From The Critique of Religion to the Critique of Political Economy
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2008-12-06 · 1:28:52 · 12,360 words
ideologycapitalismcommunism-socialismhegel-dialecticspsychoanalysisfascism-populismliberalism-political-correctnessrace-antisemitismeconomicsreligion-theologygeopolitics-warhistoryphilosophy-general
Žižek delivers a lecture structured in two halves: a political analysis of contemporary ideology, the 2008 financial crisis, and the rise of fundamentalism, followed by a theoretical engagement with Marx's Critique of Political Economy. He argues that radical Islamism and right-wing populism are symptoms of liberalism's failures, not independent phenomena, and dissects the ideological function of the financial meltdown response. In the theoretical half, drawing on Moishe Postone, he rehabilitates Marx's mature concept of abstract labor and commodity fetishism as structural elements of capitalism rather than mere superstructural ideology.
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The ideas in it 19
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Used to describe the fundamental difference between left and liberal topographies: they share the three terms (liberal center, populist right, radical left) but place them in incompatible configurations.
The process by which countries (Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kansas) that had secular or leftist traditions become religiously fundamentalist precisely as a result of being drawn into global capitalist politics and the disappearance of the left.
The ideological maneuver (attributed to Bernard-Henri Lévy and Moishe Postone's political conclusions) of using the Holocaust to disqualify in advance any radical questioning of capitalism as proto-fascist or antisemitic.
The implicit exclusions of liberal egalitarianism (class, race, gender) function as its symptomatic exceptions, indicators that something is antagonistic at the heart of the system, not merely secondary failures.
Žižek rehabilitates Hegelian/Lukácsian Totality not as a harmonious reconciled whole but as the contradictory whole that must include its own symptoms, excesses, and unintended consequences as constitutive parts.
Cited as the ideological slogan of Guy Sorman and mainstream economists to normalize capitalist crises as productive cycles, which Žižek reads as ideology at its purest.
The ideological task performed by figures like Guy Sorman after the financial crisis: to reframe the crisis as a normal creative-destruction cycle so as to prevent any fundamental questioning of capitalism.
Žižek targets Sorman's proposal to supplement market economics with neuroeconomics as the ultimate depoliticization: reducing systemic economic contradictions to a purely psychological/neurological problem amenable to positive science.
as “subject supposed to know”
Žižek uses Lacan's concept (via Miller's analysis) to explain the financial crisis as a collapse of the transferential illusion that an authority (e.g. Greenspan) knows how the economy works.
Deployed to distinguish how the financial crisis was treated as an emergency demanding immediate action (the Real) whereas AIDS or hunger are treated as negotiable reality, revealing capitalism's true priorities.
Invoked critically against Miller's recommendation to restore a symbolic authority post-crisis: Miller's cynicism amounts to telling people they need a big Other even if analysts know it doesn't exist.
The first mode of ideological mystification (liberal democratic): universals like freedom and equality carry implicit qualifications that constrain their scope to privileged groups, a gap exploitable by internal critique.
Žižek maps two ideological structures onto the psychoanalytic pair: liberal egalitarianism works by symptomatic exclusion (good explicit content / bad implicit content), while fascist antisemitism works by fetishistic displacement (bad explicit content / good implicit content, displaced class struggle).
Implied in the discussion of libidinal investment in the fetish (the Jew as enemy): subjects enjoy their fetish and resist demystification because abandoning it yields no libidinal profit.
In the antisemitic structure, 'the Jew' functions as a fetish, the last object the subject sees before having to confront class struggle, analogous to the Freudian fetish object that screens out a traumatic perception.
Marx's concept from the Grundrisse (celebrated by Negri) that Žižek dismisses as Marx's worst technocratic and asocial moment, a regression that Negri misreads as anticipating post-capitalism.
Žižek follows Postone in treating commodity fetishism not as mere ideological superstructure but as a theological/metaphysical dimension inscribed in the very heart of economic reality, which is why Marx never called it 'ideology.'
as “post-Marxist Marx”
Žižek's label for the mature Marx of Capital who breaks with the simple base/superstructure materialism of the German Ideology period, focusing instead on commodity fetishism as a quasi-theological structure immanent to economic reality.
For Žižek (via Postone), abstract labor is not simply a mental abstraction of labor-in-general but designates labor in its function as the structuring principle of social life and domination in capitalism, distinct from concrete labor that produces use value.
Stories he reaches for 4
Before Soviet invasion and Western intervention, Afghanistan had a strong secular tradition and an independent communist party that took power; its fundamentalization was not inherent but a product of being drawn into global geopolitics.
“Afghanistan is not that they are a bit backwards country, literally through their very inclusion into being drawn into the global politics they were fundamentalized as it were.”
Kansas was historically the bedrock of American radical leftist populism and the most pro-Roosevelt state; as the left disappeared, it became the bedrock of Christian fundamentalism, confirming the pattern that fundamentalism replaces failed left politics.
“The disappearance of the left meant that it's now the bedrock of Christian fundamentalism. This should give us something to think.”
The anti-Iraq war demonstrations failed to make their case maximally because they defended Iraq as it was under Saddam (the Galloway position) instead of platforming Iraqi leftists who were both anti-Saddam and anti-American, a missed dialectical opportunity.
“Don't you think it would have been very helpful to find some leftist... leftist Iraqis who were anti-Saddam and at the same time anti-American?”
Žižek uses Clinton's honest admission at a UN World Food Day event, that the US and Western institutions destroyed third-world food self-sufficiency by treating food as a commodity and imposing structural adjustment, as evidence a leftist argument can sometimes come from an unlikely source.
“"We all blew it, including me when I was president, by treating food crops as commodities instead of as a vital right of the world's poor."”
Works invoked 12
Capital book
Marx's central work; Žižek argues its mature focus on commodity fetishism and abstract labor represents a radical break from vulgar Marxism and is what we need most today.
Grundrisse book
Marx's manuscript; Žižek endorses most of it but criticizes the General Intellect passage (celebrated by Negri) as Marx's worst technocratic and asocial regression.
Communist Manifesto book
Žižek quotes Marx's retort to accusations of communism ('you already have communism for the ruling class') and applies it to bank bailouts.
Žižek's own book; mentioned because the Kirsch article fabricated a quote from it attributing to him the view that Jews should be annihilated.
The German Ideology book
Represents the vulgar Marxist phase Žižek (following Postone) wants to move beyond: simple economic base/superstructure determinism.
Thomas Frank's book; described as modest but readable; used to illustrate how the disappearance of the left enables Christian fundamentalism.
Gender Trouble book
Judith Butler's book; cited as exemplifying universal historicism (everything is contingent) that creates an eternal present of relativization while evading questions about its own historical conditions.
Left in Dark Times book
Bernard-Henri Lévy's book; criticized for the thesis that 21st-century antisemitism will be progressive or none, an ideological move that equates anticapitalism with antisemitism.
Marx's text; Žižek quotes its observation that bourgeois ideologists historicize everything except the present order, and applies this to today's apologists of liberal capitalism.
Jean-Claude Milner's book arguing European Union is a prolongation of Nazism aimed at eliminating Jews; Žižek was describing this radical Zionist position, not endorsing it.
Jimmy Carter's book; cited sympathetically as an example of the brutal attacks faced by anyone who mildly criticizes Israeli policy.
Transcritique book
Kōjin Karatani's book, described as 'wonderful'; Žižek quotes it extensively for the arc of Marx's critique from religion to political economy ending in immanent theology.
People invoked 29
August Bebel positive
Quoted approvingly for the formula 'Antisemitism is the socialism of fools.'
Bill Clinton positive
Cited approvingly for his honest UN speech admitting Western policy 'blew it' by treating food as a commodity; Žižek uses him as an unlikely ally since he's clearly not a leftist.
George Galloway negative
Named as the embodiment of the wrong anti-Iraq war position: defending Iraq in toto under Saddam simply because the West was attacking it, foreclosing anti-Saddam left alternatives.
Thomas Frank positive
Author of What's the Matter with Kansas?, described as modest but readable; cited for the Kansas example of fundamentalism replacing the left.
Georg Lukács positive
Invoked as part of the 'shamelessly old-fashioned Marxist-Lukács' tradition of Totality that Žižek wants to return to.
Jacques Lacan positive
Referenced via Miller's use of 'subject supposed to know' and 'big Other'; also invoked in the psychoanalytic framing of the fetish/symptom distinction in ideology.
Joseph E. Stiglitz positive
Cited approvingly as a non-leftist economist who noted the bank bailout was about restoring trust/ideological confidence rather than making economic sense.
Alan Greenspan negative
Used as an example of the 'subject supposed to know' who admitted a 'flaw in the model', his ideology assumed market self-interest generates ethical responsibility, forgetting rational expectations of state bailouts.
George W. Bush negative
Noted for using the same emergency-state rhetoric for the financial crisis as for September 11, generating shock to make people accept unjust solutions.
Judith Butler negative
Žižek criticizes Gender Trouble and her universal historicism (everything is contingent) as an eternal present of relativization that avoids asking the historical conditions of its own contingency.
Jimmy Carter positive
Cited as an example of the brutal personal attacks on anyone who mildly criticizes Israeli policy, his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid drew attacks just for comparing West Bank policy to apartheid.
Benedict XVI negative
Criticized for capitalizing on the financial crisis to argue it proves all terrestrial truths are vanity and only God's word holds, a complementary ideological re-normalization.
Antonio Negri negative
Žižek dismisses Negri's celebration of the General Intellect passage in the Grundrisse as a total misinterpretation of Marx's worst technocratic regression.
Alain Badiou positive
Quoted approvingly multiple times: on enemy propaganda targeting the unnoticed possibility of a situation; on the financial crisis (social security vs. bank bailouts); on Obama's election (Europe couldn't elect an equivalent). Žižek spoke with him by phone. Mildly skeptical of Badiou's hope that conservative religious movements will eventually identify the true enemy.
Guy Sorman negative
French popularizer economist and Sarkozy adviser described as 'ideology at its purest': openly argues capitalism is an expression of human nature, the crisis is short, and the task of government is to protect the system from critique.
Bernard-Henri Lévy negative
Žižek criticizes Lévy's book Left in Dark Times for the thesis that 21st-century antisemitism will be progressive or none, which equates anticapitalism with antisemitism and thus immunizes capitalism against critique. Privately told Žižek that anticapitalism is inherently antisemitic.
Jean-Claude Milner negative
Described as holding a radical Zionist position in Les penchants criminels de l'Europe démocratique: that European Union is a prolongation of Nazism and Jews are the principal obstacle to its project. Žižek was paraphrasing Milner's view (not endorsing it), which was misrepresented in the Kirsch attack.
Kojin Karatani positive
Described as a 'good friend'; Žižek draws on Karatani's Transcritique and his insight that Marx's arc from critique of religion through ideology ends in the commodity fetishism that is theology immanent to capitalism.
Ernesto Laclau negative
Described as a former friend; his discourse theory, like Butler's, produces an eternal present of radical contingency that is itself ideological. Cited positively for the insight that crisis means hegemony has disintegrated.
Jacques-Alain Miller negative
Described as a former teacher and friend whose interventions on the financial crisis and Obama election Žižek finds 'horrifying' and 'incredibly primitive': Miller's use of 'subject supposed to know' to recommend rebuilding financial authority is pure liberal cynicism in service of power; his Jungian Obama analysis is beneath a Lacanian.
Walter Benjamin positive
Cited as one elaborator of the thesis that every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution.
Moishe Postone positive
Žižek credits Postone as one of the few serious engagers with the Critique of Political Economy today, endorsing his reading of abstract labor and commodity fetishism in Capital, while rejecting Postone's political conclusion that anticapitalism is inherently antisemitic.
Jacques Vergès negative
Described as embodying the catastrophic extreme of 'my enemy's enemy is my ally' logic: unconditionally pro-Arab solidarity taken so far as to ally with neo-Nazis.
Žižek describes Obama's election as a genuine event that displaced the limits of the possible, though predicts he will be 'the greatest liberal conservative president' who brings the best to the American establishment.
Max Horkheimer positive
Quoted approvingly: those who do not want to criticize capitalism should keep quiet about fascism, formula Žižek updates for fundamentalism.
Hugo Chávez positive
Despite 'stupid things he is doing,' described as precious today for being among the only leaders trying to repoliticize ordinary people.
Karl Marx positive
Central reference throughout; Žižek distinguishes the early/vulgar Marx of German Ideology from the mature Marx of Capital (the 'post-Marxist Marx'), endorsing the latter's focus on commodity fetishism and abstract labor while criticizing regressions (General Intellect passage, the 1859 Preface).
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Deployed extensively to define Totality as contradictory and inclusive of symptoms; 'Das Ganze ist das Wahre' reinterpreted against harmonious readings.
Simon Critchley negative
Cited critically for claiming the Leninist party 'is today alive in Al-Qaeda', an example of false symmetry between left and right extremisms.
What it argues
fundamentalism as symptom of liberalism's failureideology and the 2008 financial crisiscommodity fetishism as theology within capitalismabstract labor and the critique of political economyantisemitism as fetishistic displacement of class struggleHegelian totality versus liberal pluralismthe left's tragic political coalitions
Dialectical moves 8
“Every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution — fascism does not oppose the left but literally replaces it, taking the place of the leftist revolution.”
Fascism is not an independent force but the symptom of a revolutionary potential the left failed to mobilize.
“Far from being an external threat to liberal order, fundamentalism is inherent to it — they form a totality in their very apparent radical antagonism.”
Liberalism and fundamentalism are not opposed poles but mutually constitutive parts of the same global mechanism.
“The whole is truly whole only when it includes its symptoms and unintended consequences — 'Das Ganze ist das Wahre' does not mean a harmonious totality but a contradictory one.”
Hegel's Totality is not reconciliation but the inclusion of what appears as the system's external excess or failure.
“What Marx calls 'concrete labor' is truly abstract — it is the abstraction of directly working on an object — while 'abstract labor' is the concrete social reality of domination in capitalism.”
The distinction concrete/abstract labor must be inverted: abstract labor names the real social structure, concrete labor is the real abstraction.
“The enemy propaganda does not fight actual counterforces but annihilates an unnoticed possibility — and it is structurally blind to what it fights.”
Ideological legitimization targets not existing opponents but the immanent emancipatory potential invisible even to those waging the propaganda.
“Capitalism always meant communism for the ruling class — 'socialism' for banks is not a deviation but the constitutive logic of the system.”
The bailout of banks reveals that the public/private distinction in capitalism already operates a hidden class communism.
“The crisis is already being used not just to reassert capitalism but to make it more brutal — crisis means the ruling hegemony has disintegrated, and the situation is open.”
Economic crisis does not automatically favor the left; it is a contested terrain where the outcome depends on ideological struggle.
“In fascist antisemitism, a bad explicit content (antisemitism) covers up a good implicit content (genuine hatred of exploitation) — the exact opposite of liberal ideology where good explicit content covers bad implicit content.”
The Symptom/Fetish couple maps two inverse ideological structures: liberal egalitarianism hides exclusions symptomatically; fascism hides class struggle fetishistically.
