A Left that Dares to Speak Its Name. Slavoj Žižek
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remains a realm of necessity. Beyond it begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working-day is its basic prerequisite.3
This line of thought has to be rejected; what makes it suspicious is precisely its self-evident commonsense character. We should take the risk of reversing the relationship between the two realms: it is only through the discipline of work that we can regain our true freedom, while as spontaneous consumers we are caught in the necessity of our natural propensities. The infamous words at the entrance to Auschwitz, “Arbeit macht frei,” are thus true – which doesn’t mean that we are coming close to Nazism but simply that the Nazis took over this motto with cruel irony.
To be a communist today means that one is not afraid to draw such radical conclusions, also with regard to one of the most sensitive claims of the Marxist theory, the idea of the “withering away” of the state power. Do we need governments? This question is deeply ambiguous. It can be read as an offshoot of the radical leftwing idea that government (state power) is in itself a form of alienation or oppression, and that we should work toward abolishing it and building a society of some kind of direct democracy. Or it can be read in a less radical liberal way: in our complex societies we need some regulating agency, but we should keep it under tight control, making it serve the interests of those who invest their votes (if not money) into it. Both views are dangerously wrong.
As for the idea of a self-transparent organization of society that would preclude political “alienation” (state apparatuses, institutionalized rules of political life, legal order, police, etc.), is the basic experience of the end of really-existing socialism not precisely the resigned acceptance of the fact that society is a complex network of “subsystems,” which is why a certain level of “alienation” is constitutive of social life, so that a totally self-transparent society is a utopia with totalitarian potentials. It is no wonder that today’s practices of “direct democracy,” from favelas to the “postindustrial” digital culture (do the descriptions of the new “tribal” communities of computer hackers not often evoke the logic of council democracy?) all have to rely on a state apparatus – i.e., their survival relies on a thick texture of “alienated” institutional mechanisms: where do electricity and water come from? Who guarantees the rule of law? To whom do we turn for healthcare? Etc., etc. The more a community is self-ruling, the more this network has to function smoothly and invisibly. Maybe we should change the goal of emancipatory struggles from overcoming alienation to enforcing the right kind of alienation: how to achieve a smooth functioning of “alienated” (invisible) social mechanisms that sustain the space of “non-alienated” communities?
Should we then adopt the more modest traditional liberal notion of representative power? Citizens transfer (part of) their power onto the state, but under precise conditions: power is constrained by law, limited to very precise conditions of its exercise, since the people remain the ultimate source of sovereignty and can repeal power if they decide so to do. In short, the state with its power is the minor partner in a contract that the major partner (the people) can at any point repeal or change, basically in the same way each of us can change the contractor who takes care of our waste or our health. However, the moment one takes a close look at an actual state power edifice, one can easily detect an implicit but unmistakable signal: “Forget about our limitations – ultimately, we can do whatever we want with you!” This excess is not a contingent supplement spoiling the purity of power but its necessary constituent – without it, without the threat of arbitrary omnipotence, state power is not a true power, it loses its authority.
So it’s not that we need the state to regulate our affairs and, unfortunately, have to buy its authoritarian underside as a necessary price – we need precisely and maybe even primarily this authoritarian underside. As Kierkegaard put it, to claim that I believe in Christ because I was convinced by the good reasons for Christianity is a blasphemy – in order to understand reasons for Christianity I should already believe. It’s the same with love: I cannot say that I love a woman because of her features – to see her features as beautiful, I should already be in love. And it’s the same with every authority, from paternal to that of the state.
The basic problem is thus: how to invent a different mode of passivity of the majority, how to cope with the unavoidable alienation of political life. This alienation has to be taken at its strongest, as the excess constitutive of the functioning of an actual power, overlooked by liberalism as well as by Leftist proponents of direct democracy.
Notes
1 1. Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One. Available at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch01.htm.
2 2. Quoted from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm.
3 3. Quoted from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-III.pdf.
2 Why Secondary Contradictions Matter: A Maoist View
A quick glance at our imbroglio already makes it clear that we are caught up in multiple social struggles: the tension between the liberal establishment and the new populism, ecological struggle, the struggle for feminism and sexual liberation, ethnic and religious struggles, the struggle for universal human rights, the struggle against the digital control of our lives. How to bring all these struggles together without simply privileging one of them (economic struggle, feminist struggle, anti-racist struggle …) as the “true” struggle provides the key to all other struggles. Half a century ago, when the Maoist wave was at its strongest, Mao Zedong’s distinction between “principal” and “secondary” contradictions (from his treatise “On Contradiction” written in 1937) was common currency in political debates. Perhaps this distinction deserves to be brought back to life.
When Mao talks about “contradictions,” he uses the term in the simple sense of the struggle of opposites, of social and natural antagonisms, not in the strict dialectical sense articulated by Hegel. Mao’s theory of contradictions can be summed up in four points. First, a specific contradiction is what primarily defines a thing, making it what it is: it is not a mistake, a failure, a malfunctioning of a thing, but, in some sense, the very feature that holds a thing together – if this contradiction disappears, a thing loses its identity. A classic Marxist example: hitherto, throughout history, the primary “contradiction” that defined every society was class struggle. Second, a contradiction is never single, it depends on other contradiction(s). Mao’s own example: in a capitalist society, the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is accompanied by other “secondary” contradictions, such as the one between imperialists and their colonies. Third, while this secondary contradiction depends on the first one (colonies exist only in capitalism), the principal contradiction is not always the dominant one: contradictions can trade places of importance. For example, when a country is occupied, it is the ruling class that is usually bribed to collaborate with the occupiers to maintain its privileged position, so that the struggle against the occupiers becomes a priority. The same can go for the struggle against racism: in a state of racial tension and exploitation, the only way to effectively struggle for the working class is to focus on fighting racism (this is why any appeal to the white working class, as in today’s alt-Right populism, betrays class struggle). Fourth, a principal contradiction can also change: one can argue that today, maybe, the ecological struggle designates the “principal contradiction” of our societies, since it deals with a threat to the collective survival of humanity itself. One can, of course, argue that our “principal contradiction” remains the antagonism of the global capitalist system, since ecological problems are the result of the excessive exploitation of natural resources driven by capitalist thirst for profit. However, it is doubtful if our ecological mess can be so easily