Living in the End Times. Slavoj Žižek
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Wall should have been a time for reflection. It has become a cliché to emphasize the “miraculous” nature of the fall of the Wall: it was like a dream come true. With the disintegration of the Communist regimes, which collapsed like a house of cards, something unimaginable happened, something one would not have considered possible even a couple of months earlier. Who in Poland could have imagined the arrival of free elections, or Lech Wałęsa as president? We should, however, note that an even greater “miracle” was to occur only a few years later: namely, the return of the ex-Communists to power through free democratic elections, and the total marginalization of Wałęsa who had become even more unpopular than the man who, a decade and a half earlier, had attempted to crush Solidarność in a military coup—General Wojciech Jaruzelski.
The standard explanation for this later reversal evokes the “immature” utopian expectations of the majority, whose desire was deemed contradictory, or, rather, inconsistent. The people wanted to have their cake and eat it: they wanted capitalist-democratic freedom and material abundance but without paying the full price of life in a “risk society”; that is, without losing the security and stability once (more or less) guaranteed by the Communist regimes. As sarcastic Western commentators duly noted, the noble struggle for freedom and justice turned out to be little more than a craving for bananas and pornography.
When the unavoidable sense of disappointment set in, it gave rise to three (sometimes opposed, sometimes overlapping) reactions: (1) nostalgia for the “good old” Communist era;1 (2) right-wing nationalist populism; (3) a renewed and “belated” anti-Communist paranoia. The first two reactions are easy enough to comprehend. Communist nostalgia in particular should not be taken too seriously: far from expressing a genuine wish to return to the grey reality of the pre-existing regime, it was closer to a form of mourning, a process of gently relinquishing the past. The rise of rightist populism, for its part, is not an Eastern European specialty, but a feature common to all countries caught up in the vortex of globalization. More interesting then is the third reaction, the weird resurrection of anti-Communist paranoia two decades on. To the question “If capitalism is really so much better than socialism, why are our lives still miserable?” it provides a simple answer: it is because we are not yet really in capitalism, for the Communists are still ruling, only now wearing the masks of new owners and managers . . .
It is an obvious fact that, among the people protesting against the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, a large majority of them were not demanding a capitalist society. They wanted social security, solidarity, some kind of justice; they wanted the freedom to live their own lives outside the purview of state control, to come together and talk as they please; they wanted a life liberated from primitive ideological indoctrination and the prevailing cynical hypocrisy. As many perspicuous analysts have observed, the ideals that inspired the protesters were to a large extent taken from the ruling socialist ideology itself—they aspired to what can most appropriately be designated “Socialism with a human face.”
The crucial question is how we are to read the collapse of these hopes. The standard answer, as we have seen, appeals to capitalist realism, or the lack of it: the people simply did not possess a realistic image of capitalism; they were full of immature utopian expectations. The morning after the enthusiasm of the drunken days of victory, the people had to sober up and face the painful process of learning the rules of the new reality, coming to terms with the price one has to pay for political and economic freedom. It is, in effect, as if the European Left had to die twice: first as the “totalitarian” Communist Left, then as the moderate democratic Left which, over recent years, has been gradually losing ground in Italy, in France, in Germany. Up to a point, this process can be accounted for by the fact that the centrist and even the conservative parties now in the ascendant have integrated many traditionally Leftist perspectives (support for some form of welfare state, tolerance towards minorities, etc.), to the extent that, were someone like Angela Merkel to present her program in the US, she would be dismissed as a radical Leftist. But this is indeed true only up to a point. In today’s post-political democracy, the traditional bipolarity between a Social-Democratic Center-Left and a Conservative Center-Right is gradually being replaced by a new bipolarity between politics and post-politics: the technocratic-liberal multiculturalist-tolerant party of post-political administration and its Rightist-populist counterpart of passionate political struggle—no wonder that the old Centrist opponents (Conservatives or Christian Democrats and Social Democrats or Liberals) are often compelled to join forces against the common enemy.2 (Freud wrote about Unbehagen in der Kultur, the discontent/unease in culture; today, twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we experience a kind of Unbehagen in liberal capitalism. The key question now is: who will articulate this discontent? Will it be left to nationalist populists to exploit? Therein resides the big task for the Left.)
Should we, then, dismiss the utopian impulse which motivated the anti-Communist protests as a sign of immaturity, or should we remain faithful to it? At this point, it is well worth noting that the resistance to Communism in Eastern Europe in fact took three successive forms: (1) the “revisionist” Marxist critique of really-existing Socialisms (“this is not true Socialism, we want a return to the authentic vision of Socialism as a free society”)—here one might slyly remark that the same process went on in the early modern period in Europe, where secular opposition to the hegemonic role of religion first had to express itself in the guise of religious heresy; (2) the demand for an autonomous space of civil society freed from the constraints of Party-State control (this was the official position of Solidarity during the first years of its existence—its message to the Communist Party was: “we do not want power, we just want a free space outside your control where we can engage in critical reflection on what goes on in society”); (3) finally, the open struggle for power: “we do want full democratically legitimized power; which means it’s time for you to go.” Are the first two forms really just illusions (or rather, strategic compromises), and therefore to be discarded?
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.
To take up only the last point, nowhere are the new forms of apartheid more palpable than in the wealthy Middle Eastern oil states—Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Dubai. Hidden on the outskirts of the cities, often literally behind walls, are tens of thousands of “invisible” immigrant workers doing all the dirty work, from servicing to construction, separated from their families and refused all privileges.3 Such a situation clearly embodies an explosive potential which, while now exploited by religious fundamentalists, should have been channeled by the Left in its struggle against exploitation and corruption. A country like Saudi Arabia is literally “beyond corruption”: there is no need for corruption because the ruling gang (the royal family) is already in possession of all the wealth, which it can distribute freely as it sees fit. In such countries, the only alternative to fundamentalist reaction would be a kind of social-democratic welfare state. Should this situation persist, can we even imagine the change in the Western “collective psyche” when (not if, but precisely when) some “rogue nation” or group obtains a nuclear device, or powerful biological or chemical weapon, and declares its “irrational” readiness to risk all in using it? The most basic coordinates of our awareness will have to change, insofar as, today, we live in a state of collective fetishistic disavowal: we know very well that this will happen at some point, but nevertheless cannot bring ourselves to really believe that it will. The US attempt to prevent such an occurrence through continuous pre-emptive activity is a battle that has been lost in advance: the very notion that it might succeed relies on a fantasmatic vision.
A more standard form of “inclusive exclusion” are the slums—large areas outside of state governance. While generally perceived as spaces in which gangs and religious sects fight for control, slums also offer the space for radical political organizations, as is the case in India, where the Maoist movement of Naxalites is organizing a vast alternate social space. To quote an Indian state official: “The point is if you don’t govern an area, it is not yours. Except on the