A Left that Dares to Speak Its Name. Slavoj Žižek
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who claim that there never was an actual danger of World War III during the Cold War years, that both sides were just playing with fire.) It is at this deeper level that communist interventions are needed.
Jürgen Habermas is often described as the state philosopher of the German (European even) liberal Left – no wonder, then, that about two decades ago, the conservative Spanish Prime Minister, José Mariá Aznar, even formally proposed that Habermas be declared the Spanish (and European) state philosopher (on account of Habermas’s idea of constitutional patriotism, a patriotism grounded in emancipatory values embedded in a constitution rather than in one’s own ethnic roots). While disagreeing with Habermas on many points, I always found the role he was not afraid to play – that of a critical supporter of, participant in even, power – honorable and necessary, a more-than-welcome retreat from basically irresponsible “politics at a distance.”
The majority of Leftist thought in recent decades got caught in the trap of oppositionalism: it adopts as self-evident the claim that true politics is only possible at a distance from the state and its apparatuses – the moment an agent immerses itself fully into state apparatuses and procedures (like parliamentary party politics), the authentic political dimension is lost. (From this standpoint, the Bolshevik triumph – taking power in Russia in October 1917 – appears also as their self-betrayal.) But is there not in such a stance an indelible aspect of avoiding responsibility? Withdrawal into non-participation in power is also a positive act, since one is aware that somebody else will have to do it, and the dirtiest thing is to leave to another the dirty job and then, after the job is done, accuse this other of unprincipled opportunism. (Among others, Eamon de Valera did this when he let Michael Collins do the “dirty” negotiations with the British, which led to the Free Irish State, and then, after profiting himself from it, accusing him of treason.) An authentic political agent is never afraid to take power and assume responsibility for what is going on, without resorting to excuses (“unfortunate circumstances,” “enemy plots,” or whatever). Therein resides Lenin’s greatness: after taking power, he knew the Bolsheviks found themselves in an impossible situation (with no conditions for an actual “construction of socialism”), but he persisted in it, trying to make the best out of a total deadlock.
The true dimension of a revolution is not to be found in the ecstatic moments of its climax (one million people chanting in the main square …); one should rather focus on how the change is felt in everyday life when things return to normal. This is why Trotsky lost against Stalin: after Lenin’s death, the population of the Soviet Union was slowly emerging from 10 years of hell (World War I, civil war) with untold suffering, and people longed for a return to some kind of normalcy. This is what Stalin offered them, while Trotsky, with his permanent revolution, promised them just more social upheaval and suffering.
Perhaps, then, instead of the increasingly boring variations on the topic of “distance from the state,” what we need today are honest state philosophers, philosophers who are not afraid to dirty their hands in fighting for a different state. Apropos homosexuality, Oscar Wilde cited “the love that dare not speak its name” – what we need today is a Left that dares to speak its name, not a Left that shamefully covers up its core with some cultural fig leaf. And this name is communism.
Notes
1 1. See https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/01/harry-potter-among-books-burned-by-priests-in-poland.
4 4. There should be no taboos here. For example, the hypothesis that the stream of millions of refugees into Europe which climaxed recently was not spontaneous but masterminded with certain geopolitical aims is not to be dismissed as Islamophobic paranoia. Both the US and Russia are clearly interested in the weakening of Europe and silently tolerate its Muslim reconquista, which also explains why the rich Arab countries (Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Emirates …) receive no refugees, while amply financing the construction of mosques in Europe.
5 5. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Petite Metaphysique des tsunamis (Paris: Seuil, 2005), p. 19.
1 200 Years After: Is Marx Alive, Dead, or a Living Dead?
The question of the continuing relevance of Marx’s work in our era of global capitalism has to be answered in a properly dialectical way: not only is Marx’s critique of political economy, his outline of the capitalist dynamics, still fully actual; one should even take a step further and claim that it is only today, with global capitalism, that, to put it in Hegelese, reality arrived at its notion. However, a properly dialectical reversal intervenes here: at this very moment of full actuality, the limitation has to appear, the moment of triumph is that of defeat; after overcoming external obstacles, the new threat comes from within, signaling immanent inconsistency. When reality fully reaches up to its notion, this notion itself has to be transformed. Therein resides the properly dialectical paradox: Marx was not simply wrong, he was often right, but more literally than he himself expected to be.
For example, Marx couldn’t have imagined that the capitalist dynamics of dissolving all particular identities would, in addition, affect ethnic and sexual identities: sexual “one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible,” and, concerning sexual practices, “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned,” so that capitalism tends to replace the standard normative heterosexuality with a proliferation of unstable shifting identities and/or orientations. Today’s celebration of “minorities” and “marginals” is the predominant majority position – even alt-Rightists who complain about the terror of liberal political correctness present themselves as protectors of an endangered minority. Or take those critics of patriarchy who attack it as if it were still a hegemonic position, ignoring what Marx and Engels wrote more than 150 years ago, in the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto: “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations.” What becomes of patriarchal family values when a child can sue his parents for neglect and abuse, i.e., when family and parenthood itself are de jure reduced to a temporary and dissolvable contract between independent individuals?
How does ideology function in such conditions? Recall the classic joke about a man who believes himself to be a grain of seed and is taken to the mental institution where the doctors do their best to finally convince him that he is not a grain but a man. When he is cured (convinced that he is not a grain of seed but a man) and allowed to leave the hospital, he immediately returns, trembling; there is a chicken outside the door and he is afraid that it will eat him. “Dear fellow,” says his doctor, “you know very well that you are not a grain of seed but a man.” “Of course I know that,” replies the patient, “but does the chicken know it?” Exactly the same holds true for Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism, which is today even more actual than in Marx’s time. “Commodity fetishism” is an illusion that is operative in the very heart of the actual production process. Note the very beginning of the subchapter on commodity fetishism in Capital: “A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”1
Marx does not claim, in the usual “Marxist” way, that critical analysis should demonstrate how a commodity – what appears to be a mysterious theological entity – emerged out of the “ordinary” real-life