Slavoj Žižek is weird

I'm just sayin'.

Slavoj Žižek: On Corbyn, the election, Brexit and fake news Channel 4 News 05/16/2017:

The interviewer here jams him on his chronic sensationalism.

His bit on Gandhi is a wacky idea, in which he buries whatever points he has with a dumb Hitler comparison.

There is an important point to be made about systemic violence. But Žižek doesn't get farther than expressing a fuzzy idea.

He's engages in what is essentially a vapid talking point about surpassing the EU by "a new, much more aggressive universalism."

At around 11:00 in the video, he gets around to making a more-or-less coherent point, that the new French President Emmanuel Macron stands for the same kind of neoliberal economic policies that has recently strengthened the radical, anti-EU rightwing in France. And he right about the point, even though he doesn't state it quite that straightforwardly. The YouTube video is dated May 16, and Macron is already illustrating the point:

France' Emmanuel Macron is already pushing for Herbert Hoover/Heinrich Brüning economic policies. Of course. TINA? https://t.co/llsVUhhJPY

— Bruce Miller (@brucemillerca) May 23, 2017

TINA referring to the end-of-history dogma that There Is No Alternative to such policies. Even though there very clearly are constructive alternatives.

Then he lamely defends his endorsement of Donald Trump in the 2016 US Presidential election. This looked and looks to me an awful lot like someone taking a very conservative position with a thin veneer of a left justification.

He goes on to mealy-mouth about Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party in the upcoming British election.

After 41:00: "I want the rightwing chaos so that the new left will save us from it."

He goes on to complain about LGBT advocates and "political correctness." He may not understand LGBT issues very well.

At least he admits that he consciously tries to provoke with some of his formulations.

Stephen Holmes on democracy in the neoliberal era

Stephen Holmes in Goodbye future? Eurozine (German version published in Blätter 1/2014), reflects on the state of democracy in the world since the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall. The article is adapted from a speech of 03/22/2012 at a conference on the work of Claus Offe, a political scientist and sociologist working in the Frankfurt School tradition of political theory.

Already in the 1990s, I think it is fair to say, most of us had stopped being euphoric. No sooner had Poland exited the communist bloc than Leszek Kolakowski published an article reminding us that euphoria never lasts very long. Anyone following the aftermath of the Arab Spring will appreciate what he had in mind; and democratic euphoria after 1989 was similarly short-lived. True, no one back then predicted that Hungary would lapse ominously back into single-party rule as it has today, with devastating personal consequences for many ordinary Hungarians. By the late 1990s, students of post-communism had started seeing themselves less as transitologists than as traumatologists. That was certainly true for Claus Offe, who wrote extensively about the peculiarly non-revolutionary nature of the post-communist transitions and especially about the fateful absence (with the possible exception of Poland) of an organized counter-elite that, having overthrown the old regime would therefore have had the public credibility and organizational experience to act as an agent of directional change, steering the process of post-communist development. The consequence of this lack was political drift ungoverned by any shared concept of public purpose. My point, in any case, is that already in the 1990s, students of post-communism were perfectly aware that when autocracy collapses, democracy does not arise automatically to take its place, like toast popping out of a toaster. As post-1989 euphoria wore off, the elementary lessons learned earlier by students of European decolonization reasserted themselves: the absence of obstacles is not the same as the presence of preconditions; less state does not mean more freedom; gaining influence over legislation is pointless if no one obeys the law; and, since democracy is a tiny spot in human history, it must have many complex preconditions. [my emphasis]

Holmes detects two general types of democratic discontents: discontent with the specific forms of democracy in a particular country, and "a more general dissatisfaction that seems to afflict all or most democracies in the world for more or less similar reasons."

Holmes' article deals with American claims to be promoting democracy by bombing, killing and torturing in Iraq and Afghanistan in a way that reminds us to be caution about so-called humanitarian interventions.

One of the more interesting phrases he uses is what he calls the "movement for the liberation of the rich" from the need to be responsive or accommodating to the democratic majority. He looks for a rational basis for this trend, such as a "flooding of the labour market by a low-cost Chinese
workforce" that he assumes "has also reduced the interest of the American and European capitalist class in the health and education
of American and European workers." This is a little unclear; I assume he is referring to Chinese exporting of cheap products to retail giants like WalMart more than Chinese emigration to other countries. He also suggests that reliance on professional armies rather than conscript-based is significant factor: "When volunteer armies with high-tech weapons replace citizen levies, one of the main motives for elite interest in public welfare is substantially weakened."

I think he may underestimate the raw power of greed here. Franklin Roosevelt in a 1935 speech referred to those "who are ready to put a weary, selfish or greedy hand upon the clock of progress and turn it back." (A Radio Address to the Young Democratic Clubs of America 08/24/1935) Those people we have with us always. Currently they have names like Koch, DeVos and Walton.

Holmes' discussion of how power fragmented in the post-communist societies like Russia is fascinating. This is something I don't recall seeing mentioned before:

Even more extraordinary is the radical privatization of Soviet psychiatry for utterly personal ends. In today's Russia, if you covet your elderly sister's apartment, for instance, you can make a "sensitive payment" to the same psychiatric institute that once tortured political dissidents and the now for-profit psychiatrists will seize your sister physically, lock her in a facility, and pump her full of drugs until she signs any document you put in front of her. Like many of its other forms, this cruel privatization of the shattered detritus of the Soviet collapse is wholly spontaneous and serves no possible purpose of the central government, even if it leaves that government unfazed.

That's seriously grim.

But I'm not so impressed with one of Holmes' central points, in which he suggests that Bureaucracy is a huge part of what creates a sense that people don't control their politicians and that their views and needs are not adequately represented in government. It echoes a standard conservative gripe. No modern state can function without a substantial bureaucracy, especially in advanced countries. Making Bureaucracy an abstract bogeyman lets politicians that are bought and paid for by corporations - as the leading members of Germany's current Grand Coalition government look to be - way to easy. Bureaucracy in itself is neither intrinsically good nor bad. But it is necessary. And bureaucracies private or public can be run well or run poorly, with lots of variations in between. It's no excuse for elected officials not to do their jobs responsibly.

And he does get around to making a point about the corruption of democratic politics by big money:

... electoral accountability is a feeble method for aligning the interests of rulers with the interests of the ruled. This would still be true even if the public (counterfactually) was well-informed in real time about all of the government's actions. The reason is fairly well known and can most easily be explained by contrasting the anaemic responsiveness of politicians to voters with their heartfelt responsiveness to campaign contributors. Able to open or close at will the faucet of election funding for permanently campaigning members of Congress, a skilful lobbyist has a relatively easy time evaluating the promise-keeping of the elected officials he has suborned. He wants a yes or no vote on a specific bill and can verify easily whether such a vote is cast. The voter is in a much less advantageous position, having to evaluate the performance of his or her Congressman or Senator over a number of years on a wide range of unrelated issues and controversies. A single vote delivered on a single day every few years in an extremely crude tool for producing accountability for such a complex tangle of decisions. Capture of the legislative process by organized private interests is a pervasive feature of democratic politics everywhere today – without exception, which means in post-communist democracies as well. [my emphasis]

