Living in the End Times
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2010-07 · 1:46:47 · 8,529 words
with Paul Holdengräber
ecology-climatecapitalismcommunism-socialismdemocracyideologyliberalism-political-correctnessfascism-populismgeopolitics-war
Žižek surveys capitalism's response to ecological crisis, arguing that both mainstream 'ethical anti-capitalism' and Peter Hawken's 'natural capitalism' fail because they extend the commodity form rather than challenging it. He contends that parliamentary-democratic mechanisms are structurally insufficient for addressing ecological catastrophe, and that problems of commons, climate, mass displacement, resource depletion, require a transnational form of mobilization he still calls communism. Along the way he criticizes Negri's concept of the multitude, Badiou's neglect of political economy, and the emerging polarization between market liberalism and right-wing nationalist populism.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 15
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
A widespread but toothless form of critique that attacks the excesses of capitalism (corrupt managers, polluting companies) while leaving the democratic-liberal institutional frame untouched and treating abuses as contingent rather than systemic.
as “democratic illusion”
Badiou's (and Žižek's qualified) claim that accepting multiparty elections and state-of-law as the ultimate frame of any change is today's primary ideological obstacle.
as “postmodern ethical capitalism”
The attempt to render ecological and social responsibility profitable, reconciling private profit-seeking with the global good, epitomised by corporate social responsibility and natural-capitalist accounting.
Negri's concept of the new collective political subjectivity immanent in post-industrial capitalism; Žižek objects that every credible example of multitude presupposes a strong state and remains internal to capitalism.
The Marxist analysis of the economic base that Žižek finds absent in Badiou, Rancière, Balibar, and Laclau, leaving their politics floating without a grip on where struggles are ultimately won or lost.
as “natural capitalism”
Peter Hawken's proposal to expand the notion of capital to include four forms, financial, manufactured, natural, and human, so ecological costs are fully priced into market exchange; Žižek treats it as a mirror-illusion that universalises the commodity form rather than overcoming it.
The basic social form of capitalist production; Žižek argues that natural capitalism does not overcome it but extends it ad absurdum by turning all of nature into commodities.
Implied in Žižek's argument that market and commodity form constitute an objective social logic that persists regardless of how broadly we redefine capital.
The structural gap between the reality of products (use value) and financial circulation generating profit (exchange value); Žižek invokes it to show that no expansion of the capital concept eliminates subordination of reality to profit-making.
The political 'we' that a speaker invokes not as a pre-existing constituency but as a collectivity brought into being retroactively by the act of address itself, a ghost from the future rather than the past.
Žižek notes the historical novelty that experts now offer 'opinions' rather than certain knowledge, marking science's inability to replace politics on questions like the two-degree climate threshold.
The ideologically mythic numerical thresholds (e.g. two-degree warming cap, or a precise Holocaust-denier victim count) that give the appearance of scientific objectivity to what are inherently political decisions.
as “four invariants of egalitarian justice”
Badiou's formula, strict egalitarian justice, terror, voluntarism, trust in the people, which Žižek provocatively invokes as the template ecological crisis will eventually demand.
Shared resources, the earth, intellectual property, atmosphere, whose enclosure by capital is for Žižek the key reason the term 'communism' remains apt for addressing today's crises.
as “the impossible”
Žižek identifies an asymmetry in public discourse: anything is possible technologically or sexually, but modest social demands (welfare state) are declared impossible; this 'impossibility' is ideological, not objective, and true politics means doing the impossible.
Stories he reaches for 4
Žižek uses the Madoff scandal to illustrate personalized anti-capitalism: Madoff was a 'typical postmodern capitalist' who first amassed billions and then gave half back for charity, and the public's hatred of him as an individual scoundrel distracted from the systemic logic he embodied.
“a typical postmodern capitalist ... first you gather billions then you give half back for charity and so on”
Žižek uses the image of shouting at a television during a match, 'boys!', knowing the players cannot hear you, as an analogy for the meaningless performativity of individual recycling gestures.
“like when you watch TV at home you shout boys you know this is meaningless they don't hear you”
A computer specialist recounts how GDR planners thought digital mega-computers would finally make central planning workable, not grasping that computerisation was precisely what would destroy communist economies. Žižek calls this the mirror image of Hawken's fantasy.
