by
Slavoj Žižek
View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
Communism is today not the name of a solution, but the name of a problem, the problema of commons in all its dimensions--the commons of nature as the substance of our life, the problema of our biogenetic commons, the problema of our cultural commons ('intellectual property'), and, last but not least, commons as the universal space of humanity from which no one should be excluded. Whatever the solution, it will have to deal with these problems. This is why, as Alvaro Garcia Linera once put it, our horizon has to remain Communist--a horizon not as an inaccessible ideal, but as a space of ideas within which we move.
idk why he says problema
[...] The true novelty of the Syriza government is that it is a governmental event--the first time that a Western radical Left (not the old-style Communist one) has taken state power. The entire rhetoric, so beloved of the New Left, of acting at a distance from the state, has to be abandoned: one has to heroically assume full responsibility for the welfare of the entire people and leave behind the basic Leftist 'critical' attitude of finding a perverse satisfaction in providing sophisticated explanations of why things had to take a wrong turn.
[...] The point is that this dilemma is wrong: the dilemma cannot be solved at this level since the very gap between private interest (safety of my son) and global justice bears witness to a situation which has to be overcome.
great illustration of the problem with individualist thinking vs looking at the bigger picture (someone's white son is having a tough time at a majority-black school--what's the solution?)
[...] when we are deprived of universal healthcare, we are told that we are given a new freedom of choice (to choose our healthcare provider); when we can no longer rely on long-term employment and are compelled to search for a new precarious job every couple of years or maybe even every couple of weeks, we are told that we are given the opportunity to re-invent ourselves and discover our unexpected creative potential; when we have to pay for the education of our children, we are told that we become 'entrepreneurs-of-the-self', acting like a capitalist who has to choose freely how he will invest the resources he possesses (or has borrowed)--in education, health, travel. Constantly bombarded by such imposed 'free choices', forced to make decisions for which we are not even properly qualified (or do not possess enough information about), we increasingly experience our freedom as a burden that causes unbearable anxiety. Unable to break out of this vicious cycle alone, as isolated individuals, since the more we act freely, the more we get enslaved by the system, we need to be awakened from this dogmatic slumber of fake freedom by the push of a Master figure.
damn
[...] To everyone’s surprise, Lenin says, ‘I’d like to have both!’ Why? Is there a hidden stripe of decadent jouisseur behind his austere revolutionary image? No – he explains: ‘So that I can tell my wife that I am going to my mistress, and my mistress that I have to be with my wife …’ ‘And then, what do you do?’ ‘I go to a solitary place to learn, learn and learn!’
Marx chooses a wife, Engels chooses a mistress ... playing on the fact that Lenin's advice to young people under socialism was ‘Learn, learn and learn’
[...] In a well-known passage from his Existentialism and Humanism, Sartre deployed the dilemma of a young man in France in 1942, torn between the duty to help his lone, ill mother and the duty to enter the Resistance and fight the Germans; Sartre’s point is, of course, that there is no a priori answer to this dilemma. The young man needs to make a decision grounded only in his own abyssal freedom and assume full responsibility for it. [...]
he mentions an "obscene" third way out, which is to do neither
While Lossky was without doubt a sincere and benevolent person, really caring for the poor and trying to civilise Russian life, such an attitude betrays a breathtaking insensitivity to the systemic violence that had to go on in order for such a comfortable life to be possible. We’re talking here of the violence inherent in a system: not only direct physical violence, but also the more subtle forms of coercion that sustain relations of domination and exploitation, including the threat of violence. The Losskys and their kind effectively ‘did nothing bad’. There was no subjective evil in their life, just the invisible background of this systemic violence. [...] In their benevolent-gentle innocence, the Losskys perceived such signs of the forthcoming catastrophe as emerging out of nowhere, as signals of an incomprehensibly malevolent new spirit. What they didn’t understand was that in the guise of this irrational subjective violence, they were getting back the message they themselves sent out in its inverted true form. It is this violence which seems to arise ‘out of nowhere’ that, perhaps, fits what Walter Benjamin, in his ‘Critique of Violence’, called pure, divine violence.
quoting Nikolai Lossky, one of the "haute bourgeoisie" forced into exile
this is so spot-on
[...] the ‘ultra-objective’ or systemic violence that is inherent in the social conditions of global capitalism, which involve 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’.
Our blindness to the results of systemic violence is perhaps most clearly perceptible in debates about communist crimes. Responsibility for communist crimes is easy to allocate: we are dealing with subjective evil, with agents who did wrong. We can even identify the ideological sources of the crimes – totalitarian ideology, The Communist Manifesto, Rousseau, even Plato. But when one draws attention to the millions who died as the result of capitalist globalisation, from the tragedy of Mexico in the sixteenth century through to the Belgian Congo holocaust a century ago, responsibility is largely denied. All this seems just to have happened as the result of an ‘objective’ process, which nobody planned and executed and for which there was no ‘Capitalist Manifesto’. (The one who came closest to writing it was Ayn Rand.) [...]
Above all, liberal communists are true citizens of the world. They are good people who worry. They worry about populist fundamentalists and irresponsible, greedy capitalist corporations. They see the ‘deeper causes’ of today’s problems: it is mass poverty and hopelessness which breed fundamentalist terror. So their goal is not to earn money, but to change the world, though if this makes them more money as a by-product, who’s to complain? Bill Gates is already the single greatest benefactor in the history of humanity, displaying his love for neighbours with hundreds of millions freely given to education, and the battles against hunger and malaria. The catch, of course, is that in order to give, first you have to take – or, as some would put it, create. The justification of liberal communists is that in order to really help people, you must have the means to do it, and, as experience of the dismal failure of all centralised statist and collectivist approaches teaches, private initiative is the efficient way. So if the state wants to regulate their business, to tax them excessively, is it aware that in this way it is effectively undermining the stated goal of its activity – that is, to make life better for the large majority, to really help those in need?
[...]
We need to ask ourselves whether there really is something new here. Is it not merely that an attitude which, in the wild old capitalist days of the US industrial barons, was something of an exception (although not as much as it may appear) has now gained universal currency? Good old Andrew Carnegie employed a private army brutally to suppress organised labour in his steelworks and then distributed large parts of his wealth to educational, artistic and humanitarian causes. A man of steel, he proved he had a heart of gold. In the same way, today’s liberal communists give away with one hand what they first took with the other. [...]
[...]
[...] In liberal communist ethics, the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity. Charity is the humanitarian mask hiding the face of economic exploitation. In a superego blackmail of gigantic proportions, the developed countries ‘help’ the undeveloped with aid, credits and so on, and thereby avoid the key issue, namely their complicity in and co-responsibility for the miserable situation of the undeveloped.
he's very savage on what he calls "liberal communists"; new prophets of capital follows the same vein (can't remember if she cites zizek or not though)