Claims 16
asserts
Every rise of fascism and right-wing populism bears witness to a failed leftist revolution, not an independent phenomenon.fascism-populism and its relation to the left
asserts
Radical Islamism is the direct correlative to the disappearance of the secular left in Muslim countries, not an expression of their inherent backwardness.political Islam and fundamentalism
rejects
The thesis that anticapitalism is inherently antisemitic (BHL, Postone's political conclusion) is a reactionary ideological invention that uses the Holocaust to immunize capitalism against critique.Bernard-Henri Lévy's equation of anticapitalism with antisemitism
asserts
The liberal and leftist readings of the triad (liberal center / populist right / radical left) place these in incompatible topographies, and the left's is the correct one: populist right is a symptom of liberalism's failures, not a symmetrical extreme.political topology
asserts
The 2008 financial crisis revealed that capitalism treats banking emergencies as absolute (the Real demanding immediate action) while treating AIDS, hunger, and ecology as negotiable reality.financial crisis and ideology
rejects
Miller's recommendation to rebuild a 'subject supposed to know' to prevent panic is pure liberal cynicism: a psychoanalyst knowingly promoting a transferential illusion on behalf of those in power.Jacques-Alain Miller's response to the financial crisis
asserts
Hegelian Totality is not a harmonious reconciled whole but always contradictory and inclusive of its symptoms, which is why we must return to it to understand the conflict between liberalism and fundamentalism.Hegelian totality
rejects
Judith Butler's and Ernesto Laclau's universal historicism (everything is contingent) is itself a form of post-historical ideology that does not ask about its own historical conditions of possibility.discourse theory and anti-essentialism (Butler, Laclau)
asserts
The mature Marx of Capital effects a radical break from the base/superstructure materialism of the German Ideology, centering commodity fetishism as a quasi-theological dimension immanent to economic reality, not mere ideology.Marx's Critique of Political Economy
asserts
Marx's concept of abstract labor does not rest on a primitive ontology but designates labor as the social structuring principle of domination specific to capitalism, which is why only labor is the source of value.labor theory of value
rejects
Marx's General Intellect passage in the Grundrisse (celebrated by Negri) should be discarded as Marx's worst technocratic and asocial regression.Negri's reading of the Grundrisse / General Intellect
asserts
The food crisis is a direct product of globalized agricultural policy imposed by the West, not of third-world corruption or inefficiency.global food crisis and capitalism
asserts
The left should insist on the absence of a third term (a genuine left alternative) rather than accepting the false conflict between liberalism and fundamentalism as the primary antagonism.Middle East conflict and ideological mapping
asserts
Demystifying fascist-antisemitic ideology is far harder than demystifying liberal egalitarianism because the fetishist structure involves libidinal investment that makes abandoning 'the Jew' as enemy yield no enjoyment.ideological critique and psychoanalysis
rejects
Jacques Vergès's 'my enemy's enemy is my ally' stance—making alliances with neo-Nazis on anti-imperialist grounds—is politically catastrophic even by standards of pure political efficiency.Jacques Vergès's politics
asserts
Greenspan's mistake was not factual ignorance of mechanisms but a false ethical premise: that market self-interest spontaneously generates responsibility, forgetting that speculators rationally anticipated state bailouts.Alan Greenspan and the financial crisis
Quotes 12
“Those who do not want to talk critically about liberal democracy and its noble principles should also keep quiet about religious fundamentalism.”Slavoj Žižek · Horkheimer's formula updated: liberalism and fundamentalism form a totality
“The goal of all enemy propaganda is not to annihilate an existing force but rather to annihilate an unnoticed possibility of the situation.”Slavoj Žižek · Badiou on enemy propaganda targeting immanent emancipatory possibility
“When banks need money, no problem. Tens of millions may be dying in Congo, there may be a tragedy whatever, we have time. Here, when it's the question of banks, the urgency is absolute.”Slavoj Žižek · the Real of capitalism: banking emergency vs. humanitarian negotiability
“Capitalism always meant communism for the ruling class.”Slavoj Žižek · the systemic class bias of capitalist bailouts
“Crisis means just the ruling hegemony has disintegrated. And the situation is open, and who knows who will win.”Slavoj Žižek · crisis as open conjuncture, not automatic left opportunity
“The topic of fetishism means that what you find at the end is again a form of religion but religion, theology inherent to capitalism itself.”Slavoj Žižek · commodity fetishism as immanent theology of capitalism
“Trust is a fundamental ideological category.”Slavoj Žižek · the ideological function of financial trust
“An event is when the limits of the possible somehow were displaced.”Slavoj Žižek · definition of political event (Obama's election)
“We all know that subject supposed to know is a transferential illusion, but we know this as psychoanalysts. While in our public activity, we should promote the rise of a new subject supposed to know to control panic. This is pure cynicism.”Slavoj Žižek · Miller's cynical Lacanianism in service of power
“The critique of religion is the beginning of every critique — but at the end what you find is again religion, theology inherent to the very core of really existing functioning capitalism.”Slavoj Žižek · Karatani's insight: Marx's arc from religion to political economy returns to immanent theology
“You accuse us of communism, but for the ruling elite you already have communism.”Slavoj Žižek · Marx's Communist Manifesto retort applied to bank bailouts
“I mean, I'm tired of people who, including myself, who all the time refer to Marx, Capital, and so on, but don't approach head-on this key problem.”Slavoj Žižek · self-critical call to return to Critique of Political Economy
Transcript 2 turns
unknown
Thank you very
Thank you very
Slavoj Žižek
much. I hope this works. I hope you will not be disappointed. Today, I decided to be maybe even a little bit simplistic, political in the first half of the talk and then gradually, gradually to approach the theoretical topic which for me, I was avoiding it for a long time, it is crucial. Namely, what to do today with Marx's theory, especially with what is its core, critique of political economy? I mean, I'm tired of people who, including myself, who all the time refer to Marx, Capital, and so on, but don't approach head-on this key problem. My god, Marx didn't write a treatise on cultural criticism, etc. It was meant to be a book analyzing actual trends of capitalist society and so on, and so on. So, what to do, or can we do anything at all, at all, to make it of any use today and how to do it? I would like to begin with an anecdotal level, just pure masochism, but with this then I will use this to approach my starting point, ideology today. Maybe some of you already heard about it, like in the last issue of The New Republic, there is a delicious, detailed attack on me. The title is "The Deadly Jester". The subtitle then tells it all: "The most despicable philosopher in the world." And I mean, it's really I think a sign, one of the signs, that the class struggle in economy is [unintelligible] is aggravating itself because no, quite maybe, I mean I'm not even sure if I will answer it. But nonetheless, how should I put it, the degree of pure personal aggressiveness and of faking quotes and so on reached a breathtaking level here. So I advise you even to read it as a kind of a test. I mean, if you read it and if you will say, because I think the guy is counting on this, for you to say, "Okay, maybe there are some manipulations here or there with quotes, but all in all, my god, so much stuff, you know." You usually again have these stupid proverbs like, "When there is a smoke, there must be fire." So something must be... if you are tempted by this, then well then, nice to see you maybe. Look, just the culminating quote towards the end. I will just read it, then give you the key to it. I quote: "In In Defense of Lost Causes, again paraphrasing Badiou, Žižek writes, quote from me allegedly, 'To put it succinctly, the only true solution to the Jewish question is the final solution, their annihilation. Because Jews are the ultimate obstacle to the final solution of history itself, to the overcoming of divisions in an all-encompassing unity and flexibility.' End of quote from me." Then the text goes on, goes on: "I hasten to add that Žižek dissents from Badiou's vision to this extent. He believes that Jews, quote from me, 'resisting identification with the state of Israel, the Jews of the Jews themselves, the worthy successors to Spinoza,' end of quote, 'deserve to be exempted from this total annihilation on account of their,' again quotation marks, quote from me, 'fidelity to their messianic impulse.'" I mean, it's just breathtaking. If some of you read some of my work, you may even remember where this first quote comes. I am not paraphrasing Badiou, but I am just resuming, describing the position of Jean-Claude Milner in his book Les penchants criminels de l'Europe démocratique. Milner's thesis is a very radical Zionist one. It is that the modern democratic Europe today, European Union and so on, is a, he uses this Clausewitz metaphor, a prolongation of Hitler, of Nazism with other means. That is the same project that it that antisemitism is not a marginal contingent feature emerging here and there, it's inscribed into the very project of European Union. Jews are the principal obstacle. They have to be eliminated. This is what how Milner perceives modern democratic Europe. Now, in a way which totally goes beyond my comprehension, this guy Kirsch, which means cherry incidentally, this guy then claims that I with sympathy paraphrase here Badiou, but that I have only one proviso, you know, he tries to be honest all the time like, "No, no, he doesn't claim this purely." My proviso is that Jews should be killed, annihilated, but not all. Those who are critical of Israel, they should be left alive. And then he goes on simply quoting me when I simply describe this, the position of those Jews who are critical towards Israel, and of course this has nothing to do with Milner. I do this in a totally different part of the book and so on, and so on. And again, the whole, the whole... it's absolutely breathtaking. The whole text is like this. What are these kind of attacks an indication of? Because it's not only this. It's also, if I may compare myself with big figures, I was shocked by the brutal violence, for example, lately in the United States, he's almost becoming a pariah, of the attacks on Jimmy Carter, ex-president, because of his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, or whatever, not apartheid or whatever. Just because the book compares what the state of Israel is doing on the West Bank to apartheid. In very soft terms, he doesn't claim they are like Nazis who want to eliminate, kill kill the Palestinians, just he sees traces of apartheid policy. What is going on here? I think what we should directly address, question, is where do we really differ? I think we differ in the very basic topography, cognitive mapping of the situation. Of course, today's field is vaguely, vaguely, abstractly divided into let's call it liberal center, populist right, and whatever remains of the left. But how do we relate these three terms to each other? The old Marxist thesis elaborated among others by Walter Benjamin and so on is every rise of Fascism bears witness to a failed revolution. And I think this insight not only still holds today, but is more pertinent than ever today. Liberals like to point out similarities between left and right extremisms. Hitler's terrors and camps, concentration camps, imitated Bolshevik terror. The Leninist party is today alive in Al-Qaeda, as we learned from Simon Critchley. Yes, but what does all this mean? It can also be read the way I would have read it: as an indication of how Fascism literally replaces, takes the place of the leftist revolution. Its rise is the left's failure, but simultaneously a proof that there was a revolutionary potential, dissatisfaction, which the left failed to properly mobilize. And I think exactly the same thing thing holds for today's so-called by some people, not by me, Islamofascism. Is the rise of radical Islamism not exactly correlative to the disappearance of the secular left in Muslim countries? For example, today when Afghanistan is portrayed as the utmost Islamic fundamentalist country, who still remembers that years ago, it was a country, before even the Soviet invasion, do you remember, some of you don't but some of us do, that it was a country with strong secular tradition up to a powerful communist party which took power there independently of the Soviet Union? So it wasn't, whatever this means, a fundamentalist country at all. The king was a kind of an enlightened pro-Western despot, like a softer version of the Shah of Iran trying to enlighten the people and so on. It was again one of the least fundamentalists of the of the Islamic countries. Where did this secular tradition disappear? So you see my point, that Afghanistan is not that they are a bit backwards country, literally through their very inclusion into being drawn into the global politics they were fundamentalized as it were. It's not that it was in their nature, on the contrary, if okay I use this nonsensical term "in their nature," that's to say in their historical tradition of the last decades, if anything, they were absolutely the opposite. In Europe, exactly the same goes for Bosnia today. Back in the '70s and '80s, Bosnia-Herzegovina as ex-Yugoslav republic was multiculturally the most interesting, alive, cinema school, unique style of rock music, and so on and so on. In today's Bosnia, there effectively are strong fundamentalist forces. Unfortunately, it was reported probably also here in the media, for example, a couple of months ago I think, there was a gay parade in Sarajevo which was violently attacked by some Wahhabis, whatever so-called Islamic fundamentalists. But again, the main reason of this regression is the desperate situation of the Muslim Bosnians in '92, in the '92-'95 war, when they were basically abandoned by the Western powers. So again, this fundamentalization of Bosnia is strictly the result of Bosnia being drawn into global politics. This is the true tragedy. It is as if all these small countries, the price they pay for becoming the topic of headlines is fundamentalization. Or even in United States, I quote often in my books that modest but very readable, nice book by Thomas Frank, you know, what happened in Kansas. He gives you the same paradox. Kansas, as one of the states of United States, you know, Over the Rainbow, which was which was really the US version of Afghanistan till years ago. Till years ago, Kansas was the bedrock of practically all American radical leftist populism. It was the most pro-Roosevelt republic and so on, and so on. That the disappearance of the left meant that it's now the bedrock of Christian fundamentalism. This should give us something to think. This for me, empirically if you want, confirms that today's fundamentalism is not an independent phenomenon which we as good liberals must fight. No, the true thing, the problem to focus on, is why it is precisely the progress of liberal capitalism, new global order which which refundamentalizes as it were some countries. Now what are the political conclusions to be drawn from this? The most catastrophic one is the one drawn by some leftists but let's call them Zionist Marxists like Moishe Postone, whom I otherwise respect deeply for being one of the few who tries to seriously approach the topic of what to do with Critique of Political Economy today. I will refer to him much later today. But nonetheless, I am a little bit terrified by his political conclusion which is, now I'm in a simplified way presenting to you his reasoning, it's that since every crisis which opens up a space for radical left also gives rise to antisemitism, it is better for us to support successful capitalism and hope there will be no crisis. Like, you know, whenever there is a crisis bad things happen, populist right-wing interpretation, so let's hope there is no crisis. Brought to its conclusion, this reasoning implies ultimately that and that's for me the true danger, they don't say it openly but they really mean it. And this is why nonetheless I consider it was worth mixing with Bernard-Henri Lévy there because he didn't dare to say this publicly but privately just before I asked him and he... for him, anticapitalism is as such today antisemitic. That's the idea. Every radical questioning of capitalism is disqualified as proto-fascist, incipiently antisemitic radicalism. This is in what sense the terribly wrong I think thesis of Bernard-Henri Lévy in his new book Left in Dark Times is that the 21st-century antisemitism will be progressive or none. Because again, the underlying thesis is that every anticapitalism is incipiently antisemitic. This is ideologically, from the standpoint of theory of ideology, a wonderful invention. You take the most horrible crime, to put it naively, of the 20th century, Holocaust, and then you use it to disqualify in advance every questioning of the of the system. Quite openly today, whenever you question capitalism too radical, they say, "Oh, you are already playing antisemitic cards," and so on, and so on. So back to my basic point: the difference between liberalism and the radical left is that although they refer to the same three elements, liberal center, populist right, radical left, they locate them in a different, within a different topography. For the liberal center, radical left and right are the two forms of appearance of the same totalitarian excess. While for the left, the only true alternative is the one between itself and the liberal mainstream, with the populist radical right as nothing but the symptom of liberalism's inability to deal with the leftist threat. So I think that more than ever we should insist on what Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School said years ago: "Those who do not want to talk critically about liberal democracy and its noble principles should also keep quiet about religious fundamentalism." You know, Horkheimer said, "Those who do not want to talk about capitalism critically should keep quiet about fascism." We should repeat the same today. One should insist that the Middle East conflict between the state of Israel and the Arabs is an emphatically false conflict. Even if we will all die because of it, it is a conflict which mystifies the true issues. I think we should again truly insist on it. Here resistance begins, not in taking sides but in rejecting the very basic cognitive mapping. I reject to the very claim that the conflict between liberal democracy and fundamentalism is the main conflict today. I think no, this is the conflict inherent to the existing order based on the disappearance of the third term. We should insist more than ever that something is missing, and precisely because something is missing, the left, this conflict appears. In other words, we should in a shamelessly old-fashioned Marxist-Lukács way return to the category of Totality. People are horrified when you say this today, "No, no one should adopt the position of totality." But let me use this to elaborate a little bit. What does Hegel or the good Marxist tradition really mean by Totality? It's not this idea of every phenomenon which may appear eccentric, excessive in itself finds finds its proper role within a harmonious totality. It's the exact opposite. What Hegel means by Totality is that when you observe a certain whole, like all of it, a certain system, you should always include into it, that is to say consider, interpret as its inherent part, also what may appear as its excess, its external obstacle or whatever. This is totality. Totality is not a high highly reconciled whole where everything finds its place. Totality is always contradictory, inconsistent. Totality doesn't mean today's totality is a harmonious capitalist order which is then disturbed from outside by I don't know what threats, terror, populist right-wing terrorist threat. No, it means precisely the totality of all of this as part of the same global mechanism. So again, when Hegel says "Das Ganze ist das Wahre," the whole is the true, he doesn't mean an idealized harmonious totality. It's precisely that the whole is truly whole when it includes its symptoms, its unintended consequences which betray its untrue its non-truth. Symptoms are never just secondary failures or distortions of the basically sound symptoms. They are always indicators that there is something rotten, antagonistic, inconsistent in the very heart of the system. This is again why all the anti-Hegelian rhetoric which insists on how Hegel's totality misses the details which stick out and ruin the balance of the totality miss the point. The space of the Hegelian totality is the very space of the interaction between the abstract whole and the details that elude its grasp. And again, it is crucial to apply this to today's world to see for example in the struggle between liberalism and fundamentalism how they form a totality. In their very apparent radical antagonism, they form a totality, and the point is to question this totality. And that's difficult to do. Why? Because we are I claim now as the result of this meltdown and other recent events, we are so obviously living in an era of open revitalization of ideology. Not even ideology in the sense of the '90s, this anonymous ideology, but open ideology. So this I think these questions, "How do we perceive phenomena?", "How does liberalism relate to fundamentalist threat?" are crucial points of ideological struggle today. How is this struggle structured? Permit me one old quote from Marx. In his Poverty of Philosophy, Marx wrote that bourgeois ideologists love to historicize. Every social, religious, cultural form is historical, contingent, relative, every form except their own. There was history, but now there is no history. A quote from Marx: "Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial, those of bourgeoisie are natural. When the economists say that present-day relations, the relations of bourgeois production, are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces develop in conformity with the laws of nature. Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any." End of quote. First, I cannot resist here a very evil remark. Do we not find echoes of the same position in today's let's call it discourse theory, anti-essentialist historicism, from Ernesto Laclau to Judith Butler? Just for them, the the non-historical present is precisely the present of universalized contingency. Don't you get this impression when you read for example Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, that now we've reached the stage that basically we acknowledge everything is contingent, everything is historicized, but this very fact brings us to some kind of, how should I put it, eternal present of relativization of everything where the proper historical tension is lost? This is why, and with Ernesto Laclau basically the same, which is why, in order to continue their struggle, they have to exaggerate and all the time how essentialism is not yet dead, it's still here, patriarchal authority is still here, and so on and so on. Only in this way can they avoid asking the very simple question: "What if their historicism in the sense of for Judith Butler every sexual identity is a historical contingent product, for Ernesto Laclau every political identity is a contingent discursive product, to ask the question: 'But what are the specific historical conditions of this very view of radical contingency historicism?'" That's the crucial question which they don't ask. Which is why, again, they must, with the true spirit of the best of KGB, develop this this discerning police procedural activity of, "Ah, you think you are already within contingency, but no, you know, the the essentialist enemy is lurking even everywhere." So again, I think that even that universal historicism, everything is relative, contingent, we can reconstruct it, is the very form of post-historical thought today. But back to my basic point about Marx economy. Remember the quote from Poverty of Philosophy. My point is: replace feudalism with socialism, and exactly the same holds for today's apologists of liberal democratic capitalism. Their thesis is: there was history, as long as in the 20th century capitalism was fighting socialism, now there is none because we all have to admit the Fukuyama dream, capitalism is the only rational, the least bad order. If you don't believe me, I would like to present to you a guy whom I was glad to discover because it's very rare that one finds ideology at its purest. And I think he really stands for today's re-ideologization at its purest. A French popular popularizer economist, Guy Sorman. I mean, he really as it were openly articulates what others mostly only imply. Recently, this guy gave an interview in Argentina with the title which tells it all: "This crisis," referring to the ongoing economic financial meltdown, "this crisis will be short enough." This title indicates that Sorman fulfills the basic demand that ideology has to meet with regard to the ongoing financial meltdown: to re-normalize the situation. Things may appear harsh, but the crisis will be short, it is just part of the normal cycle of creative destruction through which capitalism progresses. Or as Sorman put it in one of his texts, I quote: "Creative destruction is the engine of economic growth." That's his explanation. Another quote: "This ceaseless replacement of the old with the new, driven by technological innovation and entrepreneurialism, itself encouraged by good economic policies, brings prosperity, though those displaced by the process, who find their jobs made redundant, can understandably object to it." Like, you must understand, you may be the victim, but globally that's the way of progress. Now I'm well aware, naturally, that, and this is what always characterizes ideology, that it always uses the apparently mutually exclusive procedures. This re-normalization of the crisis coexists without any problems with its opposite: the panic raised by the authorities in order to create a shock among the wide public. You remember the the George Bush reaction, which a friend of mine made a nice analysis claiming how Bush when he reacted to the meltdown used used almost the same term as in the reaction to September 11th. "It's a national crisis, let's put away all partisan divisions, the very fundamentals of our social order, of our American way of life are are threatened," and so of course then this is how people are made to accept the obviously unjust solutions. So back to Sorman. His starting premise is that in the last decades economy finally became a fully tested science. His hitler is that if we take for example East and West Germany, we have an almost laboratory experiment. The same nation cut into two, one system was tested in one part, the other in the other part, the result was clear: which is the failure, which is the success. So no ambiguity. But is economy really a science? Does the present crisis not demonstrate that as one of the participants put it, "no one really knows what to do"? Now Sorman's answer is here really surprising. While he admits that market is full of irrational behavior and reactions, his medicament is not even psychology but neuroeconomics. Quote: "Economic actors tend to behave both rationally and irrationally. Laboratory work has demonstrated that one part of our brain bears blame for many of our economically mistaken short-term decisions, while another part is responsible for decisions that make economic sense and usually taking a longer view. Just as the state protects us from Akerlof asymmetry," [unintelligible] technical term, "by forbidding insider trading, should it also it should also protect us from our own irrational impulses." So Sorman's conclusion: this doesn't mean that we need excessive state regulation, but nonetheless that neuroeconomics should be applied as a purely positive science to counteract irrational market behavior which is for him is purely psychological. Nothing to do with economics politics properly. For him, the recent meltdown is ultimately a purely psychological phenomenon which should be treated, again, not even normal crowd psychology but neuroeconomics. With this happy twin rule of economic science supplemented by neuroeconomics, then we can get rid of ideology. For example, for Sorman, Marx, the work of Marx, quote, "can be described as a materialist rewriting of the Bible," and so on and so on. Rarely was the function of ideology described in clearer terms. Namely as the task to defend the existing system against any serious critique, legitimizing it as a direct expression of human nature. If you don't believe me, here is the key passage from Sorman, he's not a nobody, in France, in Spanish countries, in Latin... in France, for example, he is the official economic advisor of of now Sarkozy and so on. Quote: "An essential task of democratic governments and opinion-makers when confronted economic cycles and political pressure is to secure and protect the system that has served humanity so well, and not to change it for the worse on the pretext of its imperfection. Still, this lesson is doubtless one of the hardest to translate into language that public opinion will accept. The best of all possible economic systems, the capitalist one, is indeed imperfect. Whatever the truth uncovered by economic science, the free market is finally only the reflection of human nature itself, hardly perfectible." End of quote. So we have, again, the position at its purest here. That with capitalism finally we found a social system which fits human nature. This has a certain human cost because, again, sometimes people have to be forced to accept to miss their job and so on and especially because our own brain, its neurostructure is not adapted to it. But again, as he put it very nicely, the main task of ideology is to prevent people questioning the fundamentals of the system. Such ideological legitimization perfectly exemplifies Alain Badiou's wonderful formula of the basic paradox of enemy propaganda. The enemy propaganda fights something of which it is itself not aware, something for which it is structurally blind. Not the actual counterforces, political opponents, but the possibility which is immanent to a situation. The possibility, that is to say the utopian revolutionary emancipatory potential. A quote from Badiou, he said this in his seminar on Plato on the 13th of February this year, you can find it on... it's available online. Quote, I translated it from French of course: "The goal of all enemy propaganda is not to annihilate an existing force (this function is generally left to police forces) but rather to annihilate an unnoticed possibility of the situation. This possibility is also unnoticed by those who conduct this propaganda, since its features are to be simultaneously immanent to the situation and not to appear in it." End of quote. This is why the enemy propaganda against radical emancipatory politics is by definition cynical. Not in the simple sense of not believing its own words, but at a much more basic level. It is cynical precisely and even more insofar as it does believe its own words, since its message is a resigned conviction that the world we live in, even if not the best of all possible worlds, is the least bad one, so that any radical change can only make it worse. And again, as always in an effective propaganda, this normalization can be combined without any problem with its opposite, reading the economic meltdown in religious terms. Benedict the Pope, you remember, was expeditious in capitalizing on the financial crisis along these lines. He said, you remember: "This proves that all is vanity, all terrestrial truths, and that only the word of God holds out," and so on and so on. It is sad to observe how in the last years my ex-teacher and good friend Jacques-Alain Miller got more and more engaged in this propaganda. There should be no surprise that the financial meltdown, the ongoing one, also propelled Miller to intervene in such a constructing way to prevent panic. This is a quote from Miller's comment on financial meltdown, I think it was published I don't know in Le Figaro or Le Point, you can find it on the web. Quote from Miller: "The financial universe is an architecture made of fictions and its keystone is what Lacan called a 'subject supposed to know'. To know why and how. Who plays this part? The concept of authorities from where sometimes a voice is detached, Alan Greenspan for example in his time. The financial players base their behavior on this. The fictional and hyper-reflexive unit holds by the belief in the authorities, that is to say through the transference to the subject supposed to know. If this subject falters, there is a crisis, a pulling apart of the foundations which of course involves effects of panic. However, the financial subject supposed to know was already quite subdued because of deregulation and this happened because the financial world believed in its infatuated delusion to be able to work things out without the function of the subject supposed to know. Firstly, the real state assets become waste. Secondly, gradually shit permeates everything. Thirdly, there is a gigantic negative transparency vis-à-vis the authorities. The electric shock of the Paulson-Bernanke plan angers the public. The crisis is one of trust and it will last till the subject supposed to know is reconstructed. This will come in the long term by way of a new set of Bretton Woods Accords, a council enjoined to speak the truth about the truth." End of quote. You noticed Miller's reference to Greenspan, who effectively was the non-partisan subject supposed to know of the long period of economic relative growth from the Reagan era till the recent meltdown. When on October 23rd, last month, a month and a half ago, Greenspan was submitted to a congressional hearing, he conceded some interesting points in answering critics who claimed that he encouraged the bubble in housing prices by keeping interest rates too low for too long and that he failed to rein in the explosive growth of risky and often fraudulent mortgage lending. Here is the climatic climatic moment of the Greenspan hearing. Representative Henry Waxman, chairman of the Oversight Committee, said, I quote: "I'm going to interrupt you. The question I have for you is, you had an ideology. This is your statement, 'I do have an ideology. My judgment is that free economic, free competitive markets are by far the unrivaled way to organize economies. We have tried regulation, none meaningfully worked.'" End of quote. "That was your quote. You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others, and now our whole economy is paying its price. Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?" End of quote. And here is Greenspan's answer: "I found a flaw in the model that I perceived as the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works." End of quote. In other words, Greenspan considered that when a once-in-a-century credit tsunami, as he called it, has engulfed financial markets, his free-market ideology shunning regulation was proof proven flawed. Later Greenspan reiterated his shocked disbelief that financial companies failed to execute sufficient surveillance on their trading counterparties to prevent surging losses. Quote: "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of leading institutions to protect shareholder's equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief." End of quote. This last statement I think tells much more than it may appear. It indicates that Greenspan's mistake was to expect the lending institutions' enlightened self-interest... is to expect that this self-interest would have made them act more responsibly, more ethically, avoiding the short-term self-propelling cycle of wild speculations which sooner or later explodes in a bubble. In other words, his mistake was not factual concerning objective data or mechanisms, it concerned the ethical attitudes generated by market speculation. Greenspan's mistake was to act on the premise that market mechanisms themselves spontaneously generate the ethical attitude of responsibility and trust, since it is in the long term self-interest of the participants themselves to act with responsibility and trust. Obviously his mistake was not only and simply to underestimate the irrationality of the market agents, that is to say their ability to resist the short-term temptations of wild speculative gains. What he forgot to include into the equation was the financial speculator's quite rational expectation that the risks are worth taking, since in the event of a financial collapse they can count on the state to cover up their losses, which is exactly what happened of course. But back to Miller. The message of his weird lines is clear: wait patiently for the new subject supposed to know to emerge. Miller's position is here the one of pure liberal cynicism. We all know that subject supposed to know is a transferential illusion, but we know this as psychoanalysts. While in our public activity, we should promote the rise of a new subject supposed to know to control panic. Again, I find this a very sad position, which is: people need an illusion. The only way that prevents panic is the illusion of security. You know, this is pure cynicism, like: we know there is no Big Other, but people need a Big Other, so we should help those in power to construct a new Big Other to prevent panic. This is what I find so horrifying in it, how the subjective position of enunciation of Miller is so automatically solidary with those in power. The very perspective is the perspective of those in power: how to prevent panic, how to keep the situation under control. And the reply is again pure cynicism: we know it's a fake, but people need a fake, we should help people to... we should help people to accept the new fake, the new illusion. Okay, I don't want to lose time here with other Miller's incredibly primitive comments for example on Obama. He did a kind of an almost Jungian reading, undignified of a Lacanian, claiming that Obama won because obviously his sympathy there was Sarah Palin, he is one of those who had a crush on Sarah Palin. Three weeks before elections he already wrote Obama off. Sarah Palin is in, she is a new post-feminist woman with bitchy feminine irony undermining making Obama seem impotent, weak and so on. Then how to explain Obama's victory? His... he resorted to Jungian argumentation claiming that Obama cheated in the sense that he manipulated all the old religious messianic archetypes, that Obama didn't talk politics at all but referred to this religious "I come to bring savior," and that he posited himself as practically... this is my reading, as a Michael Jackson of politics, neither white nor black, neither woman nor man, so that he resuscitated all this religious mythology to win, which with all my criticism about Obama, incidentally so that you will not think some people reproach me "how can you be a leftist and write about enthusiasm about Obama," no, the enthusiasm was just and I still think this is a great event. I spoke recently on phone with Alain Badiou, who told me we can make fun of Americans but in Europe we wouldn't be able to to elect somebody like Obama. Which means, for the Germans to elect a Turk as a president or whatever, no? For you, even an Irish guy, maybe... not an not an Indian first step. So that's still great thing, but I think if you ask me Obama will turn out to be the greatest liberal conservative president the way it looks now. He will bring... he will be the best thing that can happen to the American establishment. But still, I don't compromise things here. Something happened, which is why what I quoted in my text which was being published on the online by London Review of Books. I can even tell you the name, he authorized me, I didn't invent it. It wasn't... it wasn't myself when I refer to a leftist, radical leftist friend of mine who was crying for hours. It was Ed Cadaver, the the Princeton Derridean, how should I put it, who told me that he has no illusions, he knew Obama made all the [unintelligible] but he knew nonetheless he told me he cried all the night and so on. I understand that, I mean let's not be ashamed of it, it was an authentic great event. Why? Because an event is when, how should I put it, the limits of the possible somehow were displaced. It's incredible how many people, even my friends secretly said, "You know this 'Fear of' how do you call that effect when people publicly they say of course Obama, but privately my god a nigger will not rule me, you know like..." they were... even they... we all had this skepticism, and it's nice these are truly sublime moments when we intellectuals are proven to be too cynical, distrusting people, and then at least a little bit people can nicely surprise nicely surprise you. But so back to ideology here, my main line, and economy. The reason I find this crisis meltdown so instructive is that it effectively confronted us at its purest, as it were, with the problem, which is ideology today. Let me quote Alain Badiou, his short comment on crisis published in a letter to Le Monde. Quote: "One demands absolutely from ordinary citizens to understand that it is not possible to fill in the financial gap of the social security, but that without counting the billions, one should fill in the gap of the banks." End of quote. And I think one should generalize this Badiou's statement. When we fight AIDS, hunger, lack of water, global warming and so on, although we recognize the urgency of these problems, there is always time to reflect, to postpone decisions. Remember how the main conclusion