To Alain Badiou, my absolute friend.
polity
Copyright © Slavoj Žižek 2020
The right of Slavoj Žižek to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in 2020 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-4119-5
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Žižek, Slavoj, author.
Title: A left that dares to speak its name : 34 untimely interventions / Slavoj Žižek.
Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: “With irrepressible humour Slavoj Žižek dissects our current political and social climate, discussing everything from Jordan Peterson and sex ‘unicorns’ to Greta Thunberg and Chairman Mao. This is Žižek’s attempt to elucidate the major political issues of the day from a truly radical left position”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019027646 (print) | LCCN 2019027647 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509541171 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509541188 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509541195 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Right and left (Political science) | Communism. | Social history--21st century. | World politics--21st century.
Classification: LCC JA83 .Z59 2020 (print) | LCC JA83 (ebook) | DDC 320.53/2--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027646
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027647
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This book brings together my (substantially rewritten) most recent interventions in the public media. They cover the entire panoply of topics that aroused public attention, from economic turmoil to the struggle for sexual emancipation, from populism to political correctness, from the vicissitudes of Trump’s presidency to the ongoing tensions in and with China, from ethical problems raised by sexbots to the Middle East crisis. The concluding supplement contains fragments from two polemics I was engaged in. The collected interventions are untimely because their premise is that only a communist standpoint provides the appropriate way to grasp these topics. So why communism?
Signs abound that our global situation calls increasingly for such a standpoint. Apologists of the existing order like to point out that the dream of socialism is over, that every attempt to realize it turned out to be a nightmare (just look at what goes on in Venezuela!). However, at the same time, signs of panic grow everywhere: how are we to deal with global warming, with the threat of total digital control over our lives, with the influx of refugees? In short, with the effects and consequences of this same triumph of global capitalism? There is no surprise here: when capitalism wins, its antagonisms explode.
On the one hand, signs of anti-Enlightenment madness multiply everywhere. In Koszalin, a city in northern Poland, three Catholic priests have burned books they say promote sorcery, including one of the Harry Potter novels, in a ceremony they photographed and posted on Facebook: they carried the books in a large basket from inside a church to a stone area outside, where the books were set alight as prayers were said and a small group of people looked on.1 An isolated incident, yes – but if we put it together with other similar incidents, a clear anti-Enlightenment pattern emerges. For example, at the 106th Indian Science Congress in Punjab (in January 2019), local scientists made a series of claims, among them: Kauravas were born with the help of stem cell and test tube technologies; Lord Rama used “astras” and “shastras,” while Lord Vishnu sent a Sudarshan Chakra to chase targets. This shows that the science of guided missiles was present in India thousands of years ago; that Ravana didn’t just have the Pushpaka Vimana, but had 24 types of aircraft and airports in Lanka; that theoretical physics (including the contributions of Newton and Einstein) is totally wrong, gravitational waves will be renamed “Narendra Modi Waves,” and the gravitational lensing effect will be renamed the “Hashvardhan Effect”; that Lord Brahma discovered the existence of dinosaurs on earth and mentioned it in the Vedas.2 This is also a way to fight the remnants of Western colonialism, and the book burning in Poland can be viewed as a way to fight Western commercialized consumerism. The conjunction of these two examples, one from Hindu India and the other from Christian Europe, demonstrates that we are dealing with a global phenomenon.
