Date: Sat, 16 Jan 1999 20:20:42 -0500 (EST) From: "John P. Lacny" <jplst15+ at pitt.edu> Subject: Slavoj Zizek on The Communist Manifesto
Slavoj Zizek-- whatta guy! The following is from the excellent Croatian publication Arkzin! (www.arkzin.com), the website of which I would advise all to pay a visit. The current issue features a heavily marked-up HTML edition of *The Communist Manifesto*. Unfortunately, it's in Serbo-Croatian, but even those who can't read Serbo-Croatian might find it at least entertaining.
The following are excerpts from Zizek's introduction to *The Communist Manifesto* in the same issue. Unfortunately, it has not been translated in its entirety, and my own resident translator is not exactly up to the task right now. But read on and take it for what it's worth-- which is a lot, if you ask me.
In solidarity,
John Lacny
**************************************** excerpts from THE SPECTRE IS STILL ROAMING AROUND by Slavoj Zizek
(1)
The first, automatic reaction of today's enlightened liberal reader to The Communist Manifesto is: isn't the text simply wrong on so many empirical accounts, with regard to the picture it gives of the social situation, as well as with regard to the revolutionary perspective it sustains and propagates? Was there ever a political manifesto that was more clearly falsified by subsequent historical reality? Isn't The Communist Manifesto, at best, an exaggerated extrapolation of certain tendencies discernible in the 19th century?
So let us approach The Communist Manifesto from the opposite end: where do we live today, in our global "post..." (postmodern, postindustrial) society? The slogan that is imposing itself more and more is that of "globalization": the brutal imposition of a unified world market that threatens all local ethnic traditions, including the very form of Nation-State. And, in this situation, is not the description in The Manifesto of the social impact of the bourgeoisie more actual than ever? -
"The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninter rupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new -formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
"The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere. The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and con sumption in every country. To the great chagrin of reactionists, it has drawn from under the feet of industry the national ground on which it stood. All old-established national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed. They are dislodged by new industries, whose introduction becomes a life and death question for all civilized nations, by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature."
Is this not, more than ever, our reality today? Think about Ericsson phones which are no longer Swedish, about Toyota cars manufactured 60% in the usa, about Hollywood culture that pervades the remotest parts of the globe... Yes, this is our reality - on condition that we do not forget to supplement this image from the manifesto with its inherent dialectical opposite, the "spiritualization" of the very material process of production. That is to say, on the one hand, capitalism entails the radical secularization of social life - it mercilessly tears apart all aura of authentic nobility, sacredness, honour, etc.:
"It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom - Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation."
However, the fundamental lesson of the "critique of political economy" elaborated by the mature Marx in the years after The Manifesto is that this reduction of all heavenly chimeras to the brutal economic reality generates a spectrality of its own. When Marx describes the mad self-enhancing circulation of capital, whose solipsistic path of self-fecundation reaches its apogee in today's meta-reflexive speculations on futures, it is far too simplistic to claim that the spectre of this self-engendering monster that pursues its path disregarding any human or environmental concern is an ideological abstraction, and that one should never forget that, behind this abstraction, there are real people and natural objects on whose productive capacities and resources the capital's circulation is based and on which it feeds like a gigantic parasite. The problem is that this "abstraction" is not only in our (financial speculator's) misperception of social reality, but that it is "real" in the precise sense of determining the structure of the very material social processes: the fate of whole strata of the population and sometimes of whole countries can be decided by the "solipsistic" speculative dance of Capital, which pursues its goal of profitability in a blessed indifference to how its movement will affect social reality. Therein resides the fundamental systemic violence of capitalism, much more uncanny than the direct pre-capitalist socio-ideological violence: this violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals and their "evil" intentions, but is purely "objective", systemic, anonymous. Here we should recall Etienne Balibar who distinguishes two opposite but complementary modes of excessive violence in today's world: the "ultra-objective" ("structural") violence that is inherent in the social conditions of global capitalism (the "automatic" creation of excluded and dispensable individuals, from the homeless to the unemployed), and the "ultra -subjective" violence of newly emerging ethnic and/or religious (in short: racist) "fundamentalisms" - this second "excessive" and "groundless" violence is just a counterpart to the first violence.
