Zizek- In defense of lost causes
ahmed rafeek j
http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/12/world_renowned_philosopher_slavoj_zizek_on
AMY GOODMAN: Slavoj Zizek is the author of many books. His, latest, just out now, is called In Defense of Lost Causes. We'll be back to continue our conversation in a minute.
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AMY GOODMAN: We continue our conversation with Slavoj Zizek. In Defense of Lost Causes is his latest book.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK: If you read Marx, no, he says, late capitalism is already the age of decay of capitalism. Then Lenin said imperialism, last stage. Then Mao said in the '40s that after World War II, American imperialism is the absolutely rotting lower stage, but the more it is rotting, the more it's disintegrating, the better it functions, no? That's is the miracle of capitalism. It's really something unique. It's really a unique world historical event. Capitalism is the first social formation which thrives on its instability—how shall I put it, no?
And I have here no illusions. I don't believe that simply some external, external to capitalist, mechanisms, economic—sorry, ecological or whatever crisis will ruin it. Imagine now a mega-catastrophe: I don't know, even the ice melting, New York is submerged, we have to move to Antarctica. I think this would be immediately incorporated as a—you know, can you even only imagine real estate having their multiple orgasms, the biggest real estate deals in the history and so on? Don't underestimate this level capitalism, of how it achieves incorporating what appears an obstacle. And so only in this sense, it's indestructible.
But what I nonetheless think is that—for a whole series of reasons—that the limit is becoming clear. I see it in ecology, not that it will directly ruin capitalism, but I don't think it can deal it with. Why not? Because I'm not an idealist here. I'm well aware that, if anything, state socialism was even worse for ecology. Those countries are countries with the worst ecological record. But nonetheless, there is something interesting. It's that, of course, at a certain level, the capitalists market ways to deal with ecological problems, no? You include, if you can assess, the ecological damage into the price of the product and all that stuff. It works. But I think it doesn't work with the threat of really large catastrophes, all this pushing towards Kyoto deal or whatever.
Are we aware what is happening here? It is that in the last twenty years, the idea of a large collective act was kind of a phobic object. Everyone was afraid of it, like isn't it the lesson of the catastrophe of real socialism that we don't need large concentrated power decisions but this—and you can use all the poetic expressions—this organic interaction, all the poetic interaction, not command claim and so on. So the idea is that we should have a more dispersed, open capitalism, antiauthoritarian and so on. If there is anything becoming clear today for me, it's that we need to rehabilitate the notion of big, large, collective acts.
Here then, even—for example, intellectual property—I mean, I even spoke with some conservative economists, who considered the point that intellectual property is—if I may put it in slightly ironic terms—is inherently communist, in the sense that it resents—it rebels against being treated as private property, which is why with some new software products, you know, that companies spend more money on how to prevent its free circulation of a product than on the product itself. I mean, I have nothing personally against Bill Gates, but as a nice [inaudible] conservative economist—sorry, I forgot his name—at some debate put it, that the fact that a guy who was thirty years ago nothing can be now—OK, he's no longer—now he's third, but he was the richest man in the world, this shows that intellectual property is a topic which cannot be properly value represented of the market. You get two crazy vibrations. Like he put it, with a normal commodity, material, of course, prices go up and down. It's like a normal EKG when you fear you have an attack, no? But with intellectual property, it's like a heart attack, you know? It oscillates too wildly, like, you—there is a problem. I think that the dynamic—social economic dynamic itself will force us to socialize it more and more, that it doesn't work, intellectual property. Then, of course, the entire problem of not only ecology, then there is the—all this biogenetic debate and so on.
It's very interesting how Fukuyama himself—and I appreciate him—OK, he's a little bit simplistic as a philosopher, but where I appreciate him is that he's an intelligent, skeptical conservative. I, as a Marxist, I much prefer skeptical conservatives to naïve progressive liberals. Why? Because skeptical conservatives are ready to admit a deadlock. And he did this in his–not End of History thesis, but in his later book on biogenetics, Our Posthuman Future, or whatever. He had to admit that his model of The End of History liberal society is not able to cope with this, that we need stronger state control, collective decisions and so on and so on.