And he makes an intriguing point in the following, although it's not entirely clear if he's approving or disapproving President Obama's decision to give senior members of the Cheney-Bush Administration a free pass on prosecution for serious crimes, including torture:

A seventh source of dissatisfaction with democracy derives from one of democracy's essential preconditions. Adam Przeworski famously defined democracy as a system in which parties lose elections. But for incumbents to step down voluntarily after they lose an election it is obviously necessary that they do not expect to lose too much. This observation was illustrated dramatically in 2010-2011 when Ivory Coast strongman Laurent Gbagbo refused to leave office after his rival, Alassane Ouattara, won a disputed election, thereby plunging the country into a bloody four-month standoff. In line with this principle, Obama's Department of Justice refused to prosecute criminally any of the war crimes committed during the Bush administration. Democracy will not work, he seems to have reasoned, unless electorally ousted incumbents can be guaranteed a soft landing. The problem with this "inter-temporal bargain" between rival parties alternating in power is that it drains meaning from democratic elections. L'alternance may be the essence of democracy; but reducing the stakes in the rotation of office-holders may also produce profound dissatisfaction among voters longing for "change". The problem is exacerbated because voters are usually urged to show up at the polls after being bombarded with competitive overpromising by candidates pleading for support.

But there is a huge difference between holding elected officials accountable to an established rule of law and starting a civil war. Without accountability before the law, the incentives for politicians to behave well or even obey the law are greatly reduced, as is their incentive to serve their actual constituents.

He acknowledges at the end of the piece that it is a notably pessimistic view that he takes. One that I would say at least borders on encouraging cynicism, which is the problem I have with a lot of Slavoj Žižek's popular articles. He tries to cushion his seeming negativity by offering in the last paragraph, "This ability of democracy to fill society with a sense of future possibility is one of its most precious side-effects."

But if the most democracy has to offer the majority of people is a vague sense of personal optimism for the distant future, that really is a grim message!

John Kenneth Galbraith, in his severely under-appreciated book The Culture of Contentment (1992) offered a look at the state of democracy in the immediate "post-communist" era that was sobering but nevertheless conveyed a sense that the discouraging conditions described were reason for concern and outrage and a demand for change. And he closed with a nominally pessimistic final paragraph that conveyed a very different sense than what Stephen Holmes does. Galbraith:

In the past, writers, on taking pen [a writing instrument once widely used], have assume that from the power of their talented prose must proceed the remedial action. No one would be more delighted than I were there similar hope from the present offering. Alas, however, there is not. Perhaps as a slight, not wholly inconsequential service, it can be said that we have here had the chance to see and in some small measure to understand the present discontent and dissonance and the not inconsiderable likelihood of an eventual shock to the contentment that is the cause.

Of course, since 1992 we've had quite a few shocks to the seemingly prevailing culture of contentment that Galbraith the elder was writing about then. George McGovern, another forever-unreconstructed New Dealer, wrote in a book published shortly before his death, What It Means To Be A Democrat (2011) reminded his American readers of what defeatism and complacency are not valid options:

But there is far too much at stake to waste a moment hand-wringing or complaining. Right now we have 14 million men and women without jobs, millions of families in bankruptcy and foreclosure, and some 50 million people without health insurance. We have families who cannot afford to send their children to preschool and others fretting over how to pay for college. We have Americans who go without enough to eat and others for whom nutritious food is simply not within reach. We have men and women in prison for drug use who should instead be in treatment. We have soldiers fighting in distant wars who should be at home with their families. We have immigrants who have traveled under horrific conditions in search of a better; life that still eludes them in our midst. Never in modern times have so many people needed a hand so desperately.

Tags: george mcgovern, john kenneth galbraith, neoliberalism, slavoj žižek

Žižek-ing the sign-language non-interpreter interpreter

Since I've had a couple of occasions recently to comment on the putatively Marxist philosopher
Slavoj Žižek, I thought I would continue with another Guardian commentary of his on Nelson Mandela's death and the media treatment of it, The 'fake' Mandela memorial interpreter said it all 12/16/2013.

But before I get into that one, I was struck by this from David Atkins, a blogging partner of Digby's at Hullabaloo. In a post about the maldistribution of wealth in the US, in which he refers to the wealthiest as the "asset class," he ends with this defensive comment (Assets versus workers again: Wealth is even more disturbing than income inequality 12/18/2013):

But that's just not so. And in a world of increased globalization, mechanization and deskilling, the decoupling of the asset class from the working class is going to become even more severe.

I'm not the first person to say this, but just because Marx didn't have the right answer, doesn't mean he wasn't asking the right questions. State Communism was obviously a dramatic failure. But that doesn't mean our dominant economic system represents the pinnacle of human freedom and progress, either.

As I understand it, David is not only active in the Democratic Party but he's young enough to have no adult memories of the Cold War and the often-warped polemics that were part of it.

So, perhaps from a somewhat more jaded perspective, I'll make some comments about agreeing in some way with something Karl Marx or some famous Marxist may have said.

First, there's this from Jorge Bergoglio/Pope Francis I: "“Marxist ideology is wrong. But in my life I have known many Marxists who are good people, so I don’t feel offended" when, say, a junkie bigot like Rush Limbaugh calls him a Marxist. (Joshua McElwee, Pope: There won't be women cardinals National Catholic Reporter 12/14/2013)

Catholic teaching on economics is complicated, not least because the Church held on to feudal-based criticisms of capitalism well into the 20th century. So it's sometimes hard to tell whether a sweeping Catholic criticism of capitalism is "progressive" in the sense of looking toward an improved future or "reactionary" in terms of looking back to an imagined ideal feudal economy and society. But whatever, the Pope's merits or failings, he obviously knows how to deliver a diplomatic "Bite me!" to fools who criticize him superficially.

To today's Republicans, liberal=moderate=progressive=Marxist=Communist=socialist=atheist=Nazi. The Republican Party has adopted a segregationist outlook, complete the babbling foolishness that the John Birch Society and White Citizens Council were practicing back in the 1950s and 1960s and their political ancestors of the paleo-conservative variety were practicing before that. In other words, if you're a Democrat, or defend labor unions, or question mindless American nationalism, they're going to call you a Marxist. There's a range of appropriate responses, the Pope's representing the polite end of the spectrum, and some form of "bite me, a*****e!"

Cold War polemics condemned "Marxism," "Marxism-Leninism," "Marxism-Leninism-Mao-Zedong-Thought" and other variations of challenges to capitalism, as such. On the center-left/liberal/social-democratic side, Good (non-Communist) Marxism was defended against Bad (Soviet or Chinese or Communist) Marxism. To undermine Marxist or other groups abroad that might be pro-Soviet especially, the CIA liked to promote "Third Force" groups with revolutionary/reformist aims that were neither Marxist or overtly reactionary. Then there were the Trotskyists, who I once heard defined as the people who support revolution everywhere except where there's one going on.

Karl Marx is the classical critic of capitalism. In my first homework assignment in graduate business school, I had to read excerpts from Adam Smith, the classic advocate for capitalism, and Karl Marx. (Okay, it was a Jesuit school, and the Pope's a Jesuit; draw what conclusions you will!)