The fact of this "anonymous" violence also allows us to make a more general point about anti-Communism. The pleasure provided by anti-Communist reasoning was that Communism made it so easy to play the game of finding the culprit, blaming the Party, Stalin, Lenin, ultimately Marx himself, for the millions of dead, for terror and gulag, while in capitalism, there is nobody on whom one can pin guilt or responsibility, things just happened that way, through anonymous mechanisms, although capitalism has been no less destructive in terms of human and environmental costs, destroying aboriginal cultures... In short, the difference between capitalism and Communism is that Communism was perceived as an Idea which then failed in its realization, while capitalism functioned "spontaneously". There is no Capitalist Manifesto.
****
(3)
It is crucial to take into account how this "second modernization" transforms the very fundamental structure of social domination and thus compels us to reformulate the targets of progressive struggle, from the struggle against patriarchal sexism to economic struggle. Judith Butler recently developed a powerful argument against the abstract and politically regressive opposition between economic struggle and the "merely cultural" queer struggle for recognition: far from being "merely cultural", the social form of sexual reproduction inhabits the very core of the social relations of production, i.e. the nuclear heterosexual family is a key component and condition of the capitalist relations of ownership, exchange, etc. For that reason, the way queer political practice questions and undermines normative heterosexuality poses a potential threat to the very capitalist mode of production. However, is it not that, in the course of the ongoing transformation into the "postpolitical" tolerant multiculturalist regime, today's capitalist system is able to neutralize queer demands, i.e. to absorb them as a specific "way of life"? Is the history of capitalism not a long history of how the predominant ideologico-political framework was able to accommodate (and soften the subversive edge of) the movements and demands that seemed to threaten its very survival? For a long time, sexual libertarians thought that monogamic sexual repression is necessary for the survival of capitalism; now we know that capitalism can not only tolerate but even actively incite and exploit forms of "perverse" sexuality, not to mention promiscuous indulgence in sexual pleasures. What if the same destiny awaits queer demands? Far from posing a threat to the present regime of bio-power (to use the Foucauldian terms), the recent proliferation of different sexual practices and identities (from sadomasochism to bisexuality and drag performances), is precisely the form of sexuality that is generated by the present conditions of global capitalism, which clearly favour the mode of subjectivity characterized by the multiple shifting identifications.
The key point is thus that the figure of domination we are facing today is no longer that of the good old patriarchal Oedipal Master. The public image of Bill Gates is here worthy of some comment; what matters is not factual accuracy (is Gates really like that?), but the very fact that a certain figure started to function as an icon, filling some fantasmatic slot; if the features do not correspond to the "true" Gates, they are all the more indicative of the underlying fantasmatic structure. Gates is not only no longer the patriarchal Father-Master, he is also no longer the corporate Big Brother running a stiff bureaucratic empire, dwelling in the inaccessible top floor, guarded by a host of secretaries and deputees. He is rather a kind of little brother: his very ordinariness functions as the indication of its opposite, of some monstrous dimension so uncanny that it can no longer be rendered public in the guise of some symbolic title. What we encounter here in a most violent way is the deadlock of the Double who is simultaneously like ourselves and the harbinger of an uncanny, properly monstrous dimension. Indicative of this is the way title-pages, drawings or photomontages present Gates: as an ordinary guy, whose devious smile nonetheless points towards a wholly different underlying dimension of monstrosity beyond representation which threatens to shatter his common guy image. In the 60s and 70s, it was possible to buy soft-porn postcards with a girl clad in bikini or wearing a proper gown; however, when one tilted the postcard a little bit, looked at it from a slightly different perspective, the dress magically disappeared and one was able to see the naked body of the girl. Is it not something similar with the image of Bill Gates, whose benevolent features magically acquire a sinister and threatening dimension when viewed from a slightly different perspective? In this respect, it is also a crucial feature of Gates as icon that he is (perceived as) the ex-hacker who made it - not forgetting that the term "hacker" carries a subversive /marginal/anti-establishment connotation, i.e. those who wanted to disturb the smooth functioning of large bureaucratic corporations. At the fantasmatic level, the underlying notion here is that Gates is a subversive marginal hooligan who has taken over and dresses himself up as a respectable chairman. In Bill Gates, the Little Brother, the average ugly guy, thus coincides with and contains the figure of Evil Genius who aims for total control of our lives. In old James Bond movies, this Evil Genius was still an eccentric figure, dressed up extravagantly or in a proto-Communist Maoist grey uniform - in the case of Gates, this ridiculous charade is no longer needed, the Evil Genius turns out to be the obverse of the common guy next door.
