[I kind of like this system that's evolved where people give speeches in shortened sentences to suit the People's Mike, and then release the full transcript. I'm not a big fan of Zizek or Naomi Klein, but I enjoyed both their speeches. This seems yet another unexpected benefit of this discussion rather than demand format. It seems to produce much better speeches and get them much more attention. The speeches are about changing the terms of discourse rather than details. Establishing the premise that we have to change the terms, because the old ones don't work, is more important than any particular term. And OWS has created a focal point that amplifies the attempt.]
10 October 2011
Slavoj Zizek at Occupy Wall Street: "We are not dreamers, we are the awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare"
Slavoj Zizek visited Liberty Plaza to speak to Occupy Wall Street
protesters. Here is the full transcript of his speech.
Don't fall in love with yourselves, with the nice time we are having
here. Carnivals come cheap - the true test of their worth is what
remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. Fall
in love with hard and patient work - we are the beginning, not the end.
Our basic message is: the taboo is broken, we do not leave in the best
possible world, we are allowed and obliged even to think about
alternatives. There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to
address the truly difficult questions - questions not about what we do
not want, but about what we DO want. What social organization can
replace the existing capitalism? What type of new leaders we need? The
XXth century alternatives obviously did not work.
So do not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not
corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be
corrupt. The solution is not "Main street, not Wall street," but to
change the system where main street cannot function without Wall
street. Beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends who
pretend to support us, but are already working hard to dilute our
protest. In the same way we get coffee without caffeine, beer without
alcohol, ice-cream without fat, they will try to make us into a
harmless moral protest. But the reason we are here is that we had
enough of the world where to recycle your Coke cans, to give a couple
of dollars for charity, or to buy Starbucks cappuccino where 1% goes
for the Third World troubles is enough to make us feel good. After
outsourcing work and torture, after the marriage agencies started to
outsource even our dating, we see that for a long time we were allowing
our political engagements also to be outsourced - we want them back.
They will tell us we are un-American. But when conservative
fundamentalists tell you that America is a Christian nation, remember
what Christianity is: the Holy Spirit, the free egalitarian community
of believers united by love. We here are the Holy Spirit, while on Wall
Street they are pagans worshipping false idols.
They will tell us we are violent, that our very language is violent:
occupation, and so on. Yes we are violent, but only in the sense in
which Mahathma Gandhi was violent. We are violent because we want to
put a stop on the way things go - but what is this purely symbolic
violence compared to the violence needed to sustain the smooth
functioning of the global capitalist system?
We were called losers - but are the true losers not there on the Wall
Street, and were they not bailed out by hundreds of billions of your
money? You are called socialists - but in the US, there already is
socialism for the rich. They will tell you that you don't respect
private property - but the Wall Street speculations that led to the
crash of 2008 erased more hard-earned private property than if we were
to be destroying it here night and day - just think of thousands of
homes foreclosed...
We are not Communists, if Communism means the system which deservedly
collapsed in 1990 - and remember that Communists who are still in power
run today the most ruthless capitalism (in China). The success of
Chinese Communist-run capitalism is an ominous sign that the marriage
between capitalism and democracy is approaching a divorce. The only
sense in which we are Communists is that we care for the commons - the
commons of nature, of knowledge - which are threatened by the system.
They will tell you that you are dreaming, but the true dreamers are
those who think that things can go on indefinitely they way they are,
just with some cosmetic changes. We are not dreamers, we are the
awakening from a dream which is turning into a nightmare. We are not
destroying anything, we are merely witness how the system is gradually
destroying itself. We all know the classic scene from cartoons: the cat
reaches a precipice, but it goes on walking, ignoring the fact that
there is no ground under its feet; it starts to fall only when it looks
down and notices the abyss. What we are doing is just reminding those
in power to look down...
So is the change really possible? Today, the possible and the
impossible are distributed in a strange way. In the domains of personal
freedoms and scientific technology, the impossible is becoming
increasingly possible (or so we are told): "nothing is impossible," we
can enjoy sex in all its perverse versions; entire archives of music,
films, and TV series are available for downloading; space travel is
available to everyone (with the money...); we can enhance our physical
and psychic abilities through interventions into the genome, right up
to the techno-gnostic dream of achieving immortality by transforming
our identity into a software program. On the other hand, in the domain
of social and economic relations, we are bombarded all the time by a
You cannot ... engage in collective political acts (which necessarily
end in totalitarian terror), or cling to the old Welfare State (it
makes you non-competitive and leads to economic crisis), or isolate
yourself from the global market, and so on. When austerity measures are
imposed, we are repeatedly told that this is simply what has to be
done. Maybe, the time has come to turn around these coordinates of what
is possible and what is impossible; maybe, we cannot become immortal,
but we can have more solidarity and healthcare?
In mid-April 2011, the media reported that Chinese government has
prohibited showing on TV and in theatres films which deal with time
travel and alternate history, with the argument that such stories
introduce frivolity into serious historical matters - even the
fictional escape into alternate reality is considered too dangerous. We
in the liberal West do not need such an explicit prohibition: ideology
exerts enough material power to prevent alternate history narratives
being taken with a minimum of seriousness. It is easy for us to imagine
the end of the world - see numerous apocalyptic films -, but not end of
capitalism.
In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German
worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by
censors, he tells his friends: "Let's establish a code: if a letter you
will get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is
written in red ink, it is false." After a month, his friends get the
first letter written in blue ink: "Everything is wonderful here: stores
are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated,
movie theatres show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls
ready for an affair - the only thing unavailable is red ink." And is
this not our situation till now? We have all the freedoms one wants -
the only thing missing is the red ink: we feel free because we lack the
very language to articulate our unfreedom. What this lack of red ink
means is that, today, all the main terms we use to designate the
present conflict - 'war on terror,' "democracy and freedom,' 'human
rights,' etc - are FALSE terms, mystifying our perception of the
situation instead of allowing us to think it. You, here, you are giving
to all of us red ink.