Marx was born in 1817 and died in 1883. He got some things right, like the chronic tendency of capitalist economies to have recessions, called "crises" in his day, a tendency toward extreme concentrations of wealth, and the ability of great wealth to exercise disproportionate control over even the most democratic of governments. Some things, like what is know as the secular tendency of profit margins to fall, the eminence of an end to the capitalist order, not so much. It's no sin to recognize either. Lots has happened in the world since 1883, e.g., two world wars, the rise fall of the USSR and the Eastern bloc, global climate change. If Marx were still alive and working at 196 years of age, he would have adapted his analyses to changing times.

Very few parties in the world outside of China would identify themselves as Marxist parties these days. Because, you know, times and political challenges have changed since 1883. Even if some major problems like the extreme maldistribution of wealth and income persist and recur. As Arlo Guthrie once said, "Some things change, you know. Some things don't."

One of the economists that has great insights into the euro crisis is Yanis Varoufakis, who I quote here with some frequency. In Confessions of an Erratic Marxist: Keynote speech, Subversive Festival, Zagreb, Croatia – 14th May 2013, he explains that while his professional work has been largely in the Keynesian framework, his larger theoretical outlook is one he considers to be a Marxist one:

In summary, not one of my academic publications can be thought of as explicitly Marxist, while my energies are channeled into preventing capitalism’s collapse. Nonetheless, all along, from my student days in Britain to this very day, the only way I could make sense of the world we live in is through the methodological 'eyes' of Karl Marx. In itself, this 'fact' renders me a theoretical Marxist. Moreover, I feel Marxism in my bones every time I am engaged in any form of intellectual pursuit: from discussing the Arab Spring to debating the intricacies of Art with my artist partner. Furthermore, a democratic, libertarian, socialist future is the only future that I would be willing to fight for. A most peculiar Marxist no doubt, but a Marxist nevertheless.

Make of that what you will. But anyone who just dismisses Varoufakis' solid economics work, which is highly relevant to the euro crisis today, on the grounds that he used the "M" word to describe his outlook, well, it would be a pretty airhead approach to take.

Varoufakis has an expanded version of that presentation in Confessions of an Erratic Marxist in the Midst of a Repugnant European Crisis 12/10/2013.

Which brings us to the article by Slavoj Žižek, a self-described Marxist who has become a notable "public intellectual." In other words, his opinions on current events get more attention than those of most professional philosophers like himself. As I've said before, it's often hard to tell when Slavoj Žižek is making a serious argument and when he's clowning around. Maybe there's no distinction in his case. And by his own somewhat convoluted approach, the very fact that he is a prominent public intellectual who gets occasionally published in the mainstream press is prime facie evidence that the powers that be don't regard his opinions as being in the least threatening to the established order. Whatever.

This piece is thought-provoking. It's about the fake interpreter, who is apparently a schizophrenic, a criminal and maybe even a murderer, who did sign-language translation for President Obama's speech at Mandela's funeral event. And this from Žižek is food for thought:

Jantjie's performance was not meaningless – precisely because it delivered no particular meaning (the gestures were meaningless), it directly rendered meaning as such – the pretence of meaning. Those of us who hear well and do not understand sign language assumed that his gestures had meaning, although we were not able to understand them. And this brings us to the crux of the matter: are sign language translators for the deaf really meant for those who cannot hear the spoken word? Are they not much more intended for us – it makes us (who can hear) feel good to see the interpreter, giving us a satisfaction that we are doing the right thing, taking care of the underprivileged and hindered[?]

I remember how, in the first "free" elections in Slovenia in 1990, in a TV broadcast by one of the leftist parties, the politician delivering the message was accompanied by a sign language interpreter (a gentle young woman). We all knew that the true addressees of her translation were not the deaf but we, the ordinary voters: the true message was that the party stood for the marginalised and handicapped.

It was like great charity spectacles which are not really about children with cancer or flood victims, but about making us, the public, aware that we are doing something great, displaying solidarity. [my emphasis]

The line between the thought-provoking and the cynical can sometimes be a thin one. But I'll give Žižek credit for the former in this one.

But that first sentence I quoted from him - "Jantjie's performance was not meaningless – precisely because it delivered no particular meaning (the gestures were meaningless), it directly rendered meaning as such – the pretence of meaning" - tends to invoke for me Huck Finn's reaction to Tom Sawyer's pretentious and incomprehensible explanations for things: I have no idea what he's talking about, but, boy, does it sound grand!

What I tended to focus more on with the interpreter story was this. The NSA spies on what pretty much sounds like every electronic communication link and every database and every mobile phone in the world. But our NSA super-protectors against The Terrorists ... let this guy stand next to President Obama at his speech at Mandela's funeral? They couldn't even figure out he wasn't a real sign-language interpreter?

And they say they may never figure out how much information Edward Snowden took from their super-duper databases that protect us against The Terrorists always and everywhere. Oooo-kay!!

Tags: marxism, slavoj žižek

Žižek-ing Nelson Mandela

I recently posted about the challenge of sorting out what the critical theory philosopher Slavoj Žižek may actually be talking about.

There I quoted a 2002 review of one of Žižek's books by Peter Bürger who raised the question about that book that often occurs to me when reading Žižek: "Does the author want to make himself interesting by holding a distinctive position, or does he mean what he says?"

Žižek did a provocative op-ed about Nelson Mandela, which a Brazilian friend of mine posted about on Facebook. It appeared in several places: If Nelson Mandela really had won, he wouldn't be seen as a universal hero The Guardian 12/09/2013; with the same title and date at Common Dreams; Mandela’s Socialist Failure New York Times 12/06/2013.

I'm not sure how well Ayn Rand, who Žižek quotes in his article, is known outside the US. Those who aren't acquainted with her work haven't missed much. She was an extreme reactionary emigrant from Russia who wrote bad novels (Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead) that promoted her philosophy of Objectivism, which in most of the world would be described as far-right liberalism. That doesn't work in the US, of course, where "liberal" means center-left.

On a political scale, she would be to the right of Ludwig von Mises. But her dogmas are very influential among today's US Republican Party. She ran what was basically a personal cult, whose most famous adherent was Alan Greenspan, the former head of the US Federal Reserve, whose free-market dogmas contributed enormously to the crash of 2008.

So when Žižek cites Ayn Rand approvingly, I have to ask Bürger's question: is this guy serious or is he just trying to be annoying? And, no, despite what Žižek says, Marx's theory of commodities and markets did not say anything like what the cynical quote he uses from Ayn Rand says. And surely Žižek knows this. But he then turns around and uses the Rand quote to claim that he's more Communist than the Communists. It's clever, especially if you know about Rand's rabid anti-Communism. But weird.

Most everyone seems to agree that Mandela and the ANC did not push forward the kind of radical social reform their program envisioned before taking power. And Žižek makes some thought-provoking points around that. I haven't followed South African politics closely enough to evaluate that in much closer detail. I have seen a plausible argument that Mandela's decision as President to honor the foreign debt accumulated by the apartheid regime and the neoliberal rules of "globalization" on free movement of capital were key mistakes. Because they allowed capital flight and severely restricted his government's ability to make important reforms. Argentina's experience since 2000 suggests there were meaningful alternatives - though I'm guessing that Žižek would condemn Argentina's kirchnerismo also for falling short of "radical emancipatory politics."

