A Left that Dares to Speak Its Name. Slavoj Žižek
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at first sight, to be just an ordinary object. Commodity fetishism (our belief that commodities are magic objects, endowed with an inherent metaphysical power) is not located in our mind, in the way we (mis) perceive reality, but in our social reality itself. We may know the truth, but we act as if we don’t know it – in our real life, we act like the chicken from the joke.
Niels Bohr, who already gave the right answer to Einstein’s “God doesn’t play dice” (“Don’t tell God what to do!”), also provided the perfect example of how a fetishist disavowal of belief works in ideology: seeing a horse-shoe on his door, the surprised visitor said that he doesn’t believe in the superstition that it brings luck, to which Bohr snapped back: “I also do not believe in it; I have it there because I was told that it works also if one does not believe in it!” This is how ideology works in our cynical era: we don’t have to believe in it. This is how ideology functions today: nobody takes seriously democracy or justice, we are all aware of their corruption, but we practice them – i.e., display our belief in them – because we assume they work even if we do not believe in them.
Perhaps this is why “culture” is emerging as the central life-world category. With regard to religion, we no longer “really believe,” we just follow (some of the) religious rituals and mores as part of the respect for the “lifestyle” of the community to which we belong (nonbelieving Jews obeying kosher rules “out of respect for tradition”). “I do not really believe in it, it is just part of my culture” seems to be the predominant mode of the displaced belief, characteristic of our times. “Culture” is the name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without taking them very seriously. This is why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as “barbarians,” as anticultural, as a threat to culture – they dare to take seriously their beliefs. The cynical era in which we live would have no surprises for Marx.
Marx’s theories are thus not simply alive: Marx is a living dead whose ghost continues to haunt us – and the only way to keep him alive is to focus on those of his insights that are today more true than in his own time, especially his call for universality of the emancipatory struggle. The universality to be asserted today is not a form of humanism, but the universality of the (class) struggle: more than ever, global capital has to be countered by global resistance. One should therefore insist on the difference between class struggle and other struggles (anti-racist, feminist, etc.) which aim at a peaceful coexistence of different groups and whose ultimate expression is identity politics. With class struggle, there is no identity politics: the opposing class has to be destroyed, and we ourselves should, in this same move, disappear as a class. The best concise definition of fascism is: the extension of identity politics onto the domain of class struggle. The basic fascist idea is that of the class piece: each class should be recognized in its specific identity and, in this way, its dignity will be safeguarded and antagonism between classes avoided. Class antagonism is here treated in the same way as the tension between different races: classes are accepted as a quasi-natural fact of life, not as something to be left behind.
The status of Marx as a living dead demands that we are also critical of the Marxist legacy – there should be no sacred cows here. Just two interconnected examples should suffice here. According to the standard Marxist dogma, the passage from capitalism to communism will proceed in two phases, the “lower” and the “higher.” In the lower phase (sometimes called “socialism”), the law of value will still hold:
[T]he individual producer receives back from society – after the deductions have been made – exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another…. In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly – only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!2
The standard critique of this distinction is that, while the “lower stage” can somehow be imagined and managed, the “higher stage” (full communism) is a dangerous utopia. This critique seems justified by the fact that the really-existing socialist regimes were caught in endless debates about what stage they are in, introducing subdivisions; for example, at some point, in the late Soviet Union, the opinion prevailed that they were already above mere “socialism,” although not yet in full “communism” – they were in the “lower stage of the higher stage.” But a surprise awaits us here: the temptation in many socialist countries was to jump over the “lower stage” and proclaim that, in spite of the material poverty (or, at a deeper level, precisely on account of it), we can directly enter communism. During the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, Chinese communists decided that China should bypass socialism and directly enter communism. They referred to Marx’s famous formula of communism: “From everyone according to his abilities, to everyone according to his needs!” The catch was the reading given to it in order to legitimize the total militarization of life in agricultural communes: the Party cadre who commands a commune knows what every farmer is able to do, so he sets the plan and specifies the individuals’ obligations according to their abilities; he also knows what farmers really need for survival and organizes accordingly the distribution of food and other life provisions. The condition of militarized extreme poverty thus becomes the actualization of communism, and, of course, it is not sufficient to claim that such a reading falsifies a noble idea – one should rather notice how it lies dormant in it as a possibility. The paradox is thus that we begin with the shared poverty of “war communism,” then, when things get better, we progress/regress to “socialism” in which ideally, of course, everybody is paid according to his/her contribution, and … and, at the end, we return to capitalism (as in China today), confirming the old saying that communism is a detour from capitalism to capitalism. What these complications attest to is that the true utopia is that of the “lower stage” in which the law of value still holds, but in a “just” way, so that every worker gets his/her due – an impossible dream of “just” social exchange where money-fetish is replaced by non-fetishized simple certificates. And we are at a similar point today: the threat of looming apocalypses (ecological, digital, social) compels us to abandon the socialist dream of “just” capitalism and to envisage more radical “communist” measures.
So how should we imagine communism? In Capital III, Marx renounced his earlier utopian vision of communism as a state in which the opposition between necessity and freedom, between necessity and work, will disappear, and insisted that, in every society, the distinction between the realm of necessity (Reich der Notwendigkeit) and the realm of freedom (Reich der Freiheit) will persist; the realm of our free playful activities will always have to be sustained by the realm of work necessary for society’s continuous reproduction:
The realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the sphere of actual material production. Just as the savage must wrestle with Nature to satisfy his wants, to maintain and reproduce life, so must civilised man, and he must do so in all social formations and under all possible modes of production. With his development this realm of physical necessity expands as a result of his wants; but, at the same time, the forces of production which satisfy these wants also increase. Freedom in this field can only consist in socialised man, the associated producers, rationally regulating their interchange with Nature, bringing it under their common control, instead of being ruled by it as by the blind forces of Nature; and achieving this with the least