So, you see, that's how I approach it. I'm not a naïve Marxist: oh, we need a new revolution. I see problems. That's my duty today, to show to the people that we are approaching antagonisms, which not only capitalism will not be able to confront, but which will lead to a much more radical choice. I'm not fighting today's capitalism—how I should I put it—I'm fighting what this capitalism is slowly leading to if we don't counteract it.
I think capitalism will—the way we know it—will destroy itself, in a way. And it's already doing it. For example, all the human rights and so on, now we are talking about torture. Wait what we will be talking in ten years, and so on and so on. I think we are already going into another direction. Or we speak about global world? Yes, commodities can circulate, but more and more we are moving towards gated communities and so on, and we should be very clear here. Here, I will even propose a conservative topic, which is that if you don't have a basic patriotic identification—not nationalism, but in the sense of "we are all members of the same nation and so on"—then democracy doesn't function. You cannot have a living democracy in this pure multiculturalist liberal dream: we have just different lifestyle and a totally neutral legal framework, which allows them to interact. No, you need more. That more is threatened, not by leftist multiculturalists, but by capitalist development itself. I think we are more and more approaching new forms of gated communities.
For example, one of the books that I like as a description is Mike Davis talking about slums, his book about slums, because he shows, my god, are we aware what's going on here? Over one billion people already live in slums. That is to say, new and new territories are emerging from which, although they are part of a state, states are withdrawing from it. And this is a crucial moment, which is why incidentally I, in spite of all my problems with him, I admire Chavez nonetheless. I don't know of any other politician, with the exception maybe of Morales—he's trying to do it—who effectively tried to incorporate into sociopolitical life those excluded in favelas, in slums.
If we don't do it, we will be approaching–and this is a serious perspective, some French sociologist warn—a kind of a subdued, not all the times active, but nonetheless, always in the background, civil war in all developed countries, like what's happening now in Paris, you know. Everybody knows, again and again, car burnings, all this permanent civil unrest. And they are a wonderful phenomenon to analyze, these car burnings. You know why? Here, you have the limit of standard leftist analogies. When those in the suburbs start to burn cars, the soldiers came looking for explanations, but they were not, as people feared, some Muslim fundamentalists. No, the fist thing they were burning were their own mosques and so on. It was a kind of a—how shall I call it—pure protest signaling presence. It's a political equivalent of what in linguistics we call fatic communication, "Hi, I'm here, yes," you know, this—when you give a message which doesn't deliver a certain content, but just signals that you are here. It was like a big fatic "Hey, here we are. Note us." That was the message, no?
So, again, all these problems, we—here, we should act again, not—I'm not this kind of fanatical anti-capitalist who worries, "My god, capitalism is thriving. How will we arouse the people?" What worries me is not that capitalism will go on forever. No, I'm here as a Marxist. Quite honest.
Listen, let's be frank. I don't know what to say about the United States. But if we take Western Europe in the last fifty years, let's be frank. One should give to the devil what belongs to the devil. OK, we can say this was because of economic exploitation of third world, but nonetheless, I don't think there was, in the entire history of humanity, an era where so many people lived comparatively, in comparative way, such—in such relative welfare and freedom that's there. One should admit this, honestly, not to engage into the Stalinist statistics proving that they are not doing so well. The problem is, I think, it cannot last. The new divisions are getting visible on and on. And so, again, the problem is not—my fear is not that capitalism will not last forever. The struggle is beginning today for what will replace it. There, we will have to make tough decisions.
If we don't act, I can see quite well the possibility—some Western version of the Chinese option, what they poetically call Asian values capitalism, which is really capitalism with authoritarian structure. Here, I see a world historical meaning of what goes on in China. Until now, liberals were saying, OK, maybe in the beginning you need a little bit of authoritarian push to create conditions for capitalism, like Pinochet, Chile, South Korea. But they claim, sooner or later, capitalism always brings then democracy. I doubt if this holds. I think—my hopes are—our hopes are vain if we expect the same in China. I think they are a model where capitalism and democracy are dissociated, and capitalism, if anything, works even better. This is the sign of the future.