Žižek's more interesting points tend to get swallowed by his attempts to be provocative. Is there any actual evidence that Mandela "at the end of his life" was "a bitter, old man"? Žižek assumes so, apparently just because he likes the way it sounds. I was also struck by his comment: "In South Africa, the miserable life of the poor majority broadly remains the same as under apartheid, and the rise of political and civil rights is counterbalanced by the growing insecurity, violence, and crime." I don't know how fair a generalization that is. But given the way he puts it, it's also very easy for defenders of the old apartheid regime to quote it verbatim, prefaced by, "Even the notorious Marxist Slavoj Žižek says ..."

My friend was more generous to Žižek. She was intrigued by the way he talks about the function of heroism as a stabilizing force in the existing order, and the importance of addressing economic inequality as well as formal democratic equality and civil rights.

Žižek does have a good point, though he doesn't make it that clearly, that the trend over the last twenty years or so in numerous places has been for left-of-center parties to promote formal equality while allowing the "free market" to magnify economic equality. Removing discrimination against women, racial minorities, gays and lesbians is a good thing in itself. Because it's the right thing to do. And it allows a greater diversity of voices to be heard in society and the democratic process. It's great that a woman like Dilma Rousseff can be President of Brazil and that an African-American like Barack Obama President of the United States.

But obviously, having Obama as President isn't nearly enough to do away with the hold of the military-industrial complex on American policy. And his policies have largely been in the neoliberal mold: trade agreements that expand the power of corporations over government policies, blocking health and safety regulations, minimizing the reach of reforms on the financial industry, promoting austerity economics, using the NSA to spy on foreign corporations (in the name of National Security, of course). Even his famous health insurance program, which should actually do a lot of good, is based on guaranteeing access to private health insurance.

Angela Merkel is the first female Chancellor of Germany, and she just selected the country's first female Defense Minister. But her economic policies are condemning Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain to economic depression for the indefinite future. And will probably destroy the euro and maybe the EU itself in the process.

Beatriz Talegón, who is currently the head of the Socialist International's youth organization, has a book out this year, No nos avergoncéis that has some very good criticisms on how disastrous the European center-left's adoption of neoliberal economics has been. With special reference to Spain's social-democratic party the PSOE and former PSOE Prime Minister José Luis Zapatero, whose government had an impressive record on women's rights, same-sex marriage, secularization and the Iraq War, yet more-or-less meekly accepted Merkel's destructive austerity policies.

But inequality when it becomes severe enough will overwhelm democracy and formal equality. In the US, several of our leading Keynesian economists have been sounding the alarm about the severe economic inequality and its destructive effects. Paul Krugman has a recent column on that: Why Inequality Matters New York Times 12/15/2013.

I think buried in Žižek's sophisticated word games is a point something like that. He just makes it difficult to find! And part of his approach is to make consciously utopian criticisms of the existing order. But I sometimes wonder if he doesn't wind up making meaningful democratic and social change sound like impossible tasks.

Tags: neoliberalism, slavoj žižek

Harshing on Slavoj Žižek

It's been a while here since I've complained about how irritating I find the contemporary philosopher Slavoj Žižek.

Slavoj Žižek, 2009

So I'll take this opportunity to catch up.

Because I came across a review by someone who's much better informed than I on philosophy who apparently finds Žižek irritating in much the same way I do.

That's Peter Bürger in a review titled "Slavoj rennt" [Slavoj runs] Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 50:3 (2002), a review of a German edition of Žižek's book The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology: "Will der Autor sich bloB interessant machen, indem er eine aparte Position einnimmt, oder meint er, was er sagt?" ("Does the author [Žižek] want to make himself interesting by holding a distinctive position, or does he mean what he says?")

That question in itself captures my general reaction to Žižek.

He expands on it in the concluding sentences of the review:

Ist Žižeks unendliche Rede, die nie an einen Ruhepunkt gelangt, die Bruchstücke der Tradition aufnimmt, sie mit Filmszenen und Anekdoten assoziiert, ist sie nicht Ausdruck eben jener Hyperaktivität, die er als postmodern kritisiert? Statt die eigene Zeit in Gedanken zu fassen, erfasst die Zeit seine Gedanken und treibt sie im Wirbel vor sich her, und ihm bleibt nichts anderes übrig, als ihnen atemlos hinterherzulaufen.

[In Žižek's endless speech, that never arrives at a resting point, that incorporates fragments of tradition, associating them with film scenes and anecdotes, is it not an expression of that hyperactivity the he criticizes as postmodern? Instead of grasping his own time in thought, time seizes his thought and drive it along in a swirl in front of it, and nothing is left but for him to run along breathlessly after it.]

Well put.

Tags: slavoj žižek

Cyprus and the double dilemma of the euro trap

As I've mentioned more than once here, Slavoj Žižek may be generally considered one of Europe's leading philosophers today. But he's also a clown who makes outrageous comments to catch people's attention and then seemingly contradicts himself, in ways that make me wonder how seriously we can take anything he says.

But in The Cyprus crisis is a symptom of what is rotten in the EU Guardian 04/08/2013, he does manage to focus pretty well on a key aspect of the crisis in the eurozone:

There is a well-known joke from the last decade of the Soviet Union about Rabinovitch, a Jewish man who wants to emigrate. The bureaucrat at the emigration office asks him why, and Rabinovitch answers: "There are two reasons. The first is that I'm afraid that in the Soviet Union, the communists will lose power, and the new power will put all the blame for communist crimes on us, Jews – there will again be anti-Jewish pogroms …" "But", interrupts the bureaucrat, "this is pure nonsense, nothing can change in the Soviet Union, the power of the communists will last forever!" "Well," responds Rabinovitch calmly, "that's my second reason."

It is easy to imagine a similar conversation between an EU financial administrator and a Cypriot Rabinovitch today. Rabinovitch complains: "There are two reasons why we are in a panic here. First, we are afraid that the EU will simply abandon Cyprus and let our economy collapse…" The EU administrator interrupts him: "But you can trust us, we will not abandon you, we will tightly control you and advise you what to do!" "Well," responds Rabinovitch calmly, "that's my second reason."

This is the deadlock at the core of Cyprus's predicament: it cannot survive in prosperity without Europe, but nor can it with Europe – both options are worse, as Stalin would have put it. What we can see emerging on the horizon are the contours of a divided Europe: its southern part will be increasingly reduced to a zone with a cheaper labour force, outside the safety network of the welfare state, a domain appropriate for outsourcing and tourism. In short, the gap between the developed world and those lagging behind will now exist within Europe itself. [my emphasis]

He focuses here on the immediate economic bind without discussing the democracy problem that goes along with it.

And he goes on to suggest that the only way he sees to solve the current problem is "some kind of socialisation of the banks," though he's unsurprisingly vague on what he may mean by that. Presumably, if he had meant "nationalization," or "expropriation," he would have said so. But with Žižek, it's hard to be sure.

There may be larger reasons for having state-run banks. But a eurozone-wide system of banking regulation and insurance could have prevented the current disaster or mitigated it without the destructive economic and democratic consequences that actually developed. That wouldn't have meant that the banks had to be nationalized, although it would have had to include resolution authority that would allow some governmental agency to take over bankrupt institutions and reorganize them, which is currently happening to Laiki Bank in Cyprus on the national level.