While we are sinking deeper and deeper into this madness (which coexists easily with a thriving global market), the real crisis is approaching. In January 2019, an international team of scientists proposed “a diet it says can improve health while ensuring sustainable food production to reduce further damage to the planet. The ‘planetary health diet’ is based on cutting red meat and sugar consumption in half and upping intake of fruits, vegetables and nuts.”3 We are talking about a radical reorganization of our entire food production and distribution – so how to do it? “The report suggests five strategies to ensure people can change their diets and not harm the planet in doing so: incentivizing people to eat healthier, shifting global production toward varied crops, intensifying agriculture sustainably, stricter rules around the governing of oceans and lands, and reducing food waste.” OK, but, again, how can this be achieved? Is it not clear that a strong global agency is needed with the power to coordinate such measures? And is not such an agency pointing in the direction of what we once called “communism”? And does the same not hold for other threats to our survival as humans? Is the same global agency not needed also to deal with the problem of exploding numbers of refugees and immigrants, with the problem of digital control over our lives?4
Communist interventions are needed because our fate is not yet decided – not in the simple sense that we have a choice, but in a more radical sense of choosing one’s own fate. According to the standard view, the past is fixed, what happened happened, it cannot be undone, and the future is open, it depends on unpredictable contingencies. What we should propose here is a reversal of this standard view: the past is open to retroactive reinterpretations, while the future is closed since we live in a determinist universe. This doesn’t mean that we cannot change the future; it just means that, in order to change our future we should first (not “understand” but) change our past, reinterpret it in such a way that opens up toward a different future from the one implied by the predominant vision of the past.
Will there be a new world war? The answer can only be a paradoxical one. If there is to be a new war, it will be a necessary one. This is how history works – through weird reversals as described by Jean-Pierre Dupuy: “If an outstanding event takes place, a catastrophe, for example, it could not not have taken place; nonetheless, insofar as it did not take place, it is not inevitable. It is thus the event’s actualization – the fact that it takes place – which retroactively creates its necessity.”5 And exactly the same holds for a new global war: once the conflict explodes (between the US and Iran, between China and Taiwan), it will appear inevitable, that is to say, we will automatically read the past that led to it as a series of causes that necessarily caused the explosion. If it does not happen, we will read it in the same way that today we read the Cold War – as a series of dangerous moments where the catastrophe was avoided because both sides were aware of the deadly consequences of a global conflict. (So we have today many interpreters who claim that there never was an actual danger of World War III during the Cold War years, that both sides were just playing with fire.) It is at this deeper level that communist interventions are needed.
Jürgen Habermas is often described as the state philosopher of the German (European even) liberal Left – no wonder, then, that about two decades ago, the conservative Spanish Prime Minister, José Mariá Aznar, even formally proposed that Habermas be declared the Spanish (and European) state philosopher (on account of Habermas’s idea of constitutional patriotism, a patriotism grounded in emancipatory values embedded in a constitution rather than in one’s own ethnic roots). While disagreeing with Habermas on many points, I always found the role he was not afraid to play – that of a critical supporter of, participant in even, power – honorable and necessary, a more-than-welcome retreat from basically irresponsible “politics at a distance.”
The majority of Leftist thought in recent decades got caught in the trap of oppositionalism: it adopts as self-evident the claim that true politics is only possible at a distance from the state and its apparatuses – the moment an agent immerses itself fully into state apparatuses and procedures (like parliamentary party politics), the authentic political dimension is lost. (From this standpoint, the Bolshevik triumph – taking power in Russia in October 1917 – appears also as their self-betrayal.) But is there not in such a stance an indelible aspect of avoiding responsibility? Withdrawal into non-participation in power is also a positive act, since one is aware that somebody else will have to do it, and the dirtiest thing is to leave to another the dirty job and then, after the job is done, accuse this other of unprincipled opportunism. (Among others, Eamon de Valera did this when he let Michael Collins do the “dirty” negotiations with the British, which led to the Free Irish State, and then, after profiting himself from it, accusing him of treason.) An authentic political agent is never afraid to take power and assume responsibility for what is going on, without resorting to excuses (“unfortunate circumstances,” “enemy plots,” or whatever). Therein resides Lenin’s greatness: after taking power, he knew the Bolsheviks found themselves in an impossible situation (with no conditions for an actual “construction of socialism”), but he persisted in it, trying to make the best out of a total deadlock.
The true dimension of a revolution is not to be found in the ecstatic moments of its climax (one million people chanting in the main square …); one should rather focus on how the change is felt in everyday life when things return to normal. This is why Trotsky lost against Stalin: after Lenin’s death, the population of the Soviet Union was slowly emerging from 10 years of hell (World War I, civil war) with untold suffering, and people longed for a return to some kind of normalcy. This is what Stalin offered them, while Trotsky, with his permanent revolution, promised them just more social upheaval and suffering.