of the last meeting of the superpower leaders in Bali about ecology was hailed as a success, but why? Because they concluded to meet again in two years to continue. But you noticed how in contrast to all this, you know, whenever there is ecological crisis, poverty, they say, "Oh, it's difficult, it's a complex problem, there is time to reflect, to double-check it." But here it was an absolute emergency. When banks need money, no problem. What Americans did, did you notice, is they practically introduced a kind of political emergency state. There was a vote, first vote where the measures were rejected, and basically the ruling elite concluded, "No, this was the wrong vote." So they practically introduced a kind of extraordinary measure, they basically the message was, "Fuck off, now it's for the real, it's no longer a comedy, we don't have time, we have to make the right decision," with all the twisting of arms in which all, including Obama, participated and so on. So the panic was here absolute. Here it was really the, you know, tens of millions may be dying in Congo, there may be a tragedy whatever, we have time. Here, ah, when it's the question of banks, the urgency is absolute. And let us also not forget that the sublimely enormous sum of money, and I mean here sublime in the precise Kantian sense, because is it... somewhere, I don't know, okay maybe I'm but I'm definitely not rich, richer than some of you, although I think there are some of you a bit richer than me, but you know for us where does it become meaningless? Somehow I can think in millions, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars, you know. But when you go above, like billion, it's sublime in the sense of it doesn't really mean anything, no? But as some, not leftist but like not right-wing economists like Joseph Stiglitz put it very nicely, the point of this throwing money wasn't that economically it makes real sense. It was... it was to re-establish trust. I love this paradox, how Stiglitz even says that because of this even if economically it makes no sense, it may work. Because what matters is not, "Does it have economic sense?" but that people that it will restore people's trust. This brings us to ideology today, because trust is a fundamental ideological category. Again, this proves that I was right when I claimed capitalism's today's real. Hunger, AIDS, reality. With reality you are pragmatic, you negotiate. "Yes, maybe we should give money to AIDS, will it be well spent, what to do?" But when you encounter the real, there is no time to negotiate, you do it. So compare the billion destined to stabilize the banking system by the US alone to the fact that of billion pledged by richer nations to help poorer nations agriculturally this year of food crisis, only billion has been made has been made available. And the blame for this food crisis cannot be put on the usual suspects, the favorite usual suspects of the of our media: corruption, inefficiency, state interventionism of the third world countries, and so on and so on. On the contrary, this food crisis is directly dependent on the globalization of agriculture. Now you will say if you are center-liberal, "What leftist crap shit am I setting you?" Maybe, but the leftist on whom I'm referring here is Bill Clinton. And I think one should use even Bill Clinton, anyone, when he tells the truth. I'm referring here to a not bad text by Clinton, it's his comment as reported by Associated Press on October 23rd of this year, Clinton's comment on the global food crisis at a United Nations gathering marking World Food Day. Here is already the title of Clinton's report which is interesting: "We blew it on global food." And the essence of Clinton's speech was that today's global food crisis shows how, quote (he was honest enough), "we all blew it, including me when I was president," end of quote, "by treating food crops as commodities instead of as a vital right of the world's poor." Words he used. Clinton was very clear in putting blame not on individual states or governments but on the long-term global Western policy imposed by the United States, European Union, and enacted for decades by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other international institutions. This policy pressed African and Asian countries into dropping government subsidies for fertilizer, improved seed, and other farm inputs, thus opening up the way for the best land to be used for export crops and for ruining the country's food self-sufficiency. The result of such structural adjustments was the integration of local agriculture into global economy, while crops were exported, farmers thrown out of their land were pushed into slums available for outsourced sweatshops, and countries had to rely more and more on the imported food. In this way, third-world countries are kept in post-colonial dependence and made more and more vulnerable to market fluctuations. The skyrocketing of grain prices, also caused by the use of crops for biofuels in the last years, already caused starvation in countries from Haiti to Ethiopia as we know. And there is, recently this was reported in the media... I thought... I'm slowly becoming a believer into bourgeois liberal media, in the sense that, no in a quite naive sense that in a way everything is said there, you just really have to read it. For example, I read some pretty horrible news which was reported in the media but nobody even reacted to it, of this... what is really happening now on the international agricultural market: the exact opposite of what Clinton is advocating. That is to say, major international corporations and governments try to compensate for shortages of arable land in their own countries by setting up massive industrial farms abroad. For example, now, weeks ago, Daewoo Logistics from South Korea negotiated a 99-year lease on around million acres of farmland in Madagascar. It's to cut a long story short, half of Madagascar's arable land. It will be used strictly for export, three-quarters corn for biofuels, one-quarter palm oil. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. I read this I think in Time magazine, again no leftist propaganda if you are afraid. They say that also, for example, British Sun Biofuels is buying land in Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Tanzania. The first two at least according to the media identified as as lands which hunger and so on and so on. So again we are getting this this paradox of exactly the opposite. The developed countries are confronting food crisis by impoverishing even more the third world countries by way of buying land there and growing for export and so on and so on. So again, Clinton, back to Clinton. Clinton was right to say that, quote from Clinton, "Food is not a commodity like others. We should go back to a policy of maximum food self-sufficiency. It is crazy for us to think we can develop countries around the world without increasing their ability to feed themselves." End of quote. There are nonetheless I think two things to add to Bill Clinton here. First, one should note how while imposing the globalization of agriculture on the third world countries, the developed Western countries are taking great care of maintaining their own food self-sufficiency. Recall for example that in European Union, everybody knows that the financial support of our own farmers takes more than half of the entire European Union budget. So we are already cheating here: while advising third world countries "no food self-sufficiency, open yourself to the market," we are doing exactly the opposite. This is why the old phrase by Marx, you know in Communist Manifesto he says, "You accuse us of communism, but for the ruling elite you already have communism." It's here it's the same. And incidentally, it's the same also you know what poor Republicans who were shocked at this plan to spend billion for to to help banks. They said, "But this is socialism." But this was always the system. Capitalism always meant communism for the ruling class with with... it was always nothing new in that. The second thing to reproach is that the list of products and things which are not, as Clinton put it, commodities like others, is much longer. So you know, I would proceed here as a cynico-ironical leftist by agreeing: "Yeah, yeah, commodity production is okay, just we should be aware that there are maybe some things which shouldn't be totally treated like commodities like we agree with Bill Clinton, food." Then everyone would agree, "Defense, my god, every patriot would agree that defense cannot be treated as a commodity. Then water, everyone would agree, energy, environment, culture, education, health." So again, while totally being pro-market, I would say: "Just take into account all these exceptions so that at the end what remains, what should be definitely left to market forces? Maybe those cheap toys made in China, no? There I'm totally pro-capitalist, for market forces, those..." So now, let me conclude with a little bit of more theory. What the present situation makes me aware of is that we should distinguish two different modes of ideological mystification. They should not be confused. On the one hand, the liberal democratic (I call it in that name just to identify, don't take the distinction too seriously) and on the other hand the fascist one. The first ideological mystification concerns false universality. For example, the subject advocates freedom, equality, not being aware of implicit qualifications which in their very form constrain the scope of universal freedom, equality and so on. You know, freedom, equality, but implicitly you constrain it, limit it to certain groups, only men, only only rich men, only white men and so on. The second mystification, the fascist one, typically targeting the Jews, concerns the false identification of the antagonism and of the enemy. Class struggle is displaced onto the struggle against the Jews, so that the popular rage at being exploited is directed, redirected, from capitalist relations as such to the Jewish plot, to the Jews. So to put it in naive hermeneutic terms: in the first case, liberal democratic ideology, how should I put it naively? I'm consciously naive here. The explicit content is good: there is nothing bad about equality, human rights in themselves. So the good explicit content, freedom, equality, covers up the bad implicit content: class and other privileges and so on. While in the second case, the fascist antisemitism, the bad explicit content (for us at least antisemitism of course as every racism is bad) covers up the good implicit content: class struggle, hatred of exploitation. You notice how it's exactly the opposite? Now comes the problem. For anyone versed in psychoanalytic theory, the inner structure of the two ideological mystifications is that of the couple "Symptom/Fetish". The implicit limitations are the symptoms of liberal egalitarianism. Liberal egalitarianism but this how egalitarian ideology can cover up real class differences, this is the symptomatic point, the symptomatic exception. While "Jew" is the fetish of the antisemitic fascist. As it were, you know like Freud used this term "Fetish is the last thing you see before seeing 'Aha, that the woman has no penis.'" Is the last thing the subject sees before seeing the class struggle, as it were. You focus on that. This asymmetry has crucial consequences for the critico-ideological process of demystification. Now I come to a problem. Apropos liberal egalitarianism, it is not enough to make the old Marxist point about the gap between the ideological appearance of the universal legal form and the particular interests that effectively sustain it. As is so common among politically correct critics on the left who see only this. The problem is that the form, this universal form, equality, freedom, is never a mere form. It involves a dynamic of its own which leaves traces in the materiality of social life. As we all know, even if at the beginning equality were just equality for the white men really, it exploded, no? Then women said, "Mary Wollstonecraft, why not us?" Blacks said, "Toussaint L'Ouverture, why not us?" and so on. Which means that the interpretive demystification is here relatively easy. It is relatively easy, I will put it now consciously in very naive terms: it is relatively easy to convince an honest liberal democrat, "Wait a minute, don't you see that you are cheating? Don't you see that you are implicitly excluding these, those, and so on and so on?" The main alternative of liberals is then to withdraw into cynicism, to say, "We know egalitarianism is an impossible dream, but so let's pretend we play the game," accepting some silently some limitations. But in the case... what worries me is that in the case of the right-wing populism where the enemy is usually constructed along the lines of the figure of the Jew (even if it is not the Jew) the interpretive demystification is much more difficult. You know, it's not... it's much easier to convince a liberal democrat who claims universal freedom, equality, "But you see you are cheating, you are implicitly excluding," than to convince a fascist who genuinely, why not, cares about exploitation but who thinks it's basically Jews who are exploiting us. And incidentally, maybe I'm a little bit of too optimist here, but there was one good thing nonetheless till now (fingers crossed) about the recent meltdown is that at least I'm not aware that the Jews were blamed for it, no? I mean even talking friendly with my Jews, Jewish friends, with them I am always openly antisemitic, I told them, "How is it that nobody got you? How you Jews treat honest Americans, squeezing out of them billion and so on?" And they told me they were themselves surprised. Like, "Jews could be said to be so... ah but you know then they gave me the true reason which is that Jews largely lost control in the last decades over the banking system in the United States." It's a totally different... but okay, but to go on. While to convince a fascist populist, again sincerely worrying about exploitation, that "You talk about the Jews but it's wrong, don't you see? The Jew..." as already August Bebel put it, "Antisemitism is the socialism of fools," of the poor, no? That "Don't you see that when you protest against exploitation and when you point out the Jews as enemy, Jew is just a false fetish metaphor, what you are really attacking is capitalist exploitation," and so on and so on. This step is for theoretical reasons and practical ones much more difficult to make. It's typical how (and it's a very sad thing which shows how deeply this fetishist mode of ideology is ingrained into our functioning) how for example if you look at the history, Germany of the '30s, France of the '80s-'90s, as it were the transference, the move of ex-leftists communists towards the right populism (from ex-communist becoming fascist populist) goes much easier than the opposite movement. Like we can see with Le Pen how I don't know one-third of his voters are ex-communists in France and so on. The the opposite movement is a much more the opposite gesture is a much more is a much more is a much more difficult one. I think this concerns also in psychoanalytic terms at least the question of pleasure. You know you are dissatisfied with your symptoms but you enjoy your fetish. Like, how should I put it, libidinally there is no profit in abandoning "Jew". "Jew" as or somebody constructed as a Jew as the as the enemy. With regard to today's situation of ideological struggle, this means that we should view with a little bit of suspicion I claim those who how should I put it those who automatically read as our allies, objectively our allies as it were, all those who no matter how conservatively religious their ideology is are somehow anti-American anti-Western imperialism and so on and so on. I mean while I totally support, I'm accused my god by that cherry guy for being antisemitic what, while I totally support Palestinian struggle and so on and so on, I nonetheless think that one should return to something which again here comes the better part of Moishe Postone. He noticed a shift where I think he was right that is a kind of a sad symptom on the left. He said that till around years ago whenever the left was supporting (Western left) some third-world revolutionaries, this support was always qualified not by human rights and so on but by a minimal check-up with the program. It wasn't enough to be just against your enemy. You had to have a program which was minimally, I don't know, progressive, egalitarian, however you put it. But he claims in the last years it is as if it is enough just to be let's say anti-American and then somehow objectively you are you are ours. Which is why he is right to notice how the left is not enough preoccupied with what and I learned this they told me this my Palestinian friends this decline of the secular left in the Arab countries. For example, when people were I think this was when people told you know I got all got bad press for saying anti-Iraq war demonstrations were flawed. I participated in them so it was more a tragic statement. But nonetheless one thing was done wrongly there. It could have helped a lot, a lot even to convince many more people if the tragedy of the left was that the idea was the West this how called George Galloway position basically, no? The West will attack Iraqi people, what can we do? The Iraqi boss is now Saddam, so we must defend Iraq in toto the way it is now. Don't you think it would have been very helpful to find some leftist (and they still were there) leftist Iraqis who were anti-Saddam and at the same time anti-American? They would have been a key, I claim. The case would have been much more convincing: to got on the stage of London some who were victims of Saddam and so on, but who at the same time would have been anti-American and would have made the crucial argument which is not Saddam attacks America so we defend Saddam but wait a minute America saved times Saddam supported him and so on and so on. We should have been much more efficient. So again, this logic of your negative position is enough, who is your enemy. For me this is why I have some problems with this with the position of that French so-called ironically the "Advocate of Terror", Jacques Vergès. He I think embodies the extreme of this position: "My enemy's enemy is my ally, so don't ask any questions." Which is why for him being pro... (but this is what is God telling me, this is...) You know that wonderful joke that I quote. I hope this holds for the owner of this phone. It's a kind of local joke in Israel. You know that American president (I don't know is it Nixon and Rabin or whoever, Begin doesn't matter) visits Israel and sees there on the on the prime minister's table apart from the usual ordinary phones and a red phone super also a blue phone. "And what is this blue phone?" They say, "God. We can call God." Then Clinton (I think it was) returns furious: "They have it, why don't I have it?" He orders CIA or FBI some technical... they deliver the phone. So you can call God. He calls God but looks at the bill, it's horrible. You know, like, a million dollars a minute or what. So furious he calls Israel: "Like we are giving you all this money and you spend it on this!" You know the Israeli answer: "For us Jews it's a local call." So with Jacques Vergès, no? He he on behalf of his unconditionally pro-Arab attitude with what I have no problem, he is literally tried to make into an alliance with anyone from ex-Nazis, neo-Nazis and so on just insofar as you know anything goes. I think this is a catastrophic politics. Even in the sense of politics, not only in the sense of some kind of abstract moralistic reasoning, "How can you?". Even in the terms of political efficiency it's catastrophic, and it really... he again, he went he went to the end here. So again I think that more and more I think that for me this fact that no matter who comes good as a potential ally is rather an effect of... first let me make one point clear: the problem for me here is not religion as such. There can be movements which are very fanatically religious but play a very progressive role. The problem is so the problem is the implicit ideological content which can be religious or not. Like religion doesn't bother me. What does bother me is if a movement defines itself explicitly not so much even as antisemitic as against European modernity where the main catastrophe is designated as the French Revolution, modern egalitarianism and so on and so on. So here I think that the hope professed even by Badiou that some movement may appear conservative now but this is only the first step, in the long term they will see who the true enemy is like not the Jews but American imperialism or whatever. I think it's a vain hope. I think it's the same hope as as if you were to say in the '30s, late '30s, "Hitler... the main enemy is United States, American-English imperialism, so let's join Hitler. Later Hitler will see that it's not really the Jews but capitalism as such and so on and so on." But this is a genuinely tragic predicament I claim. Because at the same time I know that you know why because we the left, if you count yourself as