I use that past perfect conditional (if I have my grammatical terms right) to reflect my sense that it's too late. If the EU had moved forward aggressively after their agreement to create some kind of banking union, they might have had a chance to fix things before the eurozone gets to the point of no return and begins breaking up. That's exceptionally unlikely to happen now, from what I can see.

A Deutsche Welle English report from 03/29/2013, Is the eurozone irrevocably divided?

Tags: cyprus, austerity economics, eu, euro, european union, neoliberalism, slavoj žižek

Slavoj Žižek is a clown

Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek is one of the odder figures who counts as a "public intellectual" these days. He is regarded as an important contemporary philosopher. And philosophy is an academic field where important accomplishments are made by people who may have eccentricities.

But this guy is also considered a major contemporary practicitioner of political theory and a leftwing, even Marxist political philosopher. Does this sound like any kind of left-leaning person to you?

In this video, Zizek On Racism YouTube 02/12/2011 he argues that that racist and nationalistic dirty jokes are good things and can be used in "progressive racism." He sneers at "political correctness" in Santa Cruz, in terms that Rush Limbaugh could pretty much use with minor changes. He uses as an example of the virtue of such "jokes"

In this clip, he explains that, well, that The Sound of Music is racist against Germans because it portrays Germans as Jews modeled on anti-Semitic stereotypes. Yes, he seriously argues that. Slavoj Žižek explains why the Sound of Music is racist YouTube date 11/25/2007:

Whatever the quality of his philosophical work, in his role as a public intellectual, he strikes me more and more as a clown. A rightwing clown.

Johann Hari came to a similar conclusion in his article, Pseud's corner New Statesman 04/30/2007.

In the opening scenes of Zizek!, a new feature-length documentary, it is not hard to see why they fall for him. Zizek looks like an immense human Droopy Dawg. He talks with such babbling, neurotic force about everything from quantum physics and Hegel to Meg Ryan that, for a moment, he is hypnotic. Leading the film-makers through his chaotic transcontinental life, he jabbers to them from his bed and even takes them to a long staircase where he fantasises about killing himself - before posing as a splattered corpse on the concrete floor beneath.

As the film progresses, however, Zizek does more than symbolically enact his own death; he commits intellectual suicide, all but admitting that his "philosophy" is a slew of nonsense. If the director, Astra Taylor, intended to make a fawning fan letter - as her cameos in the film suggest - she has failed. If she intended to shred Zizek's credibility, she has succeeded stunningly.

Tags: critical theory, racism, slavoj žižek

Slavoj Žižek: great philosopher or frivolous highbrow "concern troll"?

It's only relatively recently that I've read anything by the Slovenian Slavoj Žižek or head any of his speeches or in interviews. He is typically described as a "Marxist". But he has always struck me as more of a neoconservative sort, if not some kind of reactionary. Kind of a Marxist version of the "concern troll".

It always particularly bothered me that Žižek makes a point of saying that Stalin was worse than Hitler, a stock argument used by those seeking to minimize the horrors of Nazism. And, as José Pablo Feinmann reminds us, Stalinism was a feature of a society organized around non-capitalist lines, a social state that is arguably today only the case for China, Cuba and North Korea; and even in China something very much like capitalism predominates in the economy. Hitler's National Socialism, on the other hand, was very much a product of a capitalist society, something of which he have no scarcity today. And in fact it was a form of state terror organized to defend the capitalist system and the established class structure in Germany. A distinction which even stating a superficial equivalence between Stalinism and German National Socialism obscures.

John Gray seems to also think Žižek is a bit of a fake. In The Violent Visions of Slavoj Žižek New York Review of Books 07/12/2012 issue; accessed 06/20/2012), he argues:

Žižek was dismissed from his first university teaching post in the early 1970s, when the [Yugoslav] Slovenian authorities judged a thesis he had written on French structuralism — then an influential movement in anthropology, linguistics, psychoanalysis, and philosophy claiming that human thought and behavior exemplify a universal system of interrelated principles — to be "non-Marxist." The episode demonstrated the limited nature of the intellectual liberalization that was being promoted in the country at the time, but Žižek’s later work suggests that the authorities were right in judging that his intellectual orientation was not Marxian. Throughout the enormous corpus of work he has since built up, Marx is criticized for being insufficiently radical in his rejection of existing modes of thought, while Hegel — a much greater influence on Žižek — is praised for being willing to lay aside classical logic in order to develop a more dialectical way of thinking. But Hegel is also criticized for having too great an attachment to traditional modes of reasoning, and a central theme of Žižek’s writings is the need to shed the commitment to intellectual objectivity that has guided radical thinkers in the past. [my emphasis]

Gray also thinks that Žižek makes a dubious, if not frivolous, reading of Hegel on the idea of the "cunning of reason" as it develops in history:

The Hegel that emerges in Žižek’s writings thus bears little resemblance to the idealist philosopher who features in standard histories of thought. Hegel is commonly associated with the idea that history has an inherent logic in which ideas are embodied in practice and then left behind in a dialectical process in which they are transcended by their opposites. Drawing on the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou, Žižek radicalizes this idea of dialectic to mean the rejection of the logical principle of noncontradiction, so that rather than seeing rationality at work in history, Hegel rejects reason itself as it has been understood in the past. Implicit in Hegel (according to Žižek) is a new kind of "paraconsistent logic" in which a proposition "is not really suppressed by its negation." This new logic, Žižek suggests, is well suited to understanding capitalism today. "Is not ‘postmodern’ capitalism an increasingly paraconsistent system," he asks rhetorically, "in which, in a variety of modes, P is non-P: the order is its own transgression, capitalism can thrive under communist rule, and so on?" [my emphasis]

Hegel rejects Reason? And maybe Nietzsche loved the Protestant and Catholic Churches of his day? And maybe Kant was the leading opponent of the Enlightenment? Good grief! But those argument would make about as much sense as the idea that "Hegel rejects reason itself."

Radical-sounding quotes like this one from Žižek can also fit very well into a far-right apocalyptic vision, from his book Living in the End Times:

The underlying premise of the present book is a simple one: the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. Its “four riders of the apocalypse” are comprised by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions.

As Gray comments matter-of-factly, "What he describes as the premise of the book is simple only because it passes over historical facts."

He describes another act of Žižek’s posturing this way: "In Žižek’s hands, Marxian ideas — which in Marx’s materialist view were meant to designate objective social facts — become subjective expressions of revolutionary commitment. Whether such ideas correspond to anything in the world is irrelevant." And it's not at all clear that Žižek’s version of "revolutionary commitment" is meant to lead to state of greater justice, equality and more humane use of the world's resources. Gray says that he makes "regular recourse to a laborious kind of clowning wordplay."

Gray suggests not-so-subtlely that the Slovenian philosophy is engaged in stereotypical navel-gazing:

Why should anyone adopt Žižek’s ideas rather than any others? The answer cannot be that Žižek’s are true in any traditional sense. "The truth we are dealing with here is not 'objective' truth," Žižek writes, "but the self-relating truth about one’s own subjective position; as such, it is an engaged truth, measured not by its factual accuracy but by the way it affects the subjective position of enunciation."