Perhaps, then, instead of the increasingly boring variations on the topic of “distance from the state,” what we need today are honest state philosophers, philosophers who are not afraid to dirty their hands in fighting for a different state. Apropos homosexuality, Oscar Wilde cited “the love that dare not speak its name” – what we need today is a Left that dares to speak its name, not a Left that shamefully covers up its core with some cultural fig leaf. And this name is communism.
The question of the continuing relevance of Marx’s work in our era of global capitalism has to be answered in a properly dialectical way: not only is Marx’s critique of political economy, his outline of the capitalist dynamics, still fully actual; one should even take a step further and claim that it is only today, with global capitalism, that, to put it in Hegelese, reality arrived at its notion. However, a properly dialectical reversal intervenes here: at this very moment of full actuality, the limitation has to appear, the moment of triumph is that of defeat; after overcoming external obstacles, the new threat comes from within, signaling immanent inconsistency. When reality fully reaches up to its notion, this notion itself has to be transformed. Therein resides the properly dialectical paradox: Marx was not simply wrong, he was often right, but more literally than he himself expected to be.
For example, Marx couldn’t have imagined that the capitalist dynamics of dissolving all particular identities would, in addition, affect ethnic and sexual identities: sexual “one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible,” and, concerning sexual practices, “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned,” so that capitalism tends to replace the standard normative heterosexuality with a proliferation of unstable shifting identities and/or orientations. Today’s celebration of “minorities” and “marginals” is the predominant majority position – even alt-Rightists who complain about the terror of liberal political correctness present themselves as protectors of an endangered minority. Or take those critics of patriarchy who attack it as if it were still a hegemonic position, ignoring what Marx and Engels wrote more than 150 years ago, in the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto: “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations.” What becomes of patriarchal family values when a child can sue his parents for neglect and abuse, i.e., when family and parenthood itself are de jure reduced to a temporary and dissolvable contract between independent individuals?
How does ideology function in such conditions? Recall the classic joke about a man who believes himself to be a grain of seed and is taken to the mental institution where the doctors do their best to finally convince him that he is not a grain but a man. When he is cured (convinced that he is not a grain of seed but a man) and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately returns, trembling; there is a chicken outside the door and he is afraid that it will eat him. “Dear fellow,” says his doctor, “you know very well that you are not a grain of seed but a man.” “Of course I know that,” replies the patient, “but does the chicken know it?” Exactly the same holds true for Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, which is today even more actual than in Marx’s time. “Commodity fetishism” is an illusion that is operative in the very heart of the actual production process. Note the very beginning of the subchapter on commodity fetishism in Capital: “A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”1
Marx does not claim, in the usual “Marxist” way, that critical analysis should demonstrate how a commodity – what appears to be a mysterious theological entity – emerged out of the “ordinary” real-life process. He claims, on the contrary, that the task of critical analysis is to unearth the “metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties” in what appears, at first sight, to be just an ordinary object. Commodity fetishism (our belief that commodities are magic objects, endowed with an inherent metaphysical power) is not located in our mind, in the way we (mis) perceive reality, but in our social reality itself. We may know the truth, but we act as if we don’t know it – in our real life, we act like the chicken from the joke.
Niels Bohr, who already gave the right answer to Einstein’s “God doesn’t play dice” (“Don’t tell God what to do!”), also provided the perfect example of how a fetishist disavowal of belief works in ideology: seeing a horse-shoe on his door, the surprised visitor said that he doesn’t believe in the superstition that it brings luck, to which Bohr snapped back: “I also do not believe in it; I have it there because I was told that it works also if one does not believe in it!” This is how ideology works in our cynical era: we don’t have to believe in it. This is how ideology functions today: nobody takes seriously democracy or justice, we are all aware of their corruption, but we practice them – i.e., display our belief in them – because we assume they work even if we do not believe in them.