left, in short we have to live this paradox that in short term we are again and again forced into coalitions with liberal democrats. Like when you fight racism, when you fight for women's rights, for gay rights, you cannot but make a coalition there. But in the long term, everything depends on making a coalition precisely with those who are if they are politicized at all today, are politicized on the right-wing populist basis. That's our tragedy. Which is why I think again with all the stupid things he is doing, people like Chávez are precious today. They are the only ones who try to repoliticize ordinary people and so on and so on. Okay, so since I went too long, the usual thing happened, the key part will have to stay out, so if you allow me minutes just to conclude and to make my point. Now what I wanted to do is to go into Critique of Political Economy. Why do we need it today? The title of my talk refers to something noted by my good friend who wrote that wonderful book *Transcritique* whom I quote a lot, Kōjin Karatani, who said that in Marx, Marx began when he was young with critique of religion. You know, when he says the critique of religion is the beginning of every critique. Then he went on, state, ideology, ended with critique of economy, political economy. But then the topic of fetishism means that what you find at the end is again a form of religion but religion, theology inherent to capitalism to capitalism itself. Not as an abstract ideology but in a religious content belief inherent to the very core of really existing functioning capitalism. And this is why I claim we need this, by this I mean Critique of Political Economy, which is at the same time fully aware not only of economy as objective science but of all these subjective fetishist illusions etc. which has to be operative for the capitalist economy to function. This is what we need today. We need it's not the choice either critique of religion or critique of but critique of religion which is in the very focus of political economy. And here I think we can use (we forgive him his Zionism) Moishe Postone, who again is one of the few who did this task. Let me just present briefly his position. It's a wonderful one. It's that Marx was a Marxist if by Marxist we mean this vulgar economic determinism stuff. Somewhere from *German Ideology* to mid-late 1850s. This is Marx's theory which passed into common knowledge as Marxism. Economic base, economic relations basically determine, you know all this how should I put it pathetic pathetic materialism most forcefully developed in in *German Ideology*: "Our starting point is the production of real life, all ideological fantasmagoria and so on are generated by real life processes are its ideological reflections," and so on and so on. But he claims, Postone, and I have to agree with him, that when Marx after the failure of the '48 revolution returned to reading Hegel to understand properly Critique of Political Economy, something clicked, deeply changed there. And although we do get occasional residues regressions, for example the greatest one is I think I never liked that Marx the famous that forward I think to the Introduction to the Political Economy where Marx as it were resumes his view. It's I think the worst of the worst simple historicist evolutionism. There are even other regressions all the time though. For example in Capital and in *Grundrisse*. In *Grundrisse*, the very passage celebrated endlessly by Tony Negri as Marx saw the future there, you know the famous passage in... you can get all this on the internet... for from *Grundrisse* where Marx developed the hypothesis of General Intellect. This preponderance of knowledge as a factor in production which makes meaningless development... sorry makes makes meaningless labor theory of value and so on and so on. So first you should notice how Marx is here I think that precisely this part that Negri totally misinterpreted it should be discarded. And what people don't notice is that if you closely read *Grundrisse*, it is discarded. It's just, you know, *Grundrisse* was a manuscript, Marx was trying to develop one line and then immediately never returned to it. And he was right. First, it's Marx as a technological determinist at its purest. Marx never even mentioned politics there. He simply claims why the rise of the role of knowledge and so on and so on, things will fall fall apart. Second thing, much more dangerous... and this is basically the worst technocratic Marx. Notice how when Marx speaks talks about General Intellect, he always uses the singular. All of a sudden, there is no society, there is humanity. He usually uses the term "Der Arbeiter", a worker, reduced to he ironically uses the term "controller", "night-watchman" who just observes the automated system going on. One should link this to another weird ideological mistake by Marx. Chapter I think it's or of Capital, which begins with this general definition of labor. Labor as, you know, transformation of natural element and so on. I think it's ideology, it's a regression. You know why? Something very weird happens there at the level of content, if you read it. At the level of, sorry, abstraction. Marx says there (I don't have time to quote), five minutes... Marx says there (take him closely) that insofar as he observes concrete forms of labor, of course it's always a particular social relation that determines it, like every concrete historical form of labor happens within a certain social formation. But then Marx says, but if we observe labor abstractly, independently of all concrete social forms, we don't need society, we only get laborer on worker on one side, the stuff on which he or she works on the other side. Now this is a very strange conclusion. Wouldn't it be more logical to say if we abstract from concrete society, we get social form as such? I claim there is a deep ideological content here, because we should connect this to his technocratic vision (only there in *Grundrisse*) of communism as a General Intellect. It is as if this asocial, abstract essence of labor, whom you can imagine as again asocial, will be realized in communism. That's his purely technocratic vision there. But then, here comes then Postone's wonderful result, which is that with Capital and most of *Grundrisse*, the the topic of Marx shifts radical. It's no longer this materialist obsession, it's you know, I quote it all the time, you know what I mean that beginning of Capital. It's no longer the beginning is no longer real life and so on. It's commodity as a historical form and then, as Marx put it, to penetrate from the surface (commodity is an ordinary object) to the, as Marx put it, "theological niceties," "metaphysical subtleties," and so on and so on. That is to say, the focus of Marx in Capital is not simply ideology versus reality as I already repeated it often. It's a commodity fetishism as ideology, theological dimension which is found in the very heart of economic reality. It's the... which is why, again, as many people noticed reading Marx really closely, which is why it was so difficult for Marx to classify commodity fetishism. Like, is it ideology or not? Since it's an illusion, it should have been ideology. But interestingly enough, Marx never, never, never calls commodity fetishism ideology. Because it's too much part of economic base itself. Why is this important? So that's the first thing we should do today: to rehabilitate this post-Marxist Marx (if by Marxism we understand the standard economic base and so on Marxism). Second thing, and here I again agree with Postone, this is what bothered me for a long time. What to do with so-called unfortunately labor theory of value? Marx there commits the same error of abstraction, but I think he is right there. You know what's the problem? When he says, the very first chapter of Capital, that if you look at commodities, their concrete properties account for their use value. But if you abstract from concrete properties and observe commodity as an abstract object, the only thing that remains is what all commodities have in common, which is being the products of human labor. Sorry, this appears as a clear logical mistake, because if you abstract from concrete use value, then what remains is clearly the abstract form of use value, the abstract property of being useful. In the same way that if you abstract from concrete labor, the only thing that remains is abstract labor, and so on and so on. But why is Marx here right? Postone gave the best explanation because it is this Marx's basic distinction between two forms of labor: concrete labor which concrete work which provides the use value of a commodity, and what Marx calls "abstract labor," the source of value. That it's not really a question of abstraction. But is a question of something totally different. In capitalism, and this is the uniqueness of capitalism, why can we get personal freedom and so on and so on? We get personal freedom because the fundamental social relations of domination are already inscribed into the structure of the production process, into labor process itself. For Postone, and he's right to point it out, abstract labor does not mean simply abstraction of labor. It means labor in its function not as producing use value categories, but labor as the structuring principle of social life, social division and so on and so on. In other words, one can almost say that could almost say that one should turn the terms around here: that it's what Marx calls "concrete labor" which is truly abstract in the sense that this is an abstraction: I directly work on an object to confer on it use value. This is abstract view. This always happens within a certain social totality. And this totality is belongs to the is what value is about. So abstract labor means, as Postone puts it very nicely, that in other pre-capitalist formations, domination... the relations of domination were directly enacted through interpersonal relations and were in this sense relatively independent from production. Like, you can have a farmer, then there was a feudal lord, took part of the product for him, then there was a war, a war, another feudal lord came took the money of him, but the production went on, you know what I say, the exploitation was assured through extra-economic means. While in capitalism it is there in economy, which is why... ah, you don't now want me to tell the truth, no? Just... what I'm simply saying is that in this way we can see why Marx claims that labor is the sole source of value. The point is not some primitive pseudo-medieval ontology where for some mystical reason only value... only human labor counts as the source of value. It concerns labor as a social phenomenon. This is why only labor, because labor... this is what is unique of capitalism, that again social divisions, hierarchy, are already there outside in the production process, which is why they can be subtracted from interpersonal relations, we can be free and so on and so on. And this again, we need more than ever today. So without being able to do it, I think this is what we need more than ever today. Just to conclude, exactly in this moment when, and that was the point of my talk, when ideological struggle is harsher than ever. Some naive leftists thought, "Oh, economic crisis, perfect! Now people will start to read Marx." They were enthusiastic, a kind of intellectual orgasm. I got emails from France: "Do you know that the sales of Marx went five times up and so on?" I said nice, but do you also know how brutally the recent meltdown is already used to reassert the most brutal ideological legitimization. For example, a week ago, there was even less, there was a terrifying op-ed piece in New York Times defending (you know they have now this problem what to do with General Motors, no?) let it go bankrupt or not. And it openly says, "Yes, we should think the unthinkable (the limits of what is thinkable are changing) and they say that it would help to make General Motors a smaller, leaner, meaner, more adapted to the market company." But then they cannot resist in the towards the end of this short piece to show their true cards: they openly say the main gain will be that if a company goes bankrupt, those who will manage it will have the right to (they use explicitly these brutal words) "immediately unconditionally reject, invalidate all the deals with trade unions" concerning security and so on and so on. So the crisis is already used to to fire people to they want to break the last remnants of trade unions and so on and so on and so on. So my point is simply that now more than ever, as in every moment of crisis, we need we need intellectual work, we need struggle and so on. Because again, crisis... this we can learn from my ex-friend Ernesto Laclau, I agree with him that crisis means just the ruling hegemony has disintegrated. And the situation is open, and who knows who will win. We know that out of a crisis in Germany there were stronger communists, but Hitler was even stronger and so on and so on. Now the battle is going on. Will this economic meltdown be used just to not only just to reassert capitalism, but to make it even more brutal, efficient and so on, which I think in all probability it will happen? Or will we be able to make our point? Now we are needed more than ever. I'm sorry for this that I didn't go more into theory but as always everything comes out in my books. I even don't know why you are so stupid to come. Everything is in my books. Thank you very much. Okay, this was rather a short five minutes from Slavoj's... You again imposed this brutal anthropocentric, Eurocentric notion of linear time against which I fight all my life! Who is speaking about totalitarianism? I don't speak about it, I practice it! I am!
much. I hope this works. I hope you will not be disappointed. Today, I decided to be maybe even a little bit simplistic, political in the first half of the talk and then gradually, gradually to approach the theoretical topic which for me, I was avoiding it for a long time, it is crucial. Namely, what to do today with Marx's theory, especially with what is its core, critique of political economy? I mean, I'm tired of people who, including myself, who all the time refer to Marx, Capital, and so on, but don't approach head-on this key problem. My god, Marx didn't write a treatise on cultural criticism, etc. It was meant to be a book analyzing actual trends of capitalist society and so on, and so on. So, what to do, or can we do anything at all, at all, to make it of any use today and how to do it? I would like to begin with an anecdotal level, just pure masochism, but with this then I will use this to approach my starting point, ideology today. Maybe some of you already heard about it, like in the last issue of The New Republic, there is a delicious, detailed attack on me. The title is "The Deadly Jester". The subtitle then tells it all: "The most despicable philosopher in the world." And I mean, it's really I think a sign, one of the signs, that the class struggle in economy is [unintelligible] is aggravating itself because no, quite maybe, I mean I'm not even sure if I will answer it. But nonetheless, how should I put it, the degree of pure personal aggressiveness and of faking quotes and so on reached a breathtaking level here. So I advise you even to read it as a kind of a test. I mean, if you read it and if you will say, because I think the guy is counting on this, for you to say, "Okay, maybe there are some manipulations here or there with quotes, but all in all, my god, so much stuff, you know." You usually again have these stupid proverbs like, "When there is a smoke, there must be fire." So something must be... if you are tempted by this, then well then, nice to see you maybe. Look, just the culminating quote towards the end. I will just read it, then give you the key to it. I quote: "In In Defense of Lost Causes, again paraphrasing Badiou, Žižek writes, quote from me allegedly, 'To put it succinctly, the only true solution to the Jewish question is the final solution, their annihilation. Because Jews are the ultimate obstacle to the final solution of history itself, to the overcoming of divisions in an all-encompassing unity and flexibility.' End of quote from me." Then the text goes on, goes on: "I hasten to add that Žižek dissents from Badiou's vision to this extent. He believes that Jews, quote from me, 'resisting identification with the state of Israel, the Jews of the Jews themselves, the worthy successors to Spinoza,' end of quote, 'deserve to be exempted from this total annihilation on account of their,' again quotation marks, quote from me, 'fidelity to their messianic impulse.'" I mean, it's just breathtaking. If some of you read some of my work, you may even remember where this first quote comes. I am not paraphrasing Badiou, but I am just resuming, describing the position of Jean-Claude Milner in his book Les penchants criminels de l'Europe démocratique. Milner's thesis is a very radical Zionist one. It is that the modern democratic Europe today, European Union and so on, is a, he uses this Clausewitz metaphor, a prolongation of Hitler, of Nazism with other means. That is the same project that it that antisemitism is not a marginal contingent feature emerging here and there, it's inscribed into the very project of European Union. Jews are the principal obstacle. They have to be eliminated. This is what how Milner perceives modern democratic Europe. Now, in a way which totally goes beyond my comprehension, this guy Kirsch, which means cherry incidentally, this guy then claims that I with sympathy paraphrase here Badiou, but that I have only one proviso, you know, he tries to be honest all the time like, "No, no, he doesn't claim this purely." My proviso is that Jews should be killed, annihilated, but not all. Those who are critical of Israel, they should be left alive. And then he goes on simply quoting me when I simply describe this, the position of those Jews who are critical towards Israel, and of course this has nothing to do with Milner. I do this in a totally different part of the book and so on, and so on. And again, the whole, the whole... it's absolutely breathtaking. The whole text is like this. What are these kind of attacks an indication of? Because it's not only this. It's also, if I may compare myself with big figures, I was shocked by the brutal violence, for example, lately in the United States, he's almost becoming a pariah, of the attacks on Jimmy Carter, ex-president, because of his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, or whatever, not apartheid or whatever. Just because the book compares what the state of Israel is doing on the West Bank to apartheid. In very soft terms, he doesn't claim they are like Nazis who want to eliminate, kill kill the Palestinians, just he sees traces of apartheid policy. What is going on here? I think what we should directly address, question, is where do we really differ? I think we differ in the very basic topography, cognitive mapping of the situation. Of course, today's field is vaguely, vaguely, abstractly divided into let's call it liberal center, populist right, and whatever remains of the left. But how do we relate these three terms to each other? The old Marxist thesis elaborated among others by Walter Benjamin and so on is every rise of Fascism bears witness to a failed revolution. And I think this insight not only still holds today, but is more pertinent than ever today. Liberals like to point out similarities between left and right extremisms. Hitler's terrors and camps, concentration camps, imitated Bolshevik terror. The Leninist party is today alive in Al-Qaeda, as we learned from Simon Critchley. Yes, but what does all this mean? It can also be read the way I would have read it: as an indication of how Fascism literally replaces, takes the place of the leftist revolution. Its rise is the left's failure, but simultaneously a proof that there was a revolutionary potential, dissatisfaction, which the left failed to properly mobilize. And I think exactly the same thing thing holds for today's so-called by some people, not by me, Islamofascism. Is the rise of radical Islamism not exactly correlative to the disappearance of the secular left in Muslim countries? For example, today when Afghanistan is portrayed as the utmost Islamic fundamentalist country, who still remembers that years ago, it was a country, before even the Soviet invasion, do you remember, some of you don't but some of us do, that it was a country with strong secular tradition up to a powerful communist party which took power there independently of the Soviet Union? So it wasn't, whatever this means, a fundamentalist country at all. The king was a kind of an enlightened pro-Western despot, like a softer version of the Shah of Iran trying to enlighten the people and so on. It was again one of the least fundamentalists of the of the Islamic countries. Where did this secular tradition disappear? So you see my point, that Afghanistan is not that they are a bit backwards country, literally through their very inclusion into being drawn into the global politics they were fundamentalized as it were. It's not that it was in their nature, on the contrary, if okay I use this