But was the financial meltdown of 2008 not a kind of ironic comment on the ideological nature of this dream of the spiritualized and socially responsible ecocapitalism? As we all know, on December 11 2008 Bernard Madoff, a great investmentmanager and philanthropist from Wall Street, was arrested and charged with allegedly running a $50 billion “Ponzi scheme” (or pyramid scheme). Madoff’s funds were supposed to be low-risk investments, reporting steady returns, usually gaining a percentage point or two a month. The funds’ stated strategy was to buy large cap stocks and supplement those investments with related stock-option strategies. The combined investments were supposed to generate stable returns and also cap losses \u2013 what attracted new and new investors was the regularity of high returns, independent of the market fluctuations \u2013 the very feature that should have made his funds suspicious. Sometime in 2005 Madoff’s investment-advisory business morphed into a Ponzi scheme, taking new money from investors to pay off existing clients who wanted to cash out. Madoff told senior employees of his firm that “it’s all just one big lie” and that it was “basically, a giant Ponzi scheme,” with estimated investor losses of about $50 billion.<\/p>\n
What makes this story so surprising are two features: first, how the basically simple and well-known strategy still worked in today\u2019s allegedly complex and controlled field of financial speculations; second, Madoff was not a marginal eccentric, but a figure from the very heart of the US financial establishment (Nasdaq), involved in numerous charitable activities.<\/p>\n
Is it not that the Madoff case presents us with a pure and extreme case of what caused the financial breakdown? One has to ask here a na\u00efve question: but didn\u2019t Madoff know that, in the long term, his scheme is bound to collapse? What force counteracted this obvious insight? Not Madoff\u2019s personal evil or irrationality, but a pressure, a drive, to go on, to expand the circulation in order to keep the machinery running, which is inscribed into the very system of capitalist relations –<\/p>\n
the temptation to \u201cmorph\u201d legitimate business into a pyramid scheme is part of the very nature of the capitalist circulation. There is no exact point at which the Rubicon was crossed and the legitimate investment business \u201cmorphed\u201d into an illegal pyramid scheme: the very dynamic of capitalism blurs the frontier between \u201clegitimate\u201d investment and \u201cwild\u201d speculation, because capitalist investment is in its very core a risked wager that the scheme will turn out to be profitable, an act of borrowing from the future.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
A sudden shift in uncontrollable circumstances can ruin a very \u201csafe\u201d investment – this is what the capitalist \u201crisk\u201d is about. This is the reality of the \u201cpostmodern\u201d capitalism: the ruinous speculation raised to a much higher degree than it was even imaginable before.<\/p>\n
The self-propelling circulation of the Capital thus remains more than ever the ultimate Real of our lives, a beast that by definition cannot be controlled, since it itself controls our activity, making us blind for even the most obvious insights into the dangers we are courting. It is one big fetishist denial: \u201cI now very well the risks I am courting,
\neven the inevitability of the final collapse, but nonetheless \u2026 I can protract the collapse a little bit more, take a little bit greater risk, and so on indefinitely.\u201d<\/p>\nAgain, it is thus not enough to remain faithful to the Communist Idea \u2013 one has to locate in historical reality antagonisms which make this Idea a practical urgency. The only true question today is: do we endorse the predominant naturalization of capitalism,or does today\u2019s global capitalism contain strong enough antagonisms which prevent its indefinite reproduction? There are four such antagonisms:<\/p>\n
\n
- the looming threat of ecological catastrophy,<\/li>\n
- the inappropriateness of private property for the so-called \u201cintellectual property,\u201d<\/li>\n
- the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics<\/li>\n
- new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
There is a qualitative difference between the last feature, the gap that separates the Excluded from<\/p>\n
Part of no part is universality<\/h2>\n
What one should add here, moving beyond Kant, is that there are social groups which, on account of their lacking a determinate place in the \u201cprivate\u201d order of social hierarchy, directly stand for universality; they are what Jacques Ranciere called the \u201cpart of no-part\u201d of the social body. All truly emancipatory politics is generated by the shortcircuit between the universality of the \u201cpublic use of reason\u201d and the universality of the \u201cpart of no-part\u201d -this was already the Communist dream of the young Marx: to bring together the universality of philosophy with the universality of the proletariat. From Ancient Greece, we have a name for the intrusion of the Excluded into the socio-political space: democracy.<\/p>\n
The predominant liberal notion of democracy also deals with those Excluded, but in a radically different mode: it focuses on their inclusion, on the inclusion of all minority voices. All positions should be heard, all interests taken into account, the human rights of everyone guaranteed, all ways of life, cultures and practices respected, etc. \u2013 the obsession of this democracy is the protection of all kinds of minorities: cultural, religious, sexual, etc. The formula of democracy is here: patient negotiation and compromise. What gets lost is the proletarian position, the position of universality embodied in the Excluded.<\/strong><\/p>\n
The new emancipatory politics will no longer be the act of a particular social agent, but an explosive combination of different agents.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletarians who have \u201cnothing to lose but their chains,\u201d we are in danger of losing ALL: the threat is that we will be reduced to abstract empty Cartesian subject deprived of all substantial content,<\/p>\n
\n
- dispossessed of our symbolic substance,<\/li>\n
- with our genetic base manipulated,<\/li>\n
- vegetating in an unlivable environment.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
This triple threat to our entire being make us all in a way all proletarians, reduced to \u201csubstanceless subjectivity,\u201d as Marx put it in Grundrisse. The figure of the \u201cpart of no-part,\u201d 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 prevent actually becoming one is to act preventively.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
But was the financial meltdown of 2008 not a kind of ironic comment on the ideological nature of this dream of the spiritualized and socially responsible ecocapitalism? As we all know, on December 11 2008 Bernard Madoff, a great investmentmanager and philanthropist from Wall Street, was arrested and charged with allegedly running a $50 billion … Continue reading “\u017di\u017eek capitalist crisis”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[90,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-resistance","category-zizek"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2863"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2863\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2875,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2863\/revisions\/2875"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}