Gray also suggests, plausibly I think, that Žižek’s abstract celebration of revolutionary violence is similar to the ideas advocated by the quirky French philosopher George Sorel (1847-1922) in his 1908 work, Reflections on Violence.

Gray doesn't use the phrase, but his analysis fits my impression of Slavoj Žižek as a highbrow version of the "concern troll." One who, in Gray's words, achieves "a deceptive substance by endlessly reiterating an essentially empty vision." A social critic can point out real problems without necessarily defining solutions. But, as Gray says, "Žižek seems to be more "engaged — wittingly or otherwise — in a kind of auto-parody."

Tags: slavoj žižek

A Marx revival? (2 of 5) Some intellectual luminaries of the European left

In the first post in this series, I cited an article by Michael Sayeau, The Fifth International: n+1 covers the London Conference, "On the Idea of Communism" n+1 04/22/2009. The conference in question, Sayeau writes, featured "Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, Antonio Negri, Terry Eagleton, Jacques Ranciere, Peter Hallward, and other key (albeit mostly male and entirely European or American) players in leftist philosophy and theory."

It's safe to say that none of these people are household names in the US.

Alain Badiou holds the impressively-named Rene Descartes Chair at the European Graduate School. His faculty biography notes his indebtedness to Hegel, Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze. And to Plato.

Terry Eagleton is a literary scholar who has held chairs at the University of Manchester and at Oxford, and is currently on the faculty at Lancaster University. He writes for the The Guardian, where short articles by him are availble to sample his take on events, such as Occupy London are true followers of Jesus, even if they despise religion 11/03/2011. He is a prominent public intellectual in Britain.

Peter Hallward is a philosopher at Kingston University in London.His faculty profile tells us that he is currently working on a project on "the will of the people" in which he will "develop and defend a notion of democratic political will" drawing "in particular on the political works of Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Marx." The site also has links to several articles of his.

Antonio Negri is described by the leftist site Libcom.org (which apparently stands for "libertarian communism" as "an Italian autonomist Marxist academic who was wrongfully imprisoned by the Italian state for alleged involvement in the Brigate Rosse urban guerrilla group". His profile at the European Graduate School says he "is influenced in great part by Karl Marx and Benedict Baruch Spinoza."

Jacques Rancière, professor emeritus at the University of Paris, is also a professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School. His faculty bio includes this description of his views, "... is the experience of the distance of things; man acts as though his voice can be heard, but is always a proper distance from it."

Slavoj Žižek, a former democratic dissident in Communist Yugoslavia is "professor at the European Graduate School in Switzerland, international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London; senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana and regularly a visiting professor to some American university or other," according to a 2011 profile by Stuart Jeffries. (A life in writing: Slavoj Žižek The Guardian 07/15/2011)

John Gray reviews a book co-authored by Negri with Michael Hardt and one by Žižek in a piece called In the Bolshevik cabaret The Independent 11/20/2009. He heaps scorn on the authors, saying that "communism has been reinvented as a kind of intellectual cabaret act. The 20th century's biggest mistake is being marketed as high-end entertainment, with a modish neo-Bolshevism promising the jaded consumer an exciting experience of forbidden ideas." I'm not sure in what circles "neo-Bolshevism" is considered "modish", but whatever.

From my admittedly modest acquaintance with Žižek's work, I can't say whether Gray is entirely accurate in the following description. But my impression is consistent with Gray's suggestion that Žižek is more interested in poking critics of capitalism in the eye than in criticizing capitalism himself:

A Slovenian philosopher, psychoanalytical theorist and film critic, Zizek has become a gadfly of the left establishment, a prolific provocateur whose principal aim seems to be to confound his tender-minded readers. His target throughout this book is not the right but the soft, democratic, meliorist left, which imagines that the egalitarian goals of communism can be realised by non-repressive, liberal means.

Zizek is savagely scornful of this view, writing sharply that "One of the mantras of the postmodern left has been that we should finally leave behind the 'Jacobin-Leninist paradigm' of centralised dictatorial power. But perhaps the time has now come to turn this mantra around... Now, more than ever, one should insist on the 'eternal Idea of Communism' - strict egalitarian justice, disciplinary terror, political voluntarism, and trust in the people."

My interest in these posts that look at whether we are seeing a "Marx revival" is more about the immediate political influence of actual Marxist ideas. I take it for granted that grappling with ideas from Marx and the Marxist tradition are is and will continue to be important in academia and intellectual fields ranging from philosophy, literary theory, and history to sociology and political science and even theology. The very fact that China is ruled by a Communist Party and a Communist government that nominally adheres to a Marxist ideology would itself guarantee some continuing focus on Marxism in the intellectual world.

What struck me about Sayeau's report on that 2009 conference, though, is how little these luminaries of the left had to offer in the way of insight into the current situation. I mean, for the love of the Paris Commune, people, we're in a world depression! You know, like back in the 1930s? The "general crisis of capitalism", as Marxists (and not only Marxists) called it back then? What's the point of having Marxists around if they don't have some useful insights into the situation of a world economic depression?

Sayeau writes:

Despite the billing of the conference, and despite the fact that the papers presented were almost to a one solid pieces of philosophical work, I think it's safe to say that nothing groundbreaking, or even all that unexpected, happened. The speakers routinely erred on the side of contrition and caution. When Marx was cited, which was often, it was apologetically, rounded off with disavowals of dogmatism. When presenters engaged with the current economic situation, they were strident in proclaiming that change was necessary, but defensively so, as if they were still talking themselves into the idea — a holdover from the era of the bubble, when the "rising tide that lifts all boats" wrong-footed leftists for more than a decade.

Perhaps the clearest sign of a new sort of confidence would have been to see the presenters driven off their usual talking points. But the papers largely circled around the same conceptual axes that we would have expected five or ten years ago. The deployment of such familiar keywords as the "commons" (that is, places and objects owned collectively, if "owned" is even the right word for things as disparate as medieval grazing fields and open-source computer applications) and "immaterial labor" (work that manipulates information, feelings, or sensations rather than producing solid goods and materials) endowed the proceedings with an air of roteness, of business as usual. [my emphasis]

My point here is not to encourage sophomoric ridicule of European leftie intellectuals. My point is that their ideas need to be evaluated for their quality, or lack thereof. But with a world economic crisis now underway for going-on five-years with no end reasonably in sight, people in the United States and Europe particularly need to face that some of the dominant assumptions of the political and media elites have been proven deeply defective, such as monetarist economics and "end of history" assumptions about the secure victory of democratic institutions.

As we saw in the first post in this series, it is tempting for those whose goal is to comfort the most comfortable 1% to stigmatize any criticism of the real flaws of the current order as scary and foreign, for which the image of Karl Marx is still serviceable, now 20 years since the fall of the Soviet Union. The John Gray article linked above indulges in some of that.

But that doesn't mean everyone else has to dismiss sensible ideas or useful critical insights, no matter where they come from. One would think that the left in general, including Marxist thinkers, would have useful insights into the current situation. Even utopian thinking has its uses, though if it doesn't get beyond "imagine things can be different," it won't add much distinctive insight. But it is important that people can imagine things to be different!

As far as the economics goes, during the last several years the best insights and more relevant criticisms I've seen have come from Keynesian economists like Jamie Galbraith, Paul Krugman and Joe Stiglitz. They have done an excellent job of pointing out what happened with the economy and how badly mainstream policy assumptions went off the track.