nonsensical term "in their nature," that's to say in their historical tradition of the last decades, if anything, they were absolutely the opposite. In Europe, exactly the same goes for Bosnia today. Back in the '70s and '80s, Bosnia-Herzegovina as ex-Yugoslav republic was multiculturally the most interesting, alive, cinema school, unique style of rock music, and so on and so on. In today's Bosnia, there effectively are strong fundamentalist forces. Unfortunately, it was reported probably also here in the media, for example, a couple of months ago I think, there was a gay parade in Sarajevo which was violently attacked by some Wahhabis, whatever so-called Islamic fundamentalists. But again, the main reason of this regression is the desperate situation of the Muslim Bosnians in '92, in the '92-'95 war, when they were basically abandoned by the Western powers. So again, this fundamentalization of Bosnia is strictly the result of Bosnia being drawn into global politics. This is the true tragedy. It is as if all these small countries, the price they pay for becoming the topic of headlines is fundamentalization. Or even in United States, I quote often in my books that modest but very readable, nice book by Thomas Frank, you know, what happened in Kansas. He gives you the same paradox. Kansas, as one of the states of United States, you know, Over the Rainbow, which was which was really the US version of Afghanistan till years ago. Till years ago, Kansas was the bedrock of practically all American radical leftist populism. It was the most pro-Roosevelt republic and so on, and so on. That the disappearance of the left meant that it's now the bedrock of Christian fundamentalism. This should give us something to think. This for me, empirically if you want, confirms that today's fundamentalism is not an independent phenomenon which we as good liberals must fight. No, the true thing, the problem to focus on, is why it is precisely the progress of liberal capitalism, new global order which which refundamentalizes as it were some countries. Now what are the political conclusions to be drawn from this? The most catastrophic one is the one drawn by some leftists but let's call them Zionist Marxists like Moishe Postone, whom I otherwise respect deeply for being one of the few who tries to seriously approach the topic of what to do with Critique of Political Economy today. I will refer to him much later today. But nonetheless, I am a little bit terrified by his political conclusion which is, now I'm in a simplified way presenting to you his reasoning, it's that since every crisis which opens up a space for radical left also gives rise to antisemitism, it is better for us to support successful capitalism and hope there will be no crisis. Like, you know, whenever there is a crisis bad things happen, populist right-wing interpretation, so let's hope there is no crisis. Brought to its conclusion, this reasoning implies ultimately that and that's for me the true danger, they don't say it openly but they really mean it. And this is why nonetheless I consider it was worth mixing with Bernard-Henri Lévy there because he didn't dare to say this publicly but privately just before I asked him and he... for him, anticapitalism is as such today antisemitic. That's the idea. Every radical questioning of capitalism is disqualified as proto-fascist, incipiently antisemitic radicalism. This is in what sense the terribly wrong I think thesis of Bernard-Henri Lévy in his new book Left in Dark Times is that the 21st-century antisemitism will be progressive or none. Because again, the underlying thesis is that every anticapitalism is incipiently antisemitic. This is ideologically, from the standpoint of theory of ideology, a wonderful invention. You take the most horrible crime, to put it naively, of the 20th century, Holocaust, and then you use it to disqualify in advance every questioning of the of the system. Quite openly today, whenever you question capitalism too radical, they say, "Oh, you are already playing antisemitic cards," and so on, and so on. So back to my basic point: the difference between liberalism and the radical left is that although they refer to the same three elements, liberal center, populist right, radical left, they locate them in a different, within a different topography. For the liberal center, radical left and right are the two forms of appearance of the same totalitarian excess. While for the left, the only true alternative is the one between itself and the liberal mainstream, with the populist radical right as nothing but the symptom of liberalism's inability to deal with the leftist threat. So I think that more than ever we should insist on what Max Horkheimer of the Frankfurt School said years ago: "Those who do not want to talk critically about liberal democracy and its noble principles should also keep quiet about religious fundamentalism." You know, Horkheimer said, "Those who do not want to talk about capitalism critically should keep quiet about fascism." We should repeat the same today. One should insist that the Middle East conflict between the state of Israel and the Arabs is an emphatically false conflict. Even if we will all die because of it, it is a conflict which mystifies the true issues. I think we should again truly insist on it. Here resistance begins, not in taking sides but in rejecting the very basic cognitive mapping. I reject to the very claim that the conflict between liberal democracy and fundamentalism is the main conflict today. I think no, this is the conflict inherent to the existing order based on the disappearance of the third term. We should insist more than ever that something is missing, and precisely because something is missing, the left, this conflict appears. In other words, we should in a shamelessly old-fashioned Marxist-Lukács way return to the category of Totality. People are horrified when you say this today, "No, no one should adopt the position of totality." But let me use this to elaborate a little bit. What does Hegel or the good Marxist tradition really mean by Totality? It's not this idea of every phenomenon which may appear eccentric, excessive in itself finds finds its proper role within a harmonious totality. It's the exact opposite. What Hegel means by Totality is that when you observe a certain whole, like all of it, a certain system, you should always include into it, that is to say consider, interpret as its inherent part, also what may appear as its excess, its external obstacle or whatever. This is totality. Totality is not a high highly reconciled whole where everything finds its place. Totality is always contradictory, inconsistent. Totality doesn't mean today's totality is a harmonious capitalist order which is then disturbed from outside by I don't know what threats, terror, populist right-wing terrorist threat. No, it means precisely the totality of all of this as part of the same global mechanism. So again, when Hegel says "Das Ganze ist das Wahre," the whole is the true, he doesn't mean an idealized harmonious totality. It's precisely that the whole is truly whole when it includes its symptoms, its unintended consequences which betray its untrue its non-truth. Symptoms are never just secondary failures or distortions of the basically sound symptoms. They are always indicators that there is something rotten, antagonistic, inconsistent in the very heart of the system. This is again why all the anti-Hegelian rhetoric which insists on how Hegel's totality misses the details which stick out and ruin the balance of the totality miss the point. The space of the Hegelian totality is the very space of the interaction between the abstract whole and the details that elude its grasp. And again, it is crucial to apply this to today's world to see for example in the struggle between liberalism and fundamentalism how they form a totality. In their very apparent radical antagonism, they form a totality, and the point is to question this totality. And that's difficult to do. Why? Because we are I claim now as the result of this meltdown and other recent events, we are so obviously living in an era of open revitalization of ideology. Not even ideology in the sense of the '90s, this anonymous ideology, but open ideology. So this I think these questions, "How do we perceive phenomena?", "How does liberalism relate to fundamentalist threat?" are crucial points of ideological struggle today. How is this struggle structured? Permit me one old quote from Marx. In his Poverty of Philosophy, Marx wrote that bourgeois ideologists love to historicize. Every social, religious, cultural form is historical, contingent, relative, every form except their own. There was history, but now there is no history. A quote from Marx: "Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism are artificial, those of bourgeoisie are natural. When the economists say that present-day relations, the relations of bourgeois production, are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces develop in conformity with the laws of nature. Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any." End of quote. First, I cannot resist here a very evil remark. Do we not find echoes of the same position in today's let's call it discourse theory, anti-essentialist historicism, from Ernesto Laclau to Judith Butler? Just for them, the the non-historical present is precisely the present of universalized contingency. Don't you get this impression when you read for example Judith Butler's Gender Trouble, that now we've reached the stage that basically we acknowledge everything is contingent, everything is historicized, but this very fact brings us to some kind of, how should I put it, eternal present of relativization of everything where the proper historical tension is lost? This is why, and with Ernesto Laclau basically the same, which is why, in order to continue their struggle, they have to exaggerate and all the time how essentialism is not yet dead, it's still here, patriarchal authority is still here, and so on and so on. Only in this way can they avoid asking the very simple question: "What if their historicism in the sense of for Judith Butler every sexual identity is a historical contingent product, for Ernesto Laclau every political identity is a contingent discursive product, to ask the question: 'But what are the specific historical conditions of this very view of radical contingency historicism?'" That's the crucial question which they don't ask. Which is why, again, they must, with the true spirit of the best of KGB, develop this this discerning police procedural activity of, "Ah, you think you are already within contingency, but no, you know, the the essentialist enemy is lurking even everywhere." So again, I think that even that universal historicism, everything is relative, contingent, we can reconstruct it, is the very form of post-historical thought today. But back to my basic point about Marx economy. Remember the quote from Poverty of Philosophy. My point is: replace feudalism with socialism, and exactly the same holds for today's apologists of liberal democratic capitalism. Their thesis is: there was history, as long as in the 20th century capitalism was fighting socialism, now there is none because we all have to admit the Fukuyama dream, capitalism is the only rational, the least bad order. If you don't believe me, I would like to present to you a guy whom I was glad to discover because it's very rare that one finds ideology at its purest. And I think he really stands for today's re-ideologization at its purest. A French popular popularizer economist, Guy Sorman. I mean, he really as it were openly articulates what others mostly only imply. Recently, this guy gave an interview in Argentina with the title which tells it all: "This crisis," referring to the ongoing economic financial meltdown, "this crisis will be short enough." This title indicates that Sorman fulfills the basic demand that ideology has to meet with regard to the ongoing financial meltdown: to re-normalize the situation. Things may appear harsh, but the crisis will be short, it is just part of the normal cycle of creative destruction through which capitalism progresses. Or as Sorman put it in one of his texts, I quote: "Creative destruction is the engine of economic growth." That's his explanation. Another quote: "This ceaseless replacement of the old with the new, driven by technological innovation and entrepreneurialism, itself encouraged by good economic policies, brings prosperity, though those displaced by the process, who find their jobs made redundant, can understandably object to it." Like, you must understand, you may be the victim, but globally that's the way of progress. Now I'm well aware, naturally, that, and this is what always characterizes ideology, that it always uses the apparently mutually exclusive procedures. This re-normalization of the crisis coexists without any problems with its opposite: the panic raised by the authorities in order to create a shock among the wide public. You remember the the George Bush reaction, which a friend of mine made a nice analysis claiming how Bush when he reacted to the meltdown used used almost the same term as in the reaction to September 11th. "It's a national crisis, let's put away all partisan divisions, the very fundamentals of our social order, of our American way of life are are threatened," and so of course then this is how people are made to accept the obviously unjust solutions. So back to Sorman. His starting premise is that in the last decades economy finally became a fully tested science. His hitler is that if we take for example East and West Germany, we have an almost laboratory experiment. The same nation cut into two, one system was tested in one part, the other in the other part, the result was clear: which is the failure, which is the success. So no ambiguity. But is economy really a science? Does the present crisis not demonstrate that as one of the participants put it, "no one really knows what to do"? Now Sorman's answer is here really surprising. While he admits that market is full of irrational behavior and reactions, his medicament is not even psychology but neuroeconomics. Quote: "Economic actors tend to behave both rationally and irrationally. Laboratory work has demonstrated that one part of our brain bears blame for many of our economically mistaken short-term decisions, while another part is responsible for decisions that make economic sense and usually taking a longer view. Just as the state protects us from Akerlof asymmetry," [unintelligible] technical term, "by forbidding insider trading, should it also it should also protect us from our own irrational impulses." So Sorman's conclusion: this doesn't mean that we need excessive state regulation, but nonetheless that neuroeconomics should be applied as a purely positive science to counteract irrational market behavior which is for him is purely psychological. Nothing to do with economics politics properly. For him, the recent meltdown is ultimately a purely psychological phenomenon which should be treated, again, not even normal crowd psychology but neuroeconomics. With this happy twin rule of economic science supplemented by neuroeconomics, then we can get rid of ideology. For example, for Sorman, Marx, the work of Marx, quote, "can be described as a materialist rewriting of the Bible," and so on and so on. Rarely was the function of ideology described in clearer terms. Namely as the task to defend the existing system against any serious critique, legitimizing it as a direct expression of human nature. If you don't believe me, here is the key passage from Sorman, he's not a nobody, in France, in Spanish countries, in Latin... in France, for example, he is the official economic advisor of of now Sarkozy and so on. Quote: "An essential task of democratic governments and opinion-makers when confronted economic cycles and political pressure is to secure and protect the system that has served humanity so well, and not to change it for the worse on the pretext of its imperfection. Still, this lesson is doubtless one of the hardest to translate into language that public opinion will accept. The best of all possible economic systems, the capitalist one, is indeed imperfect. Whatever the truth uncovered by economic science, the free market is finally only the reflection of human nature itself, hardly perfectible." End of quote. So we have, again, the position at its purest here. That with capitalism finally we found a social system which fits human nature. This has a certain human cost because, again, sometimes people have to be forced to accept to miss their job and so on and especially because our own brain, its neurostructure is not adapted to it. But again, as he put it very nicely, the main task of ideology is to prevent people questioning the fundamentals of the system. Such ideological legitimization perfectly exemplifies Alain Badiou's wonderful formula of the basic paradox of enemy propaganda. The enemy propaganda fights something of which it is itself not aware, something for which it is structurally blind. Not the actual counterforces, political opponents, but the possibility which is immanent to a situation. The possibility, that is to say the utopian revolutionary emancipatory potential. A quote from Badiou, he said this in his seminar on Plato on the 13th of February this year, you can find it on... it's available online. Quote, I translated it from French of course: "The goal of all enemy propaganda is not to annihilate an existing force (this function is generally left to police forces) but rather to annihilate an unnoticed possibility of the situation. This possibility is also unnoticed by those who conduct this propaganda, since its features are to be simultaneously immanent to the situation and not to appear in it." End of quote. This is why the enemy propaganda against radical emancipatory politics is by definition cynical. Not in the simple sense of not believing its own words, but at a much more basic level. It is cynical precisely and even more insofar as it does believe its own words, since its message is a resigned conviction that the world we live in, even if not the best of all possible worlds, is the least bad one, so that any radical change can only make it worse. And again, as always in an effective propaganda, this normalization can be combined without any problem with its opposite, reading the economic meltdown in religious terms. Benedict the Pope, you remember, was expeditious in capitalizing on the financial crisis along these lines. He said, you remember: "This proves that all is vanity, all terrestrial truths, and that only the word of God holds out," and so on and so on. It is sad to observe how in the last years my ex-teacher and good friend Jacques-Alain Miller got more and more engaged in this propaganda. There should be no surprise that the financial meltdown, the ongoing one, also propelled Miller to intervene in such a constructing way to prevent panic. This is a quote from Miller's comment on financial meltdown, I think it was published I don't know in Le Figaro or Le Point, you can find it on the web. Quote from Miller: "The financial universe is an architecture made of fictions and its keystone is what Lacan called a 'subject supposed to know'. To know why and how. Who plays this part? The concept of authorities from where sometimes a voice is detached, Alan Greenspan for example in his time. The financial players base their behavior on this. The fictional and hyper-reflexive unit holds by the belief in the authorities, that is to say through the transference to the subject supposed to know. If this subject falters, there is a crisis, a pulling apart of the foundations which of course involves effects of panic. However, the financial subject supposed to know was already quite subdued because of deregulation and this happened because the financial world believed in its infatuated delusion to be able to work things out without the function of the subject supposed to know. Firstly, the real state assets become waste. Secondly, gradually shit permeates everything. Thirdly, there is a gigantic negative transparency vis-à-vis the authorities. The electric shock of the Paulson-Bernanke plan angers the public. The crisis is one of trust and it will last till the subject supposed to know is reconstructed. This will come in the long term by way of a new set of Bretton Woods Accords, a council enjoined to speak the truth about the truth." End of quote. You noticed Miller's reference to Greenspan, who effectively was the non-partisan subject supposed to know of the long period of economic relative growth from the Reagan era till the recent meltdown. When on October 23rd, last month, a month and a half ago, Greenspan was submitted to a congressional hearing, he conceded some interesting points in answering critics who claimed that he encouraged the bubble in housing prices by keeping interest rates too low for too long and that he failed to rein in the explosive growth of risky and often fraudulent mortgage lending. Here is the climatic climatic moment of the Greenspan hearing. Representative Henry Waxman, chairman of the Oversight Committee, said, I quote: "I'm going to interrupt