The Year of Dreaming Dangerously. Slavoj Žižek
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of the Soviet state? Whom did it represent insofar as it clamed to be a working-class state, when the working class had been reduced to a tiny minority? What Lenin forgot to include in the series of possible candidates for this role was the state (apparatus) itself, a mighty machine of millions that held all the economico-political power. As in the joke quoted by Lacan—“I have three brothers, Paul, Ernest and myself”—the Soviet state represented three classes: poor farmers, workers, and itself. Or, to put it in István Mészáros’s terms, Lenin forgot to take into account the role of the state within the “economic base,” as its key factor. Far from preventing the growth of a tyrannical state free from any mechanism of social control, this neglect opened up the space for the state’s untrammeled power: only if we admit that the state represents not only social classes external to itself but also itself are we led to raise the question of who will contain the power of the state.
Thomas Frank has aptly described the paradox of populist conservatism in the US today, the basic premise of which is the gap between economic interests and “moral” questions.11 In other words, the economic class opposition (poor farmers and blue-collar workers versus lawyers, bankers, large companies) is transposed or coded into the opposition between honest hard-working Christian Americans and the decadent liberals who drink lattes and drive foreign cars, advocate abortion and homosexuality, mock patriotic sacrifice and the simple provincial way of life, and so on. The enemy is thus perceived as the “liberal” who, through federal state intervention (from school-busing to prescribing that Darwinian evolution and perverse sexual practices be taught in class), wants to undermine the authentic American way of life. The populist conservatives’ central economic proposition is therefore to get rid of the strong state that taxes the hard-working population in order to finance its regulatory interventions—their minimal program is thus “fewer taxes, less regulation.”
From the standard perspective of the rational pursuit of selfinterest, the inconsistency of this ideological stance is obvious: the populist conservatives are literally voting themselves into economic ruin. Less taxation and deregulation means more freedom for the big companies that are driving the impoverished farmers out of business; less state intervention means less federal help for small farmers; and so on down the line. In the eyes of the American evangelical populists, the state stands for an alien power and, together with the UN, is an agent of the Antichrist. It is taking away the liberty of the Christian believer, relieving him of the moral responsibility of stewardship, and thus undermines the individualistic morality that makes each of us the architect of our own salvation. But how is this compatible with the unprecedented explosion of the state apparatuses under George W. Bush? No wonder large corporations are delighted at such evangelical attacks on the state, when the state tries to regulate media mergers, put restrictions on energy companies, strengthen air pollution regulations, protect wildlife and limit logging in the national parks, etcetera. It is the ultimate irony of history that radical individualism serves as an ideological justification for the unconstrained power of what the vast majority experience as an anonymous force that, without any democratic public control, regulates their lives.
As to the ideological aspect of their struggle, it is glaringly obvious that the populists are fighting a war that simply cannot be won: if Republicans were to ban abortion, if they were to prohibit the teaching of evolution, if they were to impose censorship on Hollywood and mass culture, this would entail not only their immediate ideological defeat, but also a large-scale economic depression in the US. The outcome is thus a debilitating symbiosis: although the “ruling class” disagrees with the populist moral agenda, it tolerates the “moral war” as a means of keeping the lower classes in check, allowing them to articulate their fury without disturbing vested economic interests. What this means is that the culture war is a class war in a displaced mode—pace those who claim that we live in a post-class society.
This, however, makes the enigma only more impenetrable: how is this displacement possible? “Stupidity” and “ideological manipulation” are not the answer; for it is clearly inadequate to say the lower classes have been so brainwashed by ideology they are unable to identify their true interests. If nothing else, we should recall how, years ago, Kansas was a hotbed of progressive populism in the US—and people have certainly not become more stupid over the last few decades. Nor would a direct psychoanalytic explanation in the old Wilhelm Reich style (people’s libidinal investments compel them to act against their rational interests) be adequate: it confronts the libidinal economy and the economy proper too directly, failing to grasp their mediation. The solution proposed by Ernesto Laclau is also ultimately unsatisfying: there is no “natural” link between a given socio-economic position and the ideology attached to it, so that it is meaningless to speak of “deception” and “false consciousness,” as if there were a standard of “appropriate” ideological awareness inscribed into the “objective” socio-economic situation itself; every ideological edifice is the outcome of a hegemonic struggle to establish or impose a chain of equivalences, a struggle whose outcome is thoroughly contingent, not guaranteed by any external reference such as the “objective socio-economic position.” In such a general answer, the enigma simply disappears.
The first thing to note here is that it takes two to fight a culture war: culture is also the dominant ideological topic of the “enlightened” liberals whose politics is focused on the fight against sexism, racism, and fundamentalism, and for multicultural tolerance. The key question is thus: why has “culture” emerged as our central life-world category? With regard to religion, we no longer “really believe,” we simply follow (some of the) religious rituals and mores as part of our respect for the “lifestyle” of the community to which we belong (non-believing Jews obeying kosher rules “out of respect for tradition,” etcetera). “I don’t really believe in it, it’s just part of my culture” seems to be the predominant mode of the disavowed or displaced belief characteristic of our times. Perhaps, then, the “non-fundamentalist” notion of “culture” as distinguished from “real” religion, art, and so on, is in its very core the name for the field of disowned or impersonal beliefs—“culture” as the name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without “taking them seriously.”
The second thing to note is how, while professing their solidarity with the poor, liberals encode their culture war with an opposed class message. More often than not, their fight for multicultural tolerance and women’s rights marks the counter-position to the alleged intolerance, fundamentalism, and patriarchal sexism of the “lower classes.” One way to unravel this confusion is to focus on the mediating terms whose function is to obfuscate the true lines of division. The way the term “modernization” has been used in the recent ideological offensive is exemplary here: first, an abstract opposition is constructed between “modernizers” (those who endorse global capitalism in all its aspects, from the economic to the cultural) and “traditionalists” (those who resist globalization). Into this category of those-who-resist is then thrown everyone from traditional conservatives and populists to the “Old Left” (those who continue to advocate the welfare state, trade unions, and so on). This categorization obviously does capture an aspect of social reality. Recall the coalition between the Church and trade unions in Germany in early 2003, which prevented the legalization of Sunday opening for shops. However, it is not enough to say that this “cultural difference” traverses the entire social field, cutting across different strata and classes; it is also inadequate to say that it can be combined in different ways with other oppositions (so that we get conservative “traditional values” resisting global capitalist “modernization,” or moral conservatives who fully endorse capitalist globalization). In short, it is useless to claim that this “cultural difference” is one in a series of antagonisms operative in contemporary social processes.
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