“they thought with modern mega computers ... finally these computers will be strong enough to take into account all the fluctuations of the needs ... and finally communism will become workable”
Senator Kennedy, who opposed offshore drilling, was photographed by paparazzi making love on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico. A Republican colleague quipped at the next Senate session that he was glad to see Kennedy had 'changed his position on offshore drilling.' Žižek uses it to mock the gap between ecological rhetoric and practice.
“I'm glad to see that Senator Kennedy has changed his position on offshore drilling”
Works invoked 6
Žižek's own book, mentioned in the context of the Milner misquotation controversy and as part of the 'ironically communist propaganda series' he is growing tired of.
The New Republic journal
Adam Kirsch's attack on Žižek was published here and became the source for the misquotation chain.
Die Zeit journal
One of the German outlets that published the Milner misattribution; responded to Žižek's correction with 'brutal irony'.
Agatha Christie novel discussed via Bayard's paradoxical book about it; the reference illustrates retroactive reading and the performative 'we'.
Jean-Claude Milner's book arguing the EU is a continuation of Hitlerian anti-Semitism; Žižek describes it neutrally as Milner's position, not his own.
Natural Capitalism book
Peter Hawken's proposal to add natural and human capital to standard economic accounting; Žižek spends substantial time expounding then refuting it as a hyper-commodification that leaves capitalism's profit-seeking logic intact.
People invoked 21
Peter Hawken negative
Proponent of 'natural capitalism'; Žižek gives a detailed exposition of his four-capital model before arguing it mirrors the GDR planners' mistake by universalising rather than overcoming the commodity form.
Saroj Giri positive
Described as 'one of the most gifted new social philosophers' Žižek knows; Giri's analysis of the overload of toothless anti-capitalist critique is central to the talk's opening argument.
Adam Kirsch negative
Attacked Žižek in The New Republic; his misreading of the Milner passage as Žižek's own view was taken up by French and German outlets.
Featured in an anecdote about being photographed making love offshore while opposing offshore oil drilling; used to illustrate the gap between ecological rhetoric and practice.
Pierre Bayard positive
French writer praised for 'wonderful paradoxical books'; his concept of 'anticipatory plagiarism' (Maupassant plagiarising Proust retroactively) is used to explain the performative constitution of political 'we'.
Mentioned as the populist nationalist pole in Polish politics opposite Donald Tusk's liberal technocracy; referred to as 'Twiddle-Dee'.
Étienne Balibar negative
Listed alongside Rancière and Laclau as failing to engage with critique of political economy.
John Searle positive
Described as 'not the highest on my top of these guys' (speech act theorists) but credited with noticing the performative paradox, you can only do a performative by treating it as already done.
Antonio Negri negative
Žižek says he appreciates Negri and even sides with him against Badiou on the centrality of economy, but finds the concept of multitude empirically empty and the dream of post-capitalist communism already existing to be wishful mysticism; their Berlin debate is narrated in detail.
Alain Badiou positive
Cited approvingly for the claim that 'democracy' is today's ultimate enemy and for the four invariants of egalitarian justice; Žižek notes a reservation that Badiou shares with Rancière et al. in neglecting political economy.
Žižek describes Milner's provocative thesis (EU as continuation of Hitler, requiring elimination of Jews) from his book on 'Criminal Tendencies of Modern Europe', stressing he is reporting Milner's position, not endorsing it.
Ernesto Laclau negative
Grouped with the French political philosophers for neglecting political economy; Saroj Giri's analysis is described as critical of Laclau among others.
Jacques Rancière negative
Grouped with Badiou, Balibar, and Laclau as 'French or French-oriented political philosophers' who leave no place for critique of political economy; Žižek notes he is 'getting better now'.
Appears as the moderator/interlocutor; raises the Three Gorges Dam / Sichuan earthquake example.
Described as 'unfortunately not an idiot'; his observation that 'we lost because we won' (centrists absorbed Le Pen's issues) is used to illustrate how liberalism accommodates rather than defeats right-wing nationalism.
Barack Obama negative
Žižek says Obama disappointed him by responding to the BP spill within the legal-culprit framework ('it's BP's problem', 'I'll kick them in the ass') rather than calling for systemic mobilisation.