I've spoken too long, sorry. But now you know at least why friends call me Fidel. You know, like—
AMY GOODMAN: Slavoj, your new book is called In Defense of Lost Causes.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Yes.
AMY GOODMAN: Why?
SLAVOJ ZIZEK: First, of course, I like to provoke and so on. No, these lost causes are of course communism, terror and so on, no? But what I really try to do—it's a very critical book, especially critical towards the left—it's to analyze brutally the failures of the left and hint at least how to totally reinvent these old lost causes, because, as we all know, the left, around thirty years ago, simply stopped to ask certain questions. I remember when I was young, we were still debating: will capitalism last? Will the state go on? Now, we accept all this. Maybe it is—the time is coming to start asking these fundamental, tough questions again, but, of course, fully learning the lesson of the past.
Since I often like to use Stalinist metaphors and so on, for example, people almost suspect me of being some kind of a closet Stalinist. No, OK, my first reaction is to provoke even more and to say, "Why closet Stalinist?" But what I really think is that I think that Stalinism was—that's why I am obsessed with it—was such a tragedy, much more difficult to explain than fascism. It's for me the singular greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century, precisely because it wasn't simply communist totalitarianism. What's difficult to think is the authentic emancipatory explosion of October Revolution and then how this turned into Stalinism. So, it's not that we should—we, the left, should behave with bad conscience, like, you know, "Oh, but you also had your problems, Nazism." We should do the job of analyzing Stalinism better than the anti-communist right is doing it.
That's what I see as one of my tasks. I'm returning—
so I'm going through all of this, Stalinism, structure of fascism, today's ideology, different modalities of the left. I mean, I almost give at a certain point a simple catalog of what the left is doing today: either the third way left—that is to say, we accept the capitalist game; we will just try to make capitalism better, more human and so on—then this, the one I was attacking yesterday, the resisting left—you can do, you just resist, criticize from outside—then this utopian Toni Negri left, that like revolution is around the corner but a totally different one for this new multitude stuff and so on. I simply try to ask the hard questions. And I don't give great answers; my answers are very modest.
But I think it's really a matter of survival of the left to break out this deadlock. It's always a fatal deadlock of either pragmatism or abstract moralism. They are like, you know, like horrible. Again, you see, I succumb to my Stalinist adaptation. Like Stalin said, social democracy and fascism are the left and the right hand of capitalism, stupidity, but I think that this conformist third way, pragmatic social democracy—basically, Clinton here, Blair in the UK and so on—and this moralistic radical left, politically correct all the time, are like twin phenomena, the one is parasitic—how to break out of this deadlock? I mean, I don't—I'm not saying I have a clear answer, but the problem is to be confronted.
AMY GOODMAN: Last words to leave our audience with here in the United States and, well, all over in Latin America, in Europe, Africa, Eastern Europe?
SLAVOJ ZIZEK: From me?
AMY GOODMAN: Yes.
SLAVOJ ZIZEK: It will be simply—OK, maybe, the point that I always like to repeat: don't beat—don't get caught into a fake discourse of humanitarian emergency. Remember that when somebody is telling you, "You're doing your theory. You are dreaming. But people are starving out there and so on. Let's do something," this is the threat. This is the threat.
Today's hegemonic ideology is this kind of state of emergency ideology. What we need is to withdraw—don't be afraid to withdraw and think. You know, Marx thesis eleven: philosophers have only interpreted the world; the time is, we have now to change it. Maybe, as good Marxists, we should turn it around. Maybe we are trying to change it too much. It's time to redraw and to interpret it again, because do we really know what is going on today?
What is going on today? There are old fashion theories, either Marxist or liberals who claim the same capitalism is going on. Then there is a whole set of fashionable terms like post-industrial society, post-whatever, information society, which I think don't do the job. We even don't have what my friend Fred Jameson likes to call "cognitive mapping," you know, that you get an idea what's going on. We need theory more than ever. Don't be—don't feel guilty for withdrawing from immediate engagement and for trying to understand what's going on.