There is an old European fairy-tale motif of diligent dwarves (usually controlled by an evil magician) who emerge from their hiding-place during the night, while people are asleep, and accomplish their work (set the house in order, cook the meals), so that when people wake up in the morning, they find their work magically done. This motif is found from Richard Wagner's Rhinegold (the Nibelungs who work in their underground caves, driven by their cruel master, the dwarf Alberich) to Fritz Lang's Metropolis in which the enslaved industrial workers live and work deep beneath the earth's surface to produce wealth for the ruling capitalists. This dispositif of "underground" slaves dominated by a manipulative evil Master brings us back to the old duality of the two modes of the Master, the public symbolic Master and the secret Evil Magician who effectively pulls the strings and does his work during the night. Are the two Bills who now run the USA, Clinton and Gates, not the ultimate exemplification of this duality? When the subject is endowed with symbolic authority, he acts as an appendix to his symbolic title, i.e. it is the big Other, the symbolic institution, who acts through him. Suffice it to recall that a judge may be a miserable and corrupted person, but the moment he puts on his robe and other insignia, his words are the words of Law itself. On the other hand, the "invisible" Master (whose exemplary case is the anti-Semitic figure of the "Jew" who, invisible to the public eye, pulls the strings of social life) is a kind of uncanny double of public authority: he has to act in the shadows, irradiating a phantom-like, spectral omnipotence. This, then, is the conclusion to be drawn from the Bill Gates icon: how the disintegration of the patriarchal symbolic authority, of the Name of the Father, gives rise to a new figure of the Master who is simultaneously our common peer, our fellow-semblant, our imaginary double, and for this very reason fantasmatically endowed with another dimension of the Evil Genius. In Lacanian terms: the suspension of the Ego Ideal, of the feature of symbolic identification, i.e. the reduction of the Master to an imaginary ideal, necessarily gives rise to its monstrous obverse, to the superego figure of the omnipotent Evil Genius who controls our lives. In this figure, the imaginary (semblance) and the real (of paranoia) overlap, due to the suspension of the proper symbolic efficiency.
*****
(4)
The point of our insisting that we are dealing with Bill Gates as an icon is that it would be mystifying to elevate the "real" Gates into a kind of Evil Genius who masterminds a plot to achieve global control over all of us. Here, more than ever, it is crucial to remember the lesson of the Marxist dialectic of fetishization: the "reification" of relations between people (the fact that they assume the form of phantasmagorical "relations between things") is always redoubled by the apparently opposite process, by the false "personalization" ("psychologiozation") of what are effectively objective social processes. It was already in the 30s that the first generation of Frankfurt School theoreticians drew attention to how - at the very moment when global market relations started to exert their full domination, making the individual producer's success or failure dependent on market cycles totally out of his control - the notion of a charismatic "business genius" reasserted itself in the "spontaneous capitalist ideology", attributing the success or failure of a businessman to some mysterious je ne sais quoi which he possesses. (Adorno pointed out how the very emergence of psychology as "science", with the individual's psyche as its "object", is strictly correlative to the predominance of impersonal relations in economic and political life.) And does the same not hold even more today, when the abstraction of market relations that run our lives is brought to extreme? The book market is overflowing with psychological manuals advising us how to succeed, how to outdo our partner or competitor - in short, making our success dependent on our proper "attitude". So, in a way, one is tempted to invert the famous formula of Marx: in contemporary capitalism, the objective market "relations between things" tend to assume the phantasmagorical form of pseudo-personalized "relations between people". No, Bill Gates is no genius, good or bad, he is just an opportunist who knew how to seize the moment, and as such the result of the capitalist system run amok. The question to ask is not "How did Gates do it?" but "How is the capitalist system structured, what is wrong with it, so that an individual can achieve such disproportionate power?". Phenomena such as Bill Gates thus seem to point towards their own solution: once we are dealing with a gigantic global network formally owned by a single individual or corporation, is it not that ownership becomes in a way irrelevant to its functioning (there is no longer any worthwhile competition, profit is guaranteed), so that it becomes possible simply to cut off this head and to socialize the entire network without greatly perturbing its functioning? Does such an act not amount to a purely formal conversion that simply brings together what de facto already belongs together: the collective of individuals and the global communicational network they are all using, and which thus forms the substance of their social lives?
