by
Slavoj Žižek
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[...] From Marx on, the truly radical Left was never simply 'progressist'. It was always obsessed with the question: what is the price of progress? Marx was fascinated by capitalism, by the unheard-of productivity it unleashed; it was just that he insisted that this very success engenders antagonisms. And we should do the same with the progress of global capitalism today: keep in view its dark underside, which is fomenting revolts.
What all this implies is that today's conservatives are not really conservative. While fully endorsing capitalism's continuous self-revolutionizing, they just want to make it more efficient by supplementing it with some traditional institutions (religion, for instance) to constrain its destructive consequences for social life and to maintain social cohesion. Today, a true conservative is the one who fully admits the antagonisms and deadlocks of global capitalism, the one who rejects simple progressives, and who is attentive to the dark obverse of progess. In this sense, only a radical Leftist can be today a true conservative.
I wouldn't really call it a dark underside ... it's a feature, not a bug (that's how it re-invents itself, and maybe eventually, as tech continues to develop, that's how we move to a post-capitalist world?)
[...] the crisis is not just the result of inadequate financial regulations, it expresses 'the intrinsic difficulty to make immaterial capital function like capital and cognitive capitalism to function like capitalism'. As such, this crisis signals the end of the 1990s project of the New Economy, the idea that capitalism can be revitalized in its digital form, with programmers and other intellectual workers turning into 'creative' capitalists [...] stronger and stronger state intervention is needed to keep the system viable. We should not miss the double irony here: there is some truth in the claim that state-socialism disintegrated in 1990 because it was not able to adapt itself to the digitalization of economic and social life; however, the same traditional Marxist notion of the contradiction between productive forces and relations of production is now undermining capitalism itself.
shit, this is good
Communism remains the horizon, the only horizon, from which one can not only judge but even adequately analyse what goes on today--a kind of immanent measure of what went wrong. That's why one should abandon the 'neo-Ricardian compromise between wage labour and productive capital against the power of finance', which tries to resuscitate the Social-Democratic welfare-state model: every demonization of financial capital is a manoeuvre to obfuscate the basic antagonism of capitalist production by transposing it onto 'parasitic' financial capital. [...]
this is so good that I've forgiven him for the note 1538 fiasco
[...] At a more fundamental level, we should clearly perceive the paradox of debt. The problem with the slogan 'You cannot spend more than you produce!' is that, taken universally, it is a tautological platitude, a fact and not a norm (of course humanity cannot consume more than it produces, like you cannot eat more food than you have on the plate), but the moment one moves to a particular level, things get problematic and ambiguous. At the direct material level of social totality, debts are in a way irrelevant, inexistent even, since humanity as a whole consumes what it produces--by definition one cannot consume more. One can reasonably speak of debt only with regard to natural resources (destroying the material conditions for the survival of future generations), where we are indebted to future generations which, precisely, do not yet exist and which, not without irony, will come to exist only through--and thus be indebted for their existence to--ourselves. so here, also the term 'debt' has no literal sense, it cannot be 'financialized', quantified into an amount of money. The debt we can talk about occurs when, within a global society, some group (nation or whatever) consumes more than it produces, which means that another group has to consume less than it produces [...]
thought this was interesting. he goes on to talk about the IMF and austerity and all that
[...] the capitalist system is ready to make considerable concessions to the workers and the poor only if there is a serious threat of an alternative, of a different mode of production which promises workers their rights. To retain its legitimacy, capitalism has to demonstrate how it works better even for the workers and the poor--and the moment this alternative vanishes, one can proceed to dismantle the welfare state.
In this way, the ultimate triumph of capitalism comes about when each worker becomes his or her own capitalist, the 'entrepreneur-of-the-self' who decides how much to invest in his or her own future (education, health and so forth), paying for these investments by becoming indebted. What were formally rights (to education, healthcare, housing) thus become free decisions to invest, which are formally at the same level as the banker's or capitalist's decision to invest in this or that company, so that--at this formal level--everyone is a capitalist getting indebted in order to invest [...] the freedom of choice imposed on him is a false one; it is the very form of his servitude.
the last part is on the difference between the real capitalist and the worker-as-capitalist
[...] Today's global capitalism brings the relationship of debtor/creditor to its extreme and simultaneously undermines it: debt becomes an openly ridiculous excess. We thus enter the domain of obscenity: when a credit is accorded, the debtor is not even expected to return it--debt is directly treated as a means of control and domination.
It is as if the providers and caretakers of debt accuse the indebted countries of not feeling enough guilt [...]
he goes on to cite the EU with Greece, and the IMF with Argentina (not wanting Argentina to pay its debts back because then they would lose control over its finances)
[...] Peter Buffett (Warren's son) recently published a New York Times op-ed in which he explained Philanthropic Colonialism:
Inside any important philanthropy meeting, you witness heads of state meeting with investment managers and corporate leaders. All are searching for answers with their right hand to problems that others in the room have created with their left ... [...]
As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to 'give back'. It's what I would call 'conscience laundering'--feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity. But this just keeps the existing structure of inequality in place. The rich sleep better at night, while others get just enough to keep the pot from boiling over.
A series of situations that characterize today's society perfectly exemplify this type of superego-individualization: ecology, political correctness and poverty [...] The ideological stakes of such individualization are easily discernible: I get lost in my own self-examination instead of raising much more pertinent global questions about our entire industrial civilization.
the idea that we should ensure that our personal actions are clean & innocent at the expense of attempting to counter systemic forces. good point
[...] the 'working class' is ultimately an empirical category designating a part of society (wage workers), while the proletariat is more a formal category designing the 'part of no-part' of the social body, the point of its symptomal torsion or, as Marx put it, the un-reason within reason--the rational structure of asociety. [...]
ok i dont really know what he's trying to say here. recording it cus i should find out the difference at some point