The Year of Dreaming Dangerously. Slavoj Žižek
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is the subtraction of thinking from acting, the suspension of its efficiency, really as clear and unequivocal as that? Kant’s secret strategy here (intentional or not) is like the well-known trick of the lawyer who makes a statement to the jury that he knows the judge will find inadmissible and order the jury to “ignore”—which is, of course, impossible, since the damage has already been done. Is not the withdrawal from efficacy in the public use of reason also a subtraction which opens up a space for some new social practice? It is all too easy to point out the obvious difference between the Kantian public use of reason and the Marxist notion of revolutionary class consciousness: the former is neutral and disengaged; the latter is “partial” and fully engaged. But the “proletarian position” can be defined precisely as that point at which the public use of reason becomes in itself practical and efficacious without regressing into the “privacy” of the private use of reason, since the position from which it is exercised is that of the “part of no-part” of the social body, its excess which stands directly for universality. By contrast, the Stalinist reduction of Marxist theory to the servant of the party-state is precisely a reduction of the public to the private use of reason.
Only such an approach which combines the universality of the “public use of reason” with an engaged subjective position can offer an adequate “cognitive mapping” of our situation. As Lenin put it: “We must aussprechen was ist, ‘state the facts,’ admit the truth that there is a tendency…” What tendency? Which facts are to be stated with regard to global capitalism today?
1 See Adam Jacot de Boinod, The Meaning of Tingo, London: Penguin Press 2005.
2 Fredric Jameson, Seeds of Time, New York: Columbia University Press 1996, pp. 129–30.
3 Ibid., p. 130.
4 Ibid.
5 G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, San Francisco: Ignatius Press 1995, p. 45.
From Domination to Exploitation and Revolt
As Marxists, we share the premise that Marx’s “critique of political economy” remains the starting point for understanding our socio-economic predicament. In order to grasp the specificity of that predicament, however, we must get rid of the last vestiges of Marx’s evolutionary historicism—even if it appears to be the very foundation of Marxist orthodoxy. Here is Marx at his historicist worst:
In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production … At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or—this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms—with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution … No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society. Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation.1
This schema is doubly wrong. First, capitalism as a social formation is characterized by a structural imbalance: the antagonism between forces and relations is present from the very beginning, and it is this very antagonism which pushes capitalism towards permanent self-revolutionizing and self-expansion—capitalism thrives because it avoids its fetters by escaping into the future. This is also why one has to drop the “wisely” optimistic notion that mankind “inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve”: today we face problems for which no clear solutions are guaranteed by the logic of evolution.
In order to move beyond this frame, we should focus on the three features that characterize contemporary capitalism: the long-term trend of shifting from profit to rent (in its two main forms: rent based on privatized “common knowledge,” and rent based on natural resources); the much stronger structural role of unemployment (the opportunity to be “exploited” in a long-term job is experienced as a privilege); and finally the rise of a new class that Jean-Claude Milner calls the “salaried bourgeoisie.”2
The consequence of the rise in productivity brought about by an exponential growth in collective knowledge is the changing role of unemployment. But does this new form of capitalism not also offer a new prospect of emancipation? Therein lies the thesis of Hardt and Negri’s Multitude, in which they endeavor to radicalize a Marx for whom highly organized corporate capitalism already was “socialism within capitalism” (a kind of socialization of capitalism, with the absent owners becoming more and more superfluous), so that one only need cut off the nominal head to reach socialism proper.3 For Hardt and Negri, however, Marx’s limitation was that he was historically constrained by the centralized and hierarchically organized form of industrial labor, which is why his vision of the “general intellect” was that of a central planning agency. It is only today, with the rise of “immaterial labor” to a hegemonic position, that the revolutionary reversal becomes “objectively possible.” This immaterial labor extends between the two poles of intellectual (symbolic) labor (the production of ideas, codes, texts, programs, figures…) and affective labor (those who deal with our bodily affects: from doctors to baby-sitters and flight attendants). Today, immaterial labor is “hegemonic” in the precise sense in which Marx proclaimed that, in nineteenth-century capitalism, large industrial production was hegemonic as the specific color lending its tone to the totality—not in quantitative terms, but playing the key, emblematic and structural role. What thereby emerges is a vast new domain of the “common”: shared knowledge, forms of cooperation and communication, etc., which can no longer be contained by the form of private property. For, in immaterial production, the products are no longer material objects, but new social (interpersonal) relations themselves—in short, immaterial production is directly biopolitical, it is the production of social life.
The irony here is that Hardt and Negri are referring to the very process that the ideologists of today’s “postmodern” capitalism celebrate as the passage from material to symbolic production, from a centralist-hierarchical logic to the logic of autopoietic selforganization, multi-centered cooperation, and so on. Negri is indeed faithful to Marx here: what he tries to prove is that Marx was right, that the rise of the “general intellect” is in the long term incompatible with capitalism. The ideologists of postmodern capitalism make exactly the opposite claim: it is Marxist theory (and practice) itself which remains within the constraints of the hierarchical and centralized logic of state control and thus cannot cope with the social effects of the new information revolution. There are good empirical reasons for this claim: again, the supreme irony of history is that the disintegration of Communism is the most convincing example of the validity of the traditional Marxist dialectic of forces and relations of production, on which Marxism counted in its attempt to overcome capitalism. What indeed ruined the Communist regimes was their inability to accommodate the new social logic sustained by the “information revolution”: they tried to steer it into yet another large-scale centralized state-planning project. The paradox is thus that what Negri celebrates as a unique opportunity for overcoming capitalism, the ideologists of the “information revolution” celebrate as the rise of a new “frictionless” capitalism.
Hardt and Negri’s analysis has three weak points that, taken together, explain how capitalism can survive what should be (in classical Marxist terms) a new organization of production that renders it obsolete. They underestimate the extent to which contemporary capitalism successfully (in the short term at least) privatized “common knowledge” itself, as well as the extent to which, more so than the bourgeoisie, workers themselves are becoming “superfluous” (increasing numbers of them becoming not just temporarily unemployed,