Perhaps this is why “culture” is emerging as the central life-world category. With regard to religion, we no longer “really believe,” we just follow (some of the) religious rituals and mores as part of the respect for the “lifestyle” of the community to which we belong (nonbelieving Jews obeying kosher rules “out of respect for tradition”). “I do not really believe in it, it is just part of my culture” seems to be the predominant mode of the displaced belief, characteristic of our times. “Culture” is the name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without taking them very seriously. This is why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as “barbarians,” as anticultural, as a threat to culture – they dare to take seriously their beliefs. The cynical era in which we live would have no surprises for Marx.
Marx’s theories are thus not simply alive: Marx is a living dead whose ghost continues to haunt us – and the only way to keep him alive is to focus on those of his insights that are today more true than in his own time, especially his call for universality of the emancipatory struggle. The universality to be asserted today is not a form of humanism, but the universality of the (class) struggle: more than ever, global capital has to be countered by global resistance. One should therefore insist on the difference between class struggle and other struggles (anti-racist, feminist, etc.) which aim at a peaceful coexistence of different groups and whose ultimate expression is identity politics. With class struggle, there is no identity politics: the opposing class has to be destroyed, and we ourselves should, in this same move, disappear as a class. The best concise definition of fascism is: the extension of identity politics onto the domain of class struggle. The basic fascist idea is that of the class piece: each class should be recognized in its specific identity and, in this way, its dignity will be safeguarded and antagonism between classes avoided. Class antagonism is here treated in the same way as the tension between different races: classes are accepted as a quasi-natural fact of life, not as something to be left behind.
The status of Marx as a living dead demands that we are also critical of the Marxist legacy – there should be no sacred cows here. Just two interconnected examples should suffice here. According to the standard Marxist dogma, the passage from capitalism to communism will proceed in two phases, the “lower” and the “higher.” In the lower phase (sometimes called “socialism”), the law of value will still hold:
[T]he individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another…. In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!2
The standard critique of this distinction is that, while the “lower stage” can somehow be imagined and managed, the “higher stage” (full communism) is a dangerous utopia. This critique seems justified by the fact that the really-existing socialist regimes were caught in endless debates about what stage they are in, introducing subdivisions; for example, at some point, in the late Soviet Union, the opinion prevailed that they were already above mere “socialism,” although not yet in full “communism” – they were in the “lower stage of the higher stage.” But a surprise awaits us here: the temptation in many socialist countries was to jump over the “lower stage” and proclaim that, in spite of the material poverty (or, at a deeper level, precisely on account of it), we can directly enter communism. During the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, Chinese communists decided that China should bypass socialism and directly enter communism. They referred to Marx’s famous formula of communism: “From everyone according to his abilities, to everyone according to his needs!” The catch was the reading given to it in order to legitimize the total militarization of life in agricultural communes: the Party cadre who commands a commune knows what every farmer is able to do, so he sets the plan and specifies the individuals’ obligations according to their abilities; he also knows what farmers really need for survival and organizes accordingly the distribution of food and other life provisions. The condition of militarized extreme poverty thus becomes the actualization of communism, and, of course, it is not sufficient to claim that such a reading falsifies a noble idea – one should rather notice how it lies dormant in it as a possibility. The paradox is thus that we begin with the shared poverty of “war communism,” then, when things get better, we progress/regress to “socialism” in which ideally, of course, everybody is paid according to his/her contribution, and … and, at the end, we return to capitalism (as in China today), confirming the old saying that communism is a detour from capitalism to capitalism. What these complications attest to is that the true utopia is that of the “lower stage” in which the law of value still holds, but in a “just” way, so that every worker gets his/her due – an impossible dream of “just” social exchange where money-fetish is replaced by non-fetishized simple certificates. And we are at a similar point today: the threat of looming apocalypses (ecological, digital, social) compels us to abandon the socialist dream of “just” capitalism and to envisage more radical “communist” measures.