If more radical thinkers like Alain Badiou, Eagleton, Hallward, Negri, Rancière and Žižek have relevant insights as well, great. I should say in fairness to them that none of them present themselves as economists. Nor is it necessary for scholarly work to have immediate relevance to the day's headlines. Politics and scholarship are different things, to put it mildly, although hopefully both fields would take reasonable insights from each other.

I haven't read the papers from the "On the Idea of Communism" conference, so it's hard to judge how fair Michael Sayeau is being in his report on it. The title of the conference suggests that its focus would be on the experience of Communism in the "real existing socialist" states of the former Soviet bloc. Since as a matter of real-world fact those states aren't around any more, it's understandable that there would be a certain defensiveness among the participants to identify with the cause of those former regimes.

Sayeau notes that the panel wasn't especially receptive to questions from the audience. And he writes:

The anger that the less eloquent questioners provoked may well be a symptom of this fact: after all, the years spent in the ideological desert of the end of history weren't very long ago. For this reason, it was important to uphold the "celebrity" status of figures like Badiou and Žižek: a movement with superstars has staying power. After all, there wouldn’t have been eighty people in the audience, let alone eight hundred, if it weren't for these celebrities, a fact that speaks to one of the more troubling contradictions in the current world of ideas: that though theory was ostensibly about rejecting priority and hierarchy, origin and personality, patriarchal organization and filiation, no field or discipline is so thoroughly defined by a system of stars and acolytes, great men and those who would be great men, as theory is today and has been for quite awhile. [my emphasis]

Yes, academics are known to sometimes have outsize egos. And that can always figure into how they come across, expecially to a general audience.

And the translation from academicese to more general usage is important to keep in mind. Juan Cole, whose expertise on Shi'a Islam and familiarity with Iraq propelled him to prominence as a public intellectual in the US during the last decade, said once that it was part of his learning curve that in TV appearances, he would sometimes find himself asked to explain some snippet of a quote from something he wrote 10 or 20 years ago that was completely off the topic of the discussion. This is the political-campaign style of using "oppo research" to discredit one's oppenent in real time. As nasty as academic debates can and do get, generally academics are used to operating under rules of discussion that exclude off-the-wall, out-of-context quotations being used for ad hominem attacks.

Not only are a lot of academics uninterested in learning to deal in that style. But not every useful idea can be reduced to a 30-second soundbite.

Posts in this series:

A Marx revival? (1 of 5) The Marx bogeyman 12/28/2011
A Marx revival? (2 of 5) Some intellectual luminaries of the European left 12/29/2011
A Marx revival? (3 of 5): the former Communist states as real-time challenge 12/30/2011
A Marx revival? (4 of 5) Is there actual evidence of such a thing in US and European politics? 01/01/2011
A Marx revival? (5 of 5) The archetypal left challenge to Marxism 01/02/2011

Tags: alain badiou, antonio negri, communism, jacques rancière, marxism, peter hallward, slavoj žižek, terry eagleton

A strange interview with philosopher Slavoj Žižek

I've had occasion a couple of times recently to post on Slavoj Žižek, a Marxist and critical theorist, in connection with Occupy Wall Street. OWS may be a big boost to the Slavoj Žižek, because he's getting a level of public attention that he probably never has before. This Aljazeera English interview is an example. I'm getting the impression that Žižek may be better at diagnosing fundamental social problems than he is about grasping real existing political movements.

Žižek saw in the London riots of this summer some like feral violence. He discusses it a bit at the start of this interview. He wrote about it more extensively in Shoplifters of the World Unite London Review of Books 08/19/2011.

Talk to Al Jazeera - Slavoj Zizek YouTube date 10/29/2011:



Žižek says beginning around 2:00 that he considers Communism to be a bigger "ethical catastrophe" than fascism, in which he presumably includes Nazi Germany. (In poli sci and history, there's substantive disagreement whether German National Socialism/Nazism represents a variant of fascism or was its own distinct form of far-right dictatorship.) Here's his reasoning:

Let's face it, 20th century Communism was, precisely because it started with such hopes and ended in a nightmare, was maybe the greatest catastrophe, ethical catastrophe, I'm almost tempted to say, in the history of humanity. More than fascism.

You know why? Because, let's be very simple. In fascism, we have bad guys who said, our program is to do this and this bad things, no?, And - what a surprise - they took power, they did bad things, no?. In Communism, you have authentic tragedy. Which is why you have dissidents, you have always inner struggles. So, but nonetheless, it is over.

Now, one could argue that this comes from the perspective of a person who grew up and formed his perspective in a then-Communist country (Yugoslavia) and is trying to argue that the official ideologies of those countries contained important elements that were true, but not realized in "real existing socialism", as those regimes were known to refer to themselves.

Still, Nazi Germany was oriented toward war from the time Hitler took power until V-E Day. It plunged Europe into the most destructive, deadliest war in all history. The Communist governments did not do that. Nor did any Communist governments undertake the physical extermination of an entire ethnic group as we saw with Nazi Germany and the Jews, in Rwanda, and arguably with the dying Ottoman Empire and the Armenians.

Nazi ideology was explicitly bad in the sense that Žižek argues. But I wouldn't endorse his view that somehow a betrayal of the stated ideals of noble ideals of some sort is ethically more catastrophic than the fact of Nazi Germany having launched the deadliest war in all of history, of which the Holocaust was very much a part. It may suit Žižek's stance of being part of a grand historical tragedy from the side of the East European Communist regimes. But as an ethical argument, it just doesn't wash.

Beginning around 3:40, he approvingly quotes (gulp!), Ayn Rand. No, I'm not kidding. And it gets even more problematic from there. For me, this whole interview was like nails on a blackboard. At the end, he even seems to think that the American Tea Party movement is a progressive workers' movement. (?!)

Žižek is a respected philosopher in the field of critical theory, an area on which I've posted many times. For reasons I discuss more below, critical theory is generally focused on diagnosing large problems, which is one reason it played an important role in sociology, notably with the 1940s studies on authoritarianism of which The Authoritarian Personality is the most famous. It has not focused so much on describing the shape of a fundamental alternative to capitalism and the "modernity" associated with it. Most of them have understood themselves as socialists. But the defining experience for critical theory - which originally meant the people associated with the Social Social Research, aka the Frankfurt School in the 1930s - was European fascism, especially the experience of Nazi Germany. That left them with a partisan appreciation of civil liberties and the fundamentals of representative democracy, which expressed itself in a radical-democratic outlook that didn't approve the forms of government in the Communist world but also didn't reject Marxist perspectives wholesale. It would be fair to say as a generalization that they built on the radical-democratic element in historical Marxism, which made them not partisans of the Communist movements but also highly critical of the post-First World War course of Social Democracy.

Žižek in this interview discusses violence in the sense of the Sorelian utopian general strike. For history buffs or philosophy geeks who happen to be familiar with that concept, it makes some sense. But for the average news consumers, even very well-informed ones, are likely to be left scratching their heads over the way he puts it.

