I was talking to Slavoj Zizek after a talk he gave yesterday, and he said that he believes that there will come a point in fifteen years time when capitalism will not be able to reproduce itself. I should make clear here, that I'm not certain in what sense he meant it: I asked him whether he meant that its contradictions will no longer propel it forwards, or whether it will have cannibalised everything and have to move backwards (and cannibalise itself), or whether it will reach a point of stalemate, but he was very firm that this is where the left must be. I'm interpreting here, but I don't think he meant it as a 'big bang' (i.e. everything explodes, big stock market crash), but a point where things might start to retract.
I found it interesting that he reached this conclusion within the context of a question about how democratic parties appropriate right-wing messages ("Okay, Le Pen is bad, but he has some ideas which express the will of the people so we will have to take this on board ..."), shifting the whole discourse rightwards. I wanted to know if he thought being a good little citizen and voting for the left can effect a shift leftwards (not as an 'only' strategy, but as something we can do as leftists). His entire reply was extremely pessimistic. He said it as a kind of "yes, but ..." (as in, yes, maybe you will vote, and maybe it will make a tiny difference somewhere - the sense I got was that he felt it was making a gain in one place only to take it away somewhere else. In addition, he talked about leftists like Jameson (who urge us to bombard the system with impossible demands that it can't integrate, which Zizek calls 'provoking the master', that is to say that, like Hardt/Negri in Empire, or, to a lesser extent, Laclau, the claims are addressed to the wrong authority), or those who only come up with negative programmes ('it is not this' - but what is it, then?).
The thing I have always respected about Zizek is that not only that he is not afraid to denounce these tendencies on the left, but also that he is not afraid to actually advance a positive argument.
What was a little depressing when I asked him to answer the naive question of how change can be effected, or what form it would take, he admitted that he couldn't say. I don't say he's wrong for that, but it's still unnerving.
Simon
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