The overtly "irrational" prospect of concentrating quasi-monopolistic power in the hands of a single individual or corporation, like Rupert Murdoch or Bill Gates, is thus an index pointing towards the necessity of some kind of politicization of the economy. If the next decade brings the unification of the multitude of communicative media in a single apparatus reuniting the features of interactive computer, TV, video- and audio-phone, video and CD-player, and if Microsoft effectively succeeds in becoming the quasi-monopolistic owner of this new universal medium, controlling not only the language used in it but also the conditions of its application, then we obviously approach the absurd situation in which a single agent, exempted from public control, will effectively dominate the basic communicational structure of our lives and will thus in a way be stronger than any government. This effectively opens up the prospect of paranoiac scenarios: since the digital language we shall all use will nonetheless be man-made, constructed by programmers, is it not possible to imagine a corporation that owns it installing in it some special secret programme-ingredient which will enable it to control us, or a virus which the corporation can trigger and thus bring our communication to a halt? When biogenetic corporations assert their ownership of our genes through patenting them, they also give rise to a similar paradox of owning the innermost parts of our body, so that we are already owned by a corporation without even being aware of it. The prospect we are confronting is thus that both the communicational network we use and the genetic language we are made of will be owned and controlled by corporations (or even a corporation) out of public control. Does the very absurdity of this prospect - the private control of the very public base of our communication and reproduction, of the very network of our social being - again not impose as the only solution a kind of socialization? In other words, is the impact of the so-called informational revolution on capitalism not the ultimate exemplification of Marx's old thesis that
"at a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or - what is but a legal expression of the same thing - with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto"?
Furthermore, does the antagonism contained in the notion of owning (scientific) knowledge since knowledge is in principle neutral towards its propagation, i.e. it is not worn by its spread and universal use, not explain why today's capitalism has to resort to ever more absurd strategies to sustain the economy of scarcity in the sphere of information, and thus to contain within the frame of private property and market relations the demon it has unleashed (e.g., by way of inventing ever new modes of preventing the free copying of digitalized information)? In short, does the prospect of the informational "global village" not signal the end of market relations (which is by definition based on the logic of scarcity), at least in the sphere of digitalized information? The paradox of the US administration's legal action against the monopoly of Microsoft is in this respect very indicative: does this action not demonstrate how, far from being simply opposed, State regulation and market are mutually dependent? If left to itself, the market mechanism would lead to the full monopoly of Microsoft and thus to the self-cancellation of competition - it is only through direct state intervention (which, from time to time, orders overly large companies to break up) that market competition can be maintained...
*****
(10)
This, then, is the reason why The Communist Manifesto is still alive, perhaps more than ever, since the predicament it describes is heightened today to a new level of unbearable tension. The lesson of The Communist Manifesto for us today is that the dilemma "global market-liberalism or fundamentalism" is a false one. On the one hand, any hope that social antagonisms will be resolved through the further development of capitalist economy and its political counterpart, multiculturalist liberal democracy, is misleading: antagonistic tension is inscribed into the very notion of capitalism and thus cannot be attenuated through "more consequent" multicultural tolerance, struggle against ethnic or sexist fundamentalism and other "remainders of the past", etc. On the other hand, any return to traditional values (from Catholic or Islamic fundamentalism to Oriental New Age wisdom) is doomed to fail - not only because it is impotent in face of the thrust of Capital, but because attempts to reassert the old ways already by their very form reinforce the New (is today's televangelist, preaching the return to authentic traditional values, in the very form of his activity not already a mediatic show-man?).
Perhaps there is a grain of truth in its detractors' claims; perhaps the answers offered by The Communist Manifesto are no longer pertinent. However, in its very deficiency, The Communist Manifesto continues to address us, imposing upon us the task of reinventing the way out of the vicious cycle of capitalism. And why are we, from the "post-Communist" Eastern European countries, the ones to assume this task? Because we are compelled to live out and sustain the contradiction of the global capitalist New World Order at its most radical. The ideological dream of a unified Europe aims at achieving the (impossible) balance between the two components: full integration into the global market; retaining the specific national and ethnic identities. What we are getting in the post-Communist Eastern Europe is a kind of negative, distopian realization of this dream - in short, the worst of both worlds, unconstrained market combined with ideological fundamentalism.
