by
Slavoj Žižek
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[...] 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
The difference between liberalism and the radical Left is that, although they refer to the same three elements (the liberal centre, the populist Right, and the radical Left), they locate them in a different topology: for the liberal centre, the radical Left and Right are two forms of the same 'totalitarian' excess, while for the Left, the only true alternative is the one between itself and the liberal mainstream, with the populist 'radical' Right as nothing but the symptom of liberalism's inability to deal with the Leftist threat. When we hear today's politicians or ideologists offering us a choice between liberal freedom and fundamentalist oppression, and triumphantly asking a (purely rhetorical) question 'Do you want women to be excluded from public life and deprived of their elementary rights? Do you want everyone who mocks religion to be punished by death?', what should make us suspicious is the very self-evidence of the answer--who would ever want that? The problem is that such a simplistic liberal universalism lost its innocence long ago. This is why, for a true Leftist, the conflict between liberal permissiveness and fundamentalism is ultimately a false conflict--a vicious cycle of two poles generating and presupposing each other. One should take a Hegelian step back and question the very measure from which fundamentalism appears in all its horror. [...]
This is why every revolution has to be repeated. It is only after the first enthusiastic unity disintegrates that true universality can be formulated, a universality no longer sustained by imaginary illusions. It is only after the initial unity of the people falls apart that the real work begins, the hard work of assuming all the implications of the struggle for an egalitarian and just society. It is not enough simply to get rid of the tyrant; the society which gave birth to the tyrant has to be thoroughly transformed. [...]
The paradox is that, precisely because it lacks democratic legitimacy, an authoritarian regime can sometimes be more responsible towards its subjects than one that was democratically elected: since it lacks democratic legitimacy, it has to legitimize itself by providing services to the citizens, with the underlying reasoning, 'True, we are not democratically elected, but as such, since we do not have to play the game of striving for cheap popularity, we can focus on citizens' real needs.' A democratically elected government, on the contrary, can fully exert its power for the narrow private interests of its members; they already have the legitimacy provided by elections, so they don't need any further legitimization and can feel safe doing what they want--they can say to those who complain, 'You elected us, now it's too late.'
that's of course assuming they don't focus on their own needs, but interesting point