So how should we imagine communism? In Capital III, Marx renounced his earlier utopian vision of communism as a state in which the opposition between necessity and freedom, between necessity and work, will disappear, and insisted that, in every society, the distinction between the realm of necessity (Reich der Notwendigkeit) and the realm of freedom (Reich der Freiheit) will persist; the realm of our free playful activities will always have to be sustained by the realm of work necessary for society’s continuous reproduction:
The realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least expenditure of energy and under conditions most favourable to, and worthy of, their human nature. But it nonetheless still remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.3
This line of thought has to be rejected; what makes it suspicious is precisely its self-evident commonsense character. We should take the risk of reversing the relationship between the two realms: it is only through the discipline of work that we can regain our true freedom, while as spontaneous consumers we are caught in the necessity of our natural propensities. The infamous words at the entrance to Auschwitz, “Arbeit macht frei,” are thus true – which doesn’t mean that we are coming close to Nazism but simply that the Nazis took over this motto with cruel irony.
To be a communist today means that one is not afraid to draw such radical conclusions, also with regard to one of the most sensitive claims of the Marxist theory, the idea of the “withering away” of the state power. Do we need governments? This question is deeply ambiguous. It can be read as an offshoot of the radical leftwing idea that government (state power) is in itself a form of alienation or oppression, and that we should work toward abolishing it and building a society of some kind of direct democracy. Or it can be read in a less radical liberal way: in our complex societies we need some regulating agency, but we should keep it under tight control, making it serve the interests of those who invest their votes (if not money) into it. Both views are dangerously wrong.
As for the idea of a self-transparent organization of society that would preclude political “alienation” (state apparatuses, institutionalized rules of political life, legal order, police, etc.), is the basic experience of the end of really-existing socialism not precisely the resigned acceptance of the fact that society is a complex network of “subsystems,” which is why a certain level of “alienation” is constitutive of social life, so that a totally self-transparent society is a utopia with totalitarian potentials. It is no wonder that today’s practices of “direct democracy,” from favelas to the “postindustrial” digital culture (do the descriptions of the new “tribal” communities of computer hackers not often evoke the logic of council democracy?) all have to rely on a state apparatus – i.e., their survival relies on a thick texture of “alienated” institutional mechanisms: where do electricity and water come from? Who guarantees the rule of law? To whom do we turn for healthcare? Etc., etc. The more a community is self-ruling, the more this network has to function smoothly and invisibly. Maybe we should change the goal of emancipatory struggles from overcoming alienation to enforcing the right kind of alienation: how to achieve a smooth functioning of “alienated” (invisible) social mechanisms that sustain the space of “non-alienated” communities?
Should we then adopt the more modest traditional liberal notion of representative power? Citizens transfer (part of) their power onto the state, but under precise conditions: power is constrained by law, limited to very precise conditions of its exercise, since the people remain the ultimate source of sovereignty and can repeal power if they decide so to do. In short, the state with its power is the minor partner in a contract that the major partner (the people) can at any point repeal or change, basically in the same way each of us can change the contractor who takes care of our waste or our health. However, the moment one takes a close look at an actual state power edifice, one can easily detect an implicit but unmistakable signal: “Forget about our limitations – ultimately, we can do whatever we want with you!” This excess is not a contingent supplement spoiling the purity of power but its necessary constituent – without it, without the threat of arbitrary omnipotence, state power is not a true power, it loses its authority.
So it’s not that we need the state to regulate our affairs and, unfortunately, have to buy its authoritarian underside as a necessary price – we need precisely and maybe even primarily this authoritarian underside. As Kierkegaard put it, to claim that I believe in Christ because I was convinced by the good reasons for Christianity is a blasphemy – in order to understand reasons for Christianity I should already believe. It’s the same with love: I cannot say that I love a woman because of her features – to see her features as beautiful, I should already be in love. And it’s the same with every authority, from paternal to that of the state.
The basic problem is thus: how to invent a different mode of passivity of the majority, how to cope with the unavoidable alienation of political life. This alienation has to be taken at its strongest, as the excess constitutive of the functioning of an actual power, overlooked by liberalism as well as by Leftist proponents of direct democracy.