Critical theory continues the analysis of the problems and opportunities of modernity that emerged from the classical German philosophy of the late 18th and early 19th century, of which Kant and Hegel are the most significant. Broadly speaking, critical theory draws from that tradition as well as Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Freudian psychoanalysis, Husserl's phenomenology, and existentialism. Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse actually defined the term "critical theory" to describe their general approach, though the term was also used earlier to refer to Kantian thought.

Žižek in this interview shows the pitfalls of this viewpoint when processing contemporary political events. He brings up some interesting empirical observations that alerted me to some things to look for, e.g., describing a mass demonstration in Istanbul for gay rights that, he says, did not attract any attempts at violence by onlookers. But he seems almost sensationalist at times in trying to make people think with provocative statements. But in terms of giving us a sense of social and political dynamics, it's pretty deficient.

The catchiest phrase I noticed in the interview comes just after 2:50: "The marriage between democracy and capitalism is over."

He makes it specifically in reference to China. But there is a conflict between capitalism and democracy in that capitalist economies, left to their preferred course, will tend to concentrate wealth and power in a small number of people, as we see now in the 1% society that OWS is highlighting. Democracy gives the public the power to offset, mitigate and potentially end the disproportionate power of the 1% over the rest of society. Capitalism will always produce types like the Koch brother billionaires who want to buy out the political system and have it serve solely the perceived self-interests of the 1%. A healthy democracy has to be able to counteract that disproportionate economic power.

Tags: critical theory, frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, occupy wall street, slavoj žižek

What does a famous actual Marxist think of the OWS protests?

A couple of weeks ago, I was quoting some pearl-clutching editorial at even-the-liberal New Republic that was shocked! shocked! I tell you, shocked! that Marxist academic and former Yugoslav democratic dissident Slavoj Žižek had made spoken to the Occupy Wall Street crowd in New York and suggested they try to "imagine the end of capitalism". The New Republic editorialist was horrified.

Žižek did a commentary on the European version of Occupy Wall Street, the indignados of Greece and Spain, Shoplifters of the World Unite London Review of Books 08/19/2011. The immediate topic was this past summer's London riots, which is different the organized protests of the indignados/OWS. But he does discuss the latter. To be fair, his take was more specifically on the anti-austerity protests in Greece and Spain, and this was before the OWS protests as such had started. Here is his comment, which leans toward academicese:

But one should also avoid the temptation of the narcissism of the lost cause: it’s too easy to admire the sublime beauty of uprisings doomed to fail. Today’s left faces the problem of ‘determinate negation’: what new order should replace the old one after the uprising, when the sublime enthusiasm of the first moment is over? In this context, the manifesto of the Spanish indignados, issued after their demonstrations in May, is revealing. The first thing that meets the eye is the pointedly apolitical tone: ‘Some of us consider ourselves progressive, others conservative. Some of us are believers, some not. Some of us have clearly defined ideologies, others are apolitical, but we are all concerned and angry about the political, economic and social outlook that we see around us: corruption among politicians, businessmen, bankers, leaving us helpless, without a voice.’ They make their protest on behalf of the ‘inalienable truths that we should abide by in our society: the right to housing, employment, culture, health, education, political participation, free personal development and consumer rights for a healthy and happy life.’ Rejecting violence, they call for an ‘ethical revolution. Instead of placing money above human beings, we shall put it back to our service. We are people, not products. I am not a product of what I buy, why I buy and who I buy from.’ Who will be the agents of this revolution? The indignados dismiss the entire political class, right and left, as corrupt and controlled by a lust for power, yet the manifesto nevertheless consists of a series of demands addressed at – whom? Not the people themselves: the indignados do not (yet) claim that no one else will do it for them, that they themselves have to be the change they want to see. And this is the fatal weakness of recent protests: they express an authentic rage which is not able to transform itself into a positive programme of sociopolitical change. They express a spirit of revolt without revolution.

In other words, they don't have a clear message! Exactly one of the criticisms that FOX News, Republicans and CNN airhead Erin Burnett made of OWS!

I'm not familiar enough with Žižek to have an idea of which of the million varieties of Marxism most influence him. But that part of his commentary reminds me of a definition I once heard of Trotskyists: they're the people who support revolution everywhere except where there's one going on.

Now, I wouldn't quarrel in this case with the literal meaning of Žižek's judgment, "They express a spirit of revolt without revolution". And the fact that he did show up to speak to OWS presumably indicates he thinks the movement is significant.

But it also illustrates how an elaborate revolutionary ideology can serve an above-the-fray attitude that discourages rather than invites engagement. Gee, they don't have a full-blown political party with long position papers on how they will solve all problems immediately upon taking power! How can a self-respecting, a very self-respecting, important Marxist intellectual take them seriously?

I admit my reaction to that essay is colored by having read this account of a conference where Professor Žižek appeared: Michael Sayeau, The Fifth International: n+1 covers the London Conference, "On the Idea of Communism" n+1 04/22/2009. But here is how he concludes his London Review essay:

The situation in Greece looks more promising, probably owing to the recent tradition of progressive self-organisation (which disappeared in Spain after the fall of the Franco regime). But even in Greece, the protest movement displays the limits of self-organisation: protesters sustain a space of egalitarian freedom with no central authority to regulate it, a public space where all are allotted the same amount of time to speak and so on. When the protesters started to debate what to do next, how to move beyond mere protest, the majority consensus was that what was needed was not a new party or a direct attempt to take state power, but a movement whose aim is to exert pressure on political parties. This is clearly not enough to impose a reorganisation of social life. To do that, one needs a strong body able to reach quick decisions and to implement them with all necessary harshness. [my emphasis]

It's true that the Spanish indignados and the larger indignado movement that OWS represents aren't the same as a set of Leninist parties ready to seize power and expropriate the expropriators. But apart from the non-insignificant matters of the desirability and the feasibility of such a seizure of power, in this context it becomes a doctrinaire way of dismissing a protest movement that has changed the political dialogue in the Western democracies, at a moment in time when the mass political parties of left and right  proved incapable of defending the interests of the working majority against the plutocrats.

If OWS and the democratic movement generally can block destructive actions by parties left and right, such as cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits in the United States, that will be a substantial progressive achievement.

It is obvious that to have a government that can represent the majority interest effectively against the Money Power, as the Jacksonians called it, the majority would have to have a political party or party coalition working effectively on their behalf.

But that doesn't mean there's no role for protest movements outside the political party structures proper. As dogmatic as today's Republican Party is, wealthy factions like that of the Koch brothers do represent a kind of inside-outside strategy; if they decide that the Party establishment is insufficiently subservient to their interests, they have various organizations, think tanks, donation channels, etc., that can bring pressure on recalcitrant members. (Even in the most rigid authoritarian party, a Marxist intellectual like Žižek would presumably be the first to recognize that there would still be contradictions among the supporting factions.)

What the United States and the European democracies need right now is a progressive movement that is substantially independent of the left parties but which can bring effective pressure to bear on them in the form of lobbying, mass mobilizations like OWS, and primary challenges to Blue Dogs such as the challenges Blue America promotes.

Žižek's August comments are a reminder that even people with a worldview that emphasizes the inevitability of social and political changes can be taken by surprise by the ones that actually occur. Some are more disappointed than others when that occurs. Some are actually glad to see it!

Tags: democratic movement, occupy wall street, slavoj žižek