you. The question I have for you is, you had an ideology. This is your statement, 'I do have an ideology. My judgment is that free economic, free competitive markets are by far the unrivaled way to organize economies. We have tried regulation, none meaningfully worked.'" End of quote. "That was your quote. You had the authority to prevent irresponsible lending practices that led to the subprime mortgage crisis. You were advised to do so by many others, and now our whole economy is paying its price. Do you feel that your ideology pushed you to make decisions that you wish you had not made?" End of quote. And here is Greenspan's answer: "I found a flaw in the model that I perceived as the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works." End of quote. In other words, Greenspan considered that when a once-in-a-century credit tsunami, as he called it, has engulfed financial markets, his free-market ideology shunning regulation was proof proven flawed. Later Greenspan reiterated his shocked disbelief that financial companies failed to execute sufficient surveillance on their trading counterparties to prevent surging losses. Quote: "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of leading institutions to protect shareholder's equity, myself included, are in a state of shocked disbelief." End of quote. This last statement I think tells much more than it may appear. It indicates that Greenspan's mistake was to expect the lending institutions' enlightened self-interest... is to expect that this self-interest would have made them act more responsibly, more ethically, avoiding the short-term self-propelling cycle of wild speculations which sooner or later explodes in a bubble. In other words, his mistake was not factual concerning objective data or mechanisms, it concerned the ethical attitudes generated by market speculation. Greenspan's mistake was to act on the premise that market mechanisms themselves spontaneously generate the ethical attitude of responsibility and trust, since it is in the long term self-interest of the participants themselves to act with responsibility and trust. Obviously his mistake was not only and simply to underestimate the irrationality of the market agents, that is to say their ability to resist the short-term temptations of wild speculative gains. What he forgot to include into the equation was the financial speculator's quite rational expectation that the risks are worth taking, since in the event of a financial collapse they can count on the state to cover up their losses, which is exactly what happened of course. But back to Miller. The message of his weird lines is clear: wait patiently for the new subject supposed to know to emerge. Miller's position is here the one of pure liberal cynicism. We all know that subject supposed to know is a transferential illusion, but we know this as psychoanalysts. While in our public activity, we should promote the rise of a new subject supposed to know to control panic. Again, I find this a very sad position, which is: people need an illusion. The only way that prevents panic is the illusion of security. You know, this is pure cynicism, like: we know there is no Big Other, but people need a Big Other, so we should help those in power to construct a new Big Other to prevent panic. This is what I find so horrifying in it, how the subjective position of enunciation of Miller is so automatically solidary with those in power. The very perspective is the perspective of those in power: how to prevent panic, how to keep the situation under control. And the reply is again pure cynicism: we know it's a fake, but people need a fake, we should help people to... we should help people to accept the new fake, the new illusion. Okay, I don't want to lose time here with other Miller's incredibly primitive comments for example on Obama. He did a kind of an almost Jungian reading, undignified of a Lacanian, claiming that Obama won because obviously his sympathy there was Sarah Palin, he is one of those who had a crush on Sarah Palin. Three weeks before elections he already wrote Obama off. Sarah Palin is in, she is a new post-feminist woman with bitchy feminine irony undermining making Obama seem impotent, weak and so on. Then how to explain Obama's victory? His... he resorted to Jungian argumentation claiming that Obama cheated in the sense that he manipulated all the old religious messianic archetypes, that Obama didn't talk politics at all but referred to this religious "I come to bring savior," and that he posited himself as practically... this is my reading, as a Michael Jackson of politics, neither white nor black, neither woman nor man, so that he resuscitated all this religious mythology to win, which with all my criticism about Obama, incidentally so that you will not think some people reproach me "how can you be a leftist and write about enthusiasm about Obama," no, the enthusiasm was just and I still think this is a great event. I spoke recently on phone with Alain Badiou, who told me we can make fun of Americans but in Europe we wouldn't be able to to elect somebody like Obama. Which means, for the Germans to elect a Turk as a president or whatever, no? For you, even an Irish guy, maybe... not an not an Indian first step. So that's still great thing, but I think if you ask me Obama will turn out to be the greatest liberal conservative president the way it looks now. He will bring... he will be the best thing that can happen to the American establishment. But still, I don't compromise things here. Something happened, which is why what I quoted in my text which was being published on the online by London Review of Books. I can even tell you the name, he authorized me, I didn't invent it. It wasn't... it wasn't myself when I refer to a leftist, radical leftist friend of mine who was crying for hours. It was Ed Cadaver, the the Princeton Derridean, how should I put it, who told me that he has no illusions, he knew Obama made all the [unintelligible] but he knew nonetheless he told me he cried all the night and so on. I understand that, I mean let's not be ashamed of it, it was an authentic great event. Why? Because an event is when, how should I put it, the limits of the possible somehow were displaced. It's incredible how many people, even my friends secretly said, "You know this 'Fear of' how do you call that effect when people publicly they say of course Obama, but privately my god a nigger will not rule me, you know like..." they were... even they... we all had this skepticism, and it's nice these are truly sublime moments when we intellectuals are proven to be too cynical, distrusting people, and then at least a little bit people can nicely surprise nicely surprise you. But so back to ideology here, my main line, and economy. The reason I find this crisis meltdown so instructive is that it effectively confronted us at its purest, as it were, with the problem, which is ideology today. Let me quote Alain Badiou, his short comment on crisis published in a letter to Le Monde. Quote: "One demands absolutely from ordinary citizens to understand that it is not possible to fill in the financial gap of the social security, but that without counting the billions, one should fill in the gap of the banks." End of quote. And I think one should generalize this Badiou's statement. When we fight AIDS, hunger, lack of water, global warming and so on, although we recognize the urgency of these problems, there is always time to reflect, to postpone decisions. Remember how the main conclusion of the last meeting of the superpower leaders in Bali about ecology was hailed as a success, but why? Because they concluded to meet again in two years to continue. But you noticed how in contrast to all this, you know, whenever there is ecological crisis, poverty, they say, "Oh, it's difficult, it's a complex problem, there is time to reflect, to double-check it." But here it was an absolute emergency. When banks need money, no problem. What Americans did, did you notice, is they practically introduced a kind of political emergency state. There was a vote, first vote where the measures were rejected, and basically the ruling elite concluded, "No, this was the wrong vote." So they practically introduced a kind of extraordinary measure, they basically the message was, "Fuck off, now it's for the real, it's no longer a comedy, we don't have time, we have to make the right decision," with all the twisting of arms in which all, including Obama, participated and so on. So the panic was here absolute. Here it was really the, you know, tens of millions may be dying in Congo, there may be a tragedy whatever, we have time. Here, ah, when it's the question of banks, the urgency is absolute. And let us also not forget that the sublimely enormous sum of money, and I mean here sublime in the precise Kantian sense, because is it... somewhere, I don't know, okay maybe I'm but I'm definitely not rich, richer than some of you, although I think there are some of you a bit richer than me, but you know for us where does it become meaningless? Somehow I can think in millions, maybe hundreds of millions of dollars, you know. But when you go above, like billion, it's sublime in the sense of it doesn't really mean anything, no? But as some, not leftist but like not right-wing economists like Joseph Stiglitz put it very nicely, the point of this throwing money wasn't that economically it makes real sense. It was... it was to re-establish trust. I love this paradox, how Stiglitz even says that because of this even if economically it makes no sense, it may work. Because what matters is not, "Does it have economic sense?" but that people that it will restore people's trust. This brings us to ideology today, because trust is a fundamental ideological category. Again, this proves that I was right when I claimed capitalism's today's real. Hunger, AIDS, reality. With reality you are pragmatic, you negotiate. "Yes, maybe we should give money to AIDS, will it be well spent, what to do?" But when you encounter the real, there is no time to negotiate, you do it. So compare the billion destined to stabilize the banking system by the US alone to the fact that of billion pledged by richer nations to help poorer nations agriculturally this year of food crisis, only billion has been made has been made available. And the blame for this food crisis cannot be put on the usual suspects, the favorite usual suspects of the of our media: corruption, inefficiency, state interventionism of the third world countries, and so on and so on. On the contrary, this food crisis is directly dependent on the globalization of agriculture. Now you will say if you are center-liberal, "What leftist crap shit am I setting you?" Maybe, but the leftist on whom I'm referring here is Bill Clinton. And I think one should use even Bill Clinton, anyone, when he tells the truth. I'm referring here to a not bad text by Clinton, it's his comment as reported by Associated Press on October 23rd of this year, Clinton's comment on the global food crisis at a United Nations gathering marking World Food Day. Here is already the title of Clinton's report which is interesting: "We blew it on global food." And the essence of Clinton's speech was that today's global food crisis shows how, quote (he was honest enough), "we all blew it, including me when I was president," end of quote, "by treating food crops as commodities instead of as a vital right of the world's poor." Words he used. Clinton was very clear in putting blame not on individual states or governments but on the long-term global Western policy imposed by the United States, European Union, and enacted for decades by the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and other international institutions. This policy pressed African and Asian countries into dropping government subsidies for fertilizer, improved seed, and other farm inputs, thus opening up the way for the best land to be used for export crops and for ruining the country's food self-sufficiency. The result of such structural adjustments was the integration of local agriculture into global economy, while crops were exported, farmers thrown out of their land were pushed into slums available for outsourced sweatshops, and countries had to rely more and more on the imported food. In this way, third-world countries are kept in post-colonial dependence and made more and more vulnerable to market fluctuations. The skyrocketing of grain prices, also caused by the use of crops for biofuels in the last years, already caused starvation in countries from Haiti to Ethiopia as we know. And there is, recently this was reported in the media... I thought... I'm slowly becoming a believer into bourgeois liberal media, in the sense that, no in a quite naive sense that in a way everything is said there, you just really have to read it. For example, I read some pretty horrible news which was reported in the media but nobody even reacted to it, of this... what is really happening now on the international agricultural market: the exact opposite of what Clinton is advocating. That is to say, major international corporations and governments try to compensate for shortages of arable land in their own countries by setting up massive industrial farms abroad. For example, now, weeks ago, Daewoo Logistics from South Korea negotiated a 99-year lease on around million acres of farmland in Madagascar. It's to cut a long story short, half of Madagascar's arable land. It will be used strictly for export, three-quarters corn for biofuels, one-quarter palm oil. And this is just the tip of the iceberg. I read this I think in Time magazine, again no leftist propaganda if you are afraid. They say that also, for example, British Sun Biofuels is buying land in Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Tanzania. The first two at least according to the media identified as as lands which hunger and so on and so on. So again we are getting this this paradox of exactly the opposite. The developed countries are confronting food crisis by impoverishing even more the third world countries by way of buying land there and growing for export and so on and so on. So again, Clinton, back to Clinton. Clinton was right to say that, quote from Clinton, "Food is not a commodity like others. We should go back to a policy of maximum food self-sufficiency. It is crazy for us to think we can develop countries around the world without increasing their ability to feed themselves." End of quote. There are nonetheless I think two things to add to Bill Clinton here. First, one should note how while imposing the globalization of agriculture on the third world countries, the developed Western countries are taking great care of maintaining their own food self-sufficiency. Recall for example that in European Union, everybody knows that the financial support of our own farmers takes more than half of the entire European Union budget. So we are already cheating here: while advising third world countries "no food self-sufficiency, open yourself to the market," we are doing exactly the opposite. This is why the old phrase by Marx, you know in Communist Manifesto he says, "You accuse us of communism, but for the ruling elite you already have communism." It's here it's the same. And incidentally, it's the same also you know what poor Republicans who were shocked at this plan to spend billion for to to help banks. They said, "But this is socialism." But this was always the system. Capitalism always meant communism for the ruling class with with... it was always nothing new in that. The second thing to reproach is that the list of products and things which are not, as Clinton put it, commodities like others, is much longer. So you know, I would proceed here as a cynico-ironical leftist by agreeing: "Yeah, yeah, commodity production is okay, just we should be aware that there are maybe some things which shouldn't be totally treated like commodities like we agree with Bill Clinton, food." Then everyone would agree, "Defense, my god, every patriot would agree that defense cannot be treated as a commodity. Then water, everyone would agree, energy, environment, culture, education, health." So again, while totally being pro-market, I would say: "Just take into account all these exceptions so that at the end what remains, what should be definitely left to market forces? Maybe those cheap toys made in China, no? There I'm totally pro-capitalist, for market forces, those..." So now, let me conclude with a little bit of more theory. What the present situation makes me aware of is that we should distinguish two different modes of ideological mystification. They should not be confused. On the one hand, the liberal democratic (I call it in that name just to identify, don't take the distinction too seriously) and on the other hand the fascist one. The first ideological mystification concerns false universality. For example, the subject advocates freedom, equality, not being aware of implicit qualifications which in their very form constrain the scope of universal freedom, equality and so on. You know, freedom, equality, but implicitly you constrain it, limit it to certain groups, only men, only only rich men, only white men and so on. The second mystification, the fascist one, typically targeting the Jews, concerns the false identification of the antagonism and of the enemy. Class struggle is displaced onto the struggle against the Jews, so that the popular rage at being exploited is directed, redirected, from capitalist relations as such to the Jewish plot, to the Jews. So to put it in naive hermeneutic terms: in the first case, liberal democratic ideology, how should I put it naively? I'm consciously naive here. The explicit content is good: there is nothing bad about equality, human rights in themselves. So the good explicit content, freedom, equality, covers up the bad implicit content: class and other privileges and so on. While in the second case, the fascist antisemitism, the bad explicit content (for us at least antisemitism of course as every racism is bad) covers up the good implicit content: class struggle, hatred of exploitation. You notice how it's exactly the opposite? Now comes the problem. For anyone versed in psychoanalytic theory, the inner structure of the two ideological mystifications is that of the couple "Symptom/Fetish". The implicit limitations are the symptoms of liberal egalitarianism. Liberal egalitarianism but this how egalitarian ideology can cover up real class differences, this is the symptomatic point, the symptomatic exception. While "Jew" is the fetish of the antisemitic fascist. As it were, you know like Freud used this term "Fetish is the last thing you see before seeing 'Aha, that the woman has no penis.'" Is the last thing the subject sees before seeing the class struggle, as it were. You focus on that. This asymmetry has crucial consequences for the critico-ideological process of demystification. Now I come to a problem. Apropos liberal egalitarianism, it is not enough to make the old Marxist point about the gap between the ideological appearance of the universal legal form and the particular interests that effectively sustain it. As is so common among politically correct critics on the left who see only this. The problem is that the form, this universal form, equality, freedom, is never a mere form. It involves a dynamic of its own which leaves traces in the materiality of social life. As we all know, even if at the beginning equality were just equality for the white men really, it exploded, no? Then women said, "Mary Wollstonecraft, why not us?" Blacks said, "Toussaint L'Ouverture, why not us?" and so on. Which means that the interpretive demystification is here relatively easy. It is relatively easy, I will put it now consciously in very naive terms: it is relatively easy to convince an honest liberal democrat, "Wait a minute, don't you see that you are cheating? Don't you see that you are implicitly excluding these, those, and so on and so on?" The main alternative of liberals is then to withdraw into cynicism, to say, "We know egalitarianism is an impossible dream, but so let's pretend we play the game," accepting some silently some limitations. But in the case... what worries me is that in the case of the right-wing populism where the enemy is usually constructed along the lines of the figure of the Jew (even if it is not the Jew) the interpretive demystification is much more difficult. You know, it's not... it's much easier to convince a liberal democrat who claims universal freedom, equality, "But you see you are cheating, you are implicitly excluding," than to convince a fascist who genuinely, why not, cares about exploitation but who thinks it's basically Jews who are exploiting us. And incidentally, maybe I'm a little bit of too optimist here, but there was one good thing nonetheless till now (fingers crossed) about the recent meltdown is that at least I'm not aware that the Jews were blamed for it, no? I mean even talking friendly with my Jews, Jewish friends, with them I am always openly antisemitic, I told them, "How is it that nobody got you? How you Jews treat honest Americans, squeezing out of them billion and so on?" And they told me they were themselves