The passage from really-existing Socialism to really-existing capitalism in Eastern Europe brought about a series of comic reversals of sublime democratic enthusiasm into the ridiculous. The dignified East German crowds gathering around Protestant churches and heroically defying Stasi terror suddenly turned into vulgar consumers of bananas and cheap pornography; the civilized Czechs mobilized by the appeal of Havel and other cultural icons suddenly turned into cheap swindlers of Western tourists. The disappointment was mutual: the West, which began by idolizing the Eastern dissident movement as the reinvention of its own tired democracy, disappointedly dismisses the present post-Socialist regimes as a mixture of corrupt ex -Communist oligarchy and/or ethnic and religious fundamentalists; even the dwindling numbers of liberals are mistrusted as insufficiently "politically correct": where is their feminist awareness? etc.) The East, which began by idolizing the West as the model of affluent democracy, finds itself in the whirlpool of ruthless commercialization and economic colonization. So was all this worth the effort? The hero of Dashiell Hammett's Maltese Falcon, the private detective Sam Spade, narrates the story of his being hired to find a man who had suddenly left his settled job and family and vanished. Spade is unable to track him down, but, a few years later, he accidentally encounters the man in a bar in another city. Under an assumed name, the man leads there a life remarkably similar to the one he fled from (a regular boring job, a new wife and children). However, in spite of this similarity, the man is convinced that his beginning again was not in vain, that it was well worth the trouble to cut his ties and start a new life. Perhaps the same goes for the passage from really-existing Socialism to really-existing capitalism in ex-Communist East European countries: despite the betrayal of enthusiastic expectations, something did take place in-between, in the passage itself, and it is in this Event which took place in-between, in this "vanishing mediator", in this moment of democratic enthusiasm, that we should locate the crucial dimension obfuscated by later capitalist renormalization.
It is clear that the protesting crowds in the GDR, Poland and the Czechoslovakia did want "something else", an utopian object of impossible Fullness designated by a multiplicity of names ("solidarity", "human rights", etc.), not what they actually got. Two reactions are possible towards this gap between expectations and reality; the best way to capture them is via reference to the well-known opposition between fool and knave. The fool is a simpleton, a court-jester who is allowed to tell the truth precisely because the "performative power" (the socio-political efficiency) of his speech is suspended; the knave is a cynic who openly states the truth, a crook who tries to sell the open admission of his crookedness as honesty, a scoundrel who admits the need for illegitimate repression in order to maintain social stability. After the fall of Socialism, the knave is a neoconservative advocate of the free market who cruelly rejects all forms of social solidarity as counterproductive sentimentalism, while the fool is a multiculturalist "radical" social criticist who, by means of his ludic procedures destined to "subvert" the existing order, actually serves as its supplement. With regard to Eastern Europe, a knave dismisses the "third way" project of Neues Forum in ex-DDR as hopelessly outdated utopia and exorts us to accept the cruel market reality, while a fool insists that the collapse of Socialism effectively opened up a Third Way, a possibility left unexploited by the Western re-colonization of the East.
This cruel reversal of the sublime into the ridiculous was, of course, grounded in the fact that there was a double misunderstanding at work in the public (self-)perception of the social protest-movements in the last years of Eastern European Socialism (from Solidarity to Neues Forum). On the one hand, there were the attempts of the ruling nomenklatura to reinscribe these events in their police/political framework, by distinguishing between "honest critics" with whom one could discuss, but in a calm, rational, depoliticized atmosphere, and a bunch of extremist provocateurs who serve foreign interests. The battle was thus not only for higher wages and better conditions, but also and above all for the workers to be acknowledged as legimitate partners in negotiating with the representative of the regime - the moment that power was forced to accept this, the battle was in a way already won. When these movements exploded in a broad mass phenomenon, their demands for freedom and democracy (and solidarity and) were also misperceived by Western commentators who saw in them confirmation that the people of the East also want what the people in the West already have: they automatically translated these demands into the Western liberal-democratic notion of freedom (the multi-party representational political game cum global market economy). Emblematic to the point of caricature was the figure of Dan Rather, the American news reporter, on Tienanmen Square in 1989, standing in front of the copy of the Statue of Liberty and claiming that this statue says it all about what the protesting students demand (in short, if you scratch the yellow skin of a Chinese, you find an American). What this Statue effectively stood for was a utopian longing having nothing to do with the actual USA (incidentally, it was the same with the original immigrants to America, for whom the view of the Statue stood for a utopian longing soon to be crushed). The perception of the American media thus offered another example of the reinscription of the explosion of what Etienne Balibar has called egalibert
(the unconditional demand for freedom-equality which explodes any positive order) within the confines of a given order.
Are we then condemned to the debilitating alternative of choosing between a knave or a fool, or is there a tertium datur? If The Communist Manifesto still has something to say to us, then there is still hope for a tertium datur.