leaders being momentarily forgotten in order to avert the catastrophe. But what the much-praised “bi-partisan” approach effectively meant was that even democratic procedures were de facto suspended: there was no time to engage in proper debate, and those who opposed the plan in the US Congress were quickly made to fall in with the majority. Bush, McCain and Obama all quickly got together, explaining to confused congressmen and women that there was simply no time for discussion-we were in a state of emergency, and things simply had to be done fast . . . And let us also not forget that the sublimely enormous sums of money were spent not on some clear “real” or concrete problem, but essentially in order to restore confidence in the markets, that is, simply to change people’s beliefs!

Do we need any further proof that Capital is the Real of our lives, a Real whose imperatives are much more absolute than even the most pressing demands of our social and natural reality? (80)

It was Joseph Brodsky who provided an appropriate solution to the search for the mysterious “fifth element:’ the quintessential ingredient of our reality: ”Along with air, earth, water, and fire, money is the fifth natural force a human being has to reckon with most often. If one has any doubts about this, a quick look at the recent financial meltdown should be more than sufficient to dispel them.

In order to approach these problems adequately, it will be necessary to invent new forms of large-scale collective action; neither the standard forms of state intervention nor the much-praised forms of local self-organization will be up to the job. If such problems are not solved one way or another, the most likely scenario will be a new era of apartheid in which secluded parts of the world enjoying an abundance of food, water and energy are separated from a chaotic “outside” characterized by widespread chaos, starvation and permanent war. What should people in Haiti and other regions blighted by food shortages do? Do they not have the full right to violent rebellion? Communism is once again at the gates (84).

First, as was noted earlier with regard to Mali, while imposing the globalization of agriculture on Third World countries, the developed Western countries are taking great care to maintain their own food self-sufficiency with financial support for their own farmers, etc. (Recall that financial support to farmers accounts for more than half of the entire European Union budget-the West itself has never abandoned the “policy of maximum food self-sufficiency”! )

Second, one should note that the list of products and services which, like food, are not “commodities like others” extends much further, including not only defense (as all “patriots” are aware), but above all water, energy, the environment as such, culture, education, and health . . . Who is to decide on the priorities here, and how, if such decisions cannot be left to the market? It is here that the question of communism has to be raised once again (85).

… the great defining problem of Western Marxism was the lack of a revolutionary subject or agent. Why is it that: the working class does not complete the passage from in-itself to for-itself: and constitute itself as a revolutionary agent? This problem was the main motivation for the turn to psychoanalysis, evoked precisely in order to explain the unconscious libidinal mechanisms which were preventing the rise of class consciousness, mechanisms inscribed into the very being (social situation) of the working class. In this way, the truth of Marxist socio-economic analysis could be saved, and there was no need to give ground to “revisionist” theories about the rise of the middle classes. For this same reason, Western Marxism was also engaged in a constant search for other social agents who could play the role of the revolutionary subject, as understudies who might replace the indisposed working class: Third World peasants, students, intellectuals, the excluded . . .

The failure of the working class as a revolutionary subject lies already at the very core of the Bolshevik revolution: Lenin’s skill lay in his ability to detect the “rage potential” of the disappointed peasants. The October Revolution took place under the banner of “land and peace:’ addressed to the vast peasant majority, seizing the brief moment of their radical dissatisfaction. Lenin had already been thinking along ‘ these lines a decade earlier, which is why he was so horrified at the prospect of the success of the Stolypin land reforms, aimed at creating a new and stronger class of independent farmers. He was sure that if Stolypin succeeded, the chance for revolution would be lost for decades.

All successful socialist revolutions, from Cuba to Yugoslavia, followed same model, seizing a local opportunity in an extreme and critical co-opting the desire for national liberation or other forms of “rage capital.” Of course, a partisan of the logic of hegemony would here point out that this is the “normal” logic of revolution, that the “critical mass” is reached precisely and only through a series of equivalences among multiple demands, a series which is always radically contingent and dependent on a specific, unique even, set of circumstances. A revolution never occurs when all antagonisms collapse into the Big One, but when they synergetically combine their power.

But the problem is here more complex: the point is not just that revolution no longer rides on the train of History, following its Laws, since there is no History, since history is an open, contingent process. The problem is a different one. It is as if there is a Law of History, a more-or-less clear and predominant line of historical development, but that revolution can only occur in its interstices, “against the current.”

Revolutionaries have to wait patiently for the (usually very brief) moment when the system openly malfunctions or collapses, have to exploit the window of opportunity, to seize power —which at that moment lies, as it were, in the street—and then fortify their hold on it, building up repressive apparatuses, and so forth, so that, once the moment of confusion is over and the majority sobers up only to be disappointed by the new regime, it is too late to reverse things, for the revolutionaries are now firmly entrenched.

The case of communist ex-Yugoslavia is typical here: throughout World War II, the communists ruthlessly hegemonized the resistance against the German occupying forces, monopolizing their role in the anti-fascist struggle by actively seeking to destroy al alternative (“bourgeois”) resisting forces, while simultaneously denying the communist nature of their struggle (those who raised the suspicion that the communists planned to grab power and foment a revolution at the end of the war were swiftly denounced as spreading enemy propaganda). After the war, once they did indeed seize full power, things changed quickly and the regime openly displayed its true communist nature. The communists, although genuinely popular until around 1946, nonetheless cheated almost openly in the general election of that year. When asked why they had done so-since they could easily have won in a free election anyway-their answer (in private, of course) was that this was true, but then they would have lost the next election four years later, so it was better to make clear now what kind of election they were prepared to tolerate. In short, they were fully aware of the unique opportunity that had brought them to power. An awareness of the communists’ historical failure to build and sustain genuine long-term hegemony based on popular support was thus, from the very beginning, taken into account.

Thus again, it is not enough simply to remain faithful to the communist Idea; one has to locate within historical reality antagonisms which give this Idea a practical urgency.

The 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? There are four such 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 socioethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics);
4. and, last but not least, the creation of new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums.

There is a qualitative difference between this last feature-the gap that separates the Excluded from the Included-and the other three, which designate different aspects of what Hardt and Negri call the “commons;’ the shared substance of our social being, the privatization of which involves violent acts which should, 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, the postal system, and so on;

-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.

What the struggles in all these domains share is an awareness of the potential for destruction, up to and including the self-annihilation of humanity itself, should the capitalist logic of enclosing the commons be allowed a free run. Nicholas Stern was right to characterize the climate crisis as “the greatest market failure in human history.” (91)
It 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.