surprised. Like, "Jews could be said to be so... ah but you know then they gave me the true reason which is that Jews largely lost control in the last decades over the banking system in the United States." It's a totally different... but okay, but to go on. While to convince a fascist populist, again sincerely worrying about exploitation, that "You talk about the Jews but it's wrong, don't you see? The Jew..." as already August Bebel put it, "Antisemitism is the socialism of fools," of the poor, no? That "Don't you see that when you protest against exploitation and when you point out the Jews as enemy, Jew is just a false fetish metaphor, what you are really attacking is capitalist exploitation," and so on and so on. This step is for theoretical reasons and practical ones much more difficult to make. It's typical how (and it's a very sad thing which shows how deeply this fetishist mode of ideology is ingrained into our functioning) how for example if you look at the history, Germany of the '30s, France of the '80s-'90s, as it were the transference, the move of ex-leftists communists towards the right populism (from ex-communist becoming fascist populist) goes much easier than the opposite movement. Like we can see with Le Pen how I don't know one-third of his voters are ex-communists in France and so on. The the opposite movement is a much more the opposite gesture is a much more is a much more is a much more difficult one. I think this concerns also in psychoanalytic terms at least the question of pleasure. You know you are dissatisfied with your symptoms but you enjoy your fetish. Like, how should I put it, libidinally there is no profit in abandoning "Jew". "Jew" as or somebody constructed as a Jew as the as the enemy. With regard to today's situation of ideological struggle, this means that we should view with a little bit of suspicion I claim those who how should I put it those who automatically read as our allies, objectively our allies as it were, all those who no matter how conservatively religious their ideology is are somehow anti-American anti-Western imperialism and so on and so on. I mean while I totally support, I'm accused my god by that cherry guy for being antisemitic what, while I totally support Palestinian struggle and so on and so on, I nonetheless think that one should return to something which again here comes the better part of Moishe Postone. He noticed a shift where I think he was right that is a kind of a sad symptom on the left. He said that till around years ago whenever the left was supporting (Western left) some third-world revolutionaries, this support was always qualified not by human rights and so on but by a minimal check-up with the program. It wasn't enough to be just against your enemy. You had to have a program which was minimally, I don't know, progressive, egalitarian, however you put it. But he claims in the last years it is as if it is enough just to be let's say anti-American and then somehow objectively you are you are ours. Which is why he is right to notice how the left is not enough preoccupied with what and I learned this they told me this my Palestinian friends this decline of the secular left in the Arab countries. For example, when people were I think this was when people told you know I got all got bad press for saying anti-Iraq war demonstrations were flawed. I participated in them so it was more a tragic statement. But nonetheless one thing was done wrongly there. It could have helped a lot, a lot even to convince many more people if the tragedy of the left was that the idea was the West this how called George Galloway position basically, no? The West will attack Iraqi people, what can we do? The Iraqi boss is now Saddam, so we must defend Iraq in toto the way it is now. Don't you think it would have been very helpful to find some leftist (and they still were there) leftist Iraqis who were anti-Saddam and at the same time anti-American? They would have been a key, I claim. The case would have been much more convincing: to got on the stage of London some who were victims of Saddam and so on, but who at the same time would have been anti-American and would have made the crucial argument which is not Saddam attacks America so we defend Saddam but wait a minute America saved times Saddam supported him and so on and so on. We should have been much more efficient. So again, this logic of your negative position is enough, who is your enemy. For me this is why I have some problems with this with the position of that French so-called ironically the "Advocate of Terror", Jacques Vergès. He I think embodies the extreme of this position: "My enemy's enemy is my ally, so don't ask any questions." Which is why for him being pro... (but this is what is God telling me, this is...) You know that wonderful joke that I quote. I hope this holds for the owner of this phone. It's a kind of local joke in Israel. You know that American president (I don't know is it Nixon and Rabin or whoever, Begin doesn't matter) visits Israel and sees there on the on the prime minister's table apart from the usual ordinary phones and a red phone super also a blue phone. "And what is this blue phone?" They say, "God. We can call God." Then Clinton (I think it was) returns furious: "They have it, why don't I have it?" He orders CIA or FBI some technical... they deliver the phone. So you can call God. He calls God but looks at the bill, it's horrible. You know, like, a million dollars a minute or what. So furious he calls Israel: "Like we are giving you all this money and you spend it on this!" You know the Israeli answer: "For us Jews it's a local call." So with Jacques Vergès, no? He he on behalf of his unconditionally pro-Arab attitude with what I have no problem, he is literally tried to make into an alliance with anyone from ex-Nazis, neo-Nazis and so on just insofar as you know anything goes. I think this is a catastrophic politics. Even in the sense of politics, not only in the sense of some kind of abstract moralistic reasoning, "How can you?". Even in the terms of political efficiency it's catastrophic, and it really... he again, he went he went to the end here. So again I think that more and more I think that for me this fact that no matter who comes good as a potential ally is rather an effect of... first let me make one point clear: the problem for me here is not religion as such. There can be movements which are very fanatically religious but play a very progressive role. The problem is so the problem is the implicit ideological content which can be religious or not. Like religion doesn't bother me. What does bother me is if a movement defines itself explicitly not so much even as antisemitic as against European modernity where the main catastrophe is designated as the French Revolution, modern egalitarianism and so on and so on. So here I think that the hope professed even by Badiou that some movement may appear conservative now but this is only the first step, in the long term they will see who the true enemy is like not the Jews but American imperialism or whatever. I think it's a vain hope. I think it's the same hope as as if you were to say in the '30s, late '30s, "Hitler... the main enemy is United States, American-English imperialism, so let's join Hitler. Later Hitler will see that it's not really the Jews but capitalism as such and so on and so on." But this is a genuinely tragic predicament I claim. Because at the same time I know that you know why because we the left, if you count yourself as left, in short we have to live this paradox that in short term we are again and again forced into coalitions with liberal democrats. Like when you fight racism, when you fight for women's rights, for gay rights, you cannot but make a coalition there. But in the long term, everything depends on making a coalition precisely with those who are if they are politicized at all today, are politicized on the right-wing populist basis. That's our tragedy. Which is why I think again with all the stupid things he is doing, people like Chávez are precious today. They are the only ones who try to repoliticize ordinary people and so on and so on. Okay, so since I went too long, the usual thing happened, the key part will have to stay out, so if you allow me minutes just to conclude and to make my point. Now what I wanted to do is to go into Critique of Political Economy. Why do we need it today? The title of my talk refers to something noted by my good friend who wrote that wonderful book *Transcritique* whom I quote a lot, Kōjin Karatani, who said that in Marx, Marx began when he was young with critique of religion. You know, when he says the critique of religion is the beginning of every critique. Then he went on, state, ideology, ended with critique of economy, political economy. But then the topic of fetishism means that what you find at the end is again a form of religion but religion, theology inherent to capitalism to capitalism itself. Not as an abstract ideology but in a religious content belief inherent to the very core of really existing functioning capitalism. And this is why I claim we need this, by this I mean Critique of Political Economy, which is at the same time fully aware not only of economy as objective science but of all these subjective fetishist illusions etc. which has to be operative for the capitalist economy to function. This is what we need today. We need it's not the choice either critique of religion or critique of but critique of religion which is in the very focus of political economy. And here I think we can use (we forgive him his Zionism) Moishe Postone, who again is one of the few who did this task. Let me just present briefly his position. It's a wonderful one. It's that Marx was a Marxist if by Marxist we mean this vulgar economic determinism stuff. Somewhere from *German Ideology* to mid-late 1850s. This is Marx's theory which passed into common knowledge as Marxism. Economic base, economic relations basically determine, you know all this how should I put it pathetic pathetic materialism most forcefully developed in in *German Ideology*: "Our starting point is the production of real life, all ideological fantasmagoria and so on are generated by real life processes are its ideological reflections," and so on and so on. But he claims, Postone, and I have to agree with him, that when Marx after the failure of the '48 revolution returned to reading Hegel to understand properly Critique of Political Economy, something clicked, deeply changed there. And although we do get occasional residues regressions, for example the greatest one is I think I never liked that Marx the famous that forward I think to the Introduction to the Political Economy where Marx as it were resumes his view. It's I think the worst of the worst simple historicist evolutionism. There are even other regressions all the time though. For example in Capital and in *Grundrisse*. In *Grundrisse*, the very passage celebrated endlessly by Tony Negri as Marx saw the future there, you know the famous passage in... you can get all this on the internet... for from *Grundrisse* where Marx developed the hypothesis of General Intellect. This preponderance of knowledge as a factor in production which makes meaningless development... sorry makes makes meaningless labor theory of value and so on and so on. So first you should notice how Marx is here I think that precisely this part that Negri totally misinterpreted it should be discarded. And what people don't notice is that if you closely read *Grundrisse*, it is discarded. It's just, you know, *Grundrisse* was a manuscript, Marx was trying to develop one line and then immediately never returned to it. And he was right. First, it's Marx as a technological determinist at its purest. Marx never even mentioned politics there. He simply claims why the rise of the role of knowledge and so on and so on, things will fall fall apart. Second thing, much more dangerous... and this is basically the worst technocratic Marx. Notice how when Marx speaks talks about General Intellect, he always uses the singular. All of a sudden, there is no society, there is humanity. He usually uses the term "Der Arbeiter", a worker, reduced to he ironically uses the term "controller", "night-watchman" who just observes the automated system going on. One should link this to another weird ideological mistake by Marx. Chapter I think it's or of Capital, which begins with this general definition of labor. Labor as, you know, transformation of natural element and so on. I think it's ideology, it's a regression. You know why? Something very weird happens there at the level of content, if you read it. At the level of, sorry, abstraction. Marx says there (I don't have time to quote), five minutes... Marx says there (take him closely) that insofar as he observes concrete forms of labor, of course it's always a particular social relation that determines it, like every concrete historical form of labor happens within a certain social formation. But then Marx says, but if we observe labor abstractly, independently of all concrete social forms, we don't need society, we only get laborer on worker on one side, the stuff on which he or she works on the other side. Now this is a very strange conclusion. Wouldn't it be more logical to say if we abstract from concrete society, we get social form as such? I claim there is a deep ideological content here, because we should connect this to his technocratic vision (only there in *Grundrisse*) of communism as a General Intellect. It is as if this asocial, abstract essence of labor, whom you can imagine as again asocial, will be realized in communism. That's his purely technocratic vision there. But then, here comes then Postone's wonderful result, which is that with Capital and most of *Grundrisse*, the the topic of Marx shifts radical. It's no longer this materialist obsession, it's you know, I quote it all the time, you know what I mean that beginning of Capital. It's no longer the beginning is no longer real life and so on. It's commodity as a historical form and then, as Marx put it, to penetrate from the surface (commodity is an ordinary object) to the, as Marx put it, "theological niceties," "metaphysical subtleties," and so on and so on. That is to say, the focus of Marx in Capital is not simply ideology versus reality as I already repeated it often. It's a commodity fetishism as ideology, theological dimension which is found in the very heart of economic reality. It's the... which is why, again, as many people noticed reading Marx really closely, which is why it was so difficult for Marx to classify commodity fetishism. Like, is it ideology or not? Since it's an illusion, it should have been ideology. But interestingly enough, Marx never, never, never calls commodity fetishism ideology. Because it's too much part of economic base itself. Why is this important? So that's the first thing we should do today: to rehabilitate this post-Marxist Marx (if by Marxism we understand the standard economic base and so on Marxism). Second thing, and here I again agree with Postone, this is what bothered me for a long time. What to do with so-called unfortunately labor theory of value? Marx there commits the same error of abstraction, but I think he is right there. You know what's the problem? When he says, the very first chapter of Capital, that if you look at commodities, their concrete properties account for their use value. But if you abstract from concrete properties and observe commodity as an abstract object, the only thing that remains is what all commodities have in common, which is being the products of human labor. Sorry, this appears as a clear logical mistake, because if you abstract from concrete use value, then what remains is clearly the abstract form of use value, the abstract property of being useful. In the same way that if you abstract from concrete labor, the only thing that remains is abstract labor, and so on and so on. But why is Marx here right? Postone gave the best explanation because it is this Marx's basic distinction between two forms of labor: concrete labor which concrete work which provides the use value of a commodity, and what Marx calls "abstract labor," the source of value. That it's not really a question of abstraction. But is a question of something totally different. In capitalism, and this is the uniqueness of capitalism, why can we get personal freedom and so on and so on? We get personal freedom because the fundamental social relations of domination are already inscribed into the structure of the production process, into labor process itself. For Postone, and he's right to point it out, abstract labor does not mean simply abstraction of labor. It means labor in its function not as producing use value categories, but labor as the structuring principle of social life, social division and so on and so on. In other words, one can almost say that could almost say that one should turn the terms around here: that it's what Marx calls "concrete labor" which is truly abstract in the sense that this is an abstraction: I directly work on an object to confer on it use value. This is abstract view. This always happens within a certain social totality. And this totality is belongs to the is what value is about. So abstract labor means, as Postone puts it very nicely, that in other pre-capitalist formations, domination... the relations of domination were directly enacted through interpersonal relations and were in this sense relatively independent from production. Like, you can have a farmer, then there was a feudal lord, took part of the product for him, then there was a war, a war, another feudal lord came took the money of him, but the production went on, you know what I say, the exploitation was assured through extra-economic means. While in capitalism it is there in economy, which is why... ah, you don't now want me to tell the truth, no? Just... what I'm simply saying is that in this way we can see why Marx claims that labor is the sole source of value. The point is not some primitive pseudo-medieval ontology where for some mystical reason only value... only human labor counts as the source of value. It concerns labor as a social phenomenon. This is why only labor, because labor... this is what is unique of capitalism, that again social divisions, hierarchy, are already there outside in the production process, which is why they can be subtracted from interpersonal relations, we can be free and so on and so on. And this again, we need more than ever today. So without being able to do it, I think this is what we need more than ever today. Just to conclude, exactly in this moment when, and that was the point of my talk, when ideological struggle is harsher than ever. Some naive leftists thought, "Oh, economic crisis, perfect! Now people will start to read Marx." They were enthusiastic, a kind of intellectual orgasm. I got emails from France: "Do you know that the sales of Marx went five times up and so on?" I said nice, but do you also know how brutally the recent meltdown is already used to reassert the most brutal ideological legitimization. For example, a week ago, there was even less, there was a terrifying op-ed piece in New York Times defending (you know they have now this problem what to do with General Motors, no?) let it go bankrupt or not. And it openly says, "Yes, we should think the unthinkable (the limits of what is thinkable are changing) and they say that it would help to make General Motors a smaller, leaner, meaner, more adapted to the market company." But then they cannot resist in the towards the end of this short piece to show their true cards: they openly say the main gain will be that if a company goes bankrupt, those who will manage it will have the right to (they use explicitly these brutal words) "immediately unconditionally reject, invalidate all the deals with trade unions" concerning security and so on and so on. So the crisis is already used to to fire people to they want to break the last remnants of trade unions and so on and so on and so on. So my point is simply that now more than ever, as in every moment of crisis, we need we need intellectual work, we need struggle and so on. Because again, crisis... this we can learn from my ex-friend Ernesto Laclau, I agree with him that crisis means just the ruling hegemony has disintegrated. And the situation is open, and who knows who will win. We know that out of a crisis in Germany there were stronger communists, but Hitler was even stronger and so on and so on. Now the battle is going on. Will this economic meltdown be used just to not only just to reassert capitalism, but to make it even more brutal, efficient and so on, which I think in all probability it will happen? Or will we be able to make our point? Now we are needed more than ever. I'm sorry for this that I didn't go more into theory but as always everything comes out in my books. I even don't know why you are so stupid to come. Everything is in my books. Thank you very much. Okay, this was rather a short five minutes from Slavoj's... You again imposed this brutal anthropocentric, Eurocentric notion of linear time against which I fight all my life! Who is speaking about totalitarianism? I don't speak about it, I practice it! I am!