Ulrich Beck positive
Credited with first drawing attention to the novel ambiguity of 'expert opinion' and the shift from experts providing truth to experts providing opinions, which Žižek finds genuinely insightful.
Described as 'the crazy anti-feminist anti-semite'; his claim that socialism is Aryan and communism is Jewish is cited to explain why Žižek prefers the word 'communism' over 'socialism'.
Karl Marx positive
Žižek endorses the Marxist insight that real freedom lies in social relations of production rather than formal political rights, calling it valid today 'perhaps more than ever'.
Sigmund Freud positive
The structure of the Irma's injection dream (trauma + three comic explanations) is applied to the Washington political response to the Louisiana oil spill.
Used as the paradigm example of the new market-liberal technocratic politics ('pure liberal apolitical ... just trying to build a tolerant working capitalist system').
What it argues
natural capitalism and the limits of commodifying natureparliamentary democracy as insufficient frame for ecological crisispersonalized vs. systemic anti-capitalismthe commons as the proper name for communist politics todaydecline of social democracy and the rise of nationalist populismthe performative 'we' of political movementsthe impossibility of radical change as ideological mystification
Dialectical moves 8
“The true anti-capitalism circulating in media today is already its own opposite: the more ruthless it appears, the more it saves the democratic-liberal frame it should be questioning.”
Personalized anti-capitalist critique is functionally pro-systemic because it targets excess rather than the form itself.
“Natural capitalism does not overcome commodification — it is commodification raised to the second power, an excessive universalisation that becomes the very thing it tries to cure.”
Hawken's ecological solution repeats the capitalist logic at an absolute level rather than breaking with it.
“The very form of capital presupposes a structural gap between reality and financial circulation — no matter how much we expand the notion of capital, reality will continue to function as expendable stuff subordinated to profit.”
Expanding capital's definition cannot abolish capital's structural subordination of use to exchange.
“Far from being BP's problem, the oil spill is not even a legal problem: it is a problem of our way of life.”
Treating the disaster as a question of legal culpability mystifies its systemic character.
“In technology and sexuality anything is possible; in social relations less and less is possible — we can visit stars but a welfare state is declared impossible.”
The asymmetry between technological and social 'impossibility' reveals the latter as ideological rather than objective.
“The 'we' of a political movement is not a pre-existing subject who speaks — it is a ghost from the future, created retroactively by the very act of invoking it.”
Political subjectivity is performatively constituted, not descriptively reported.
“Precisely when science pervades all our spheres of life, experts no longer give us the truth — they give us opinions: the penetration of science into life coincides with the collapse of scientific authority.”
The scientisation of everyday life paradoxically undermines the authority of expertise.
“I am not against democracy but for a more radical democracy — the critique of formal democratic mechanisms is the condition for saving genuine freedoms.”
Only by going beyond formal procedural democracy can one preserve what is genuinely democratic.
Claims 15
asserts
The mainstream overload of anti-capitalist critique is toothless because it never questions the democratic-liberal institutional frame within which those excesses are to be corrected.ethical anti-capitalism / democratic illusion
asserts
Marx's insight that real freedom resides in the apolitical network of social relations (market, family, production) rather than in formal political rights remains valid today, perhaps more than ever.Marxist critique of political freedom
rejects
Natural capitalism fails because it tries to save ecology by universalising the commodity form — making everything from oxygen to human culture into priced capital — rather than challenging the profit-seeking logic of capital reproduction.natural capitalism / Peter Hawken
asserts
The East German communist bureaucrats' mistake of thinking mega-computers would finally make central planning feasible is the mirror image of Hawken's mistake of thinking universal commodification will solve ecology.ideological symmetry between late communism and natural capitalism
rejects
Negri's concept of the multitude is empirically hollow: every plausible example of multitude either presupposes a strong state or remains internal to capitalism, making the leap to post-capitalist generalisation mystical.Negri / multitude
rejects
Badiou, Rancière, Balibar, and Laclau all fail to assign any role to the critique of political economy, leaving their politics without a grip on where capitalist struggles are actually decided.French political philosophy / absence of political economy
asserts
A new political polarisation is emerging between technocratic market liberalism and right-wing anti-immigrant nationalism, displacing the traditional left-right spectrum, and this dynamic is dangerous.political polarisation / decline of social democracy
asserts
The social-democratic welfare state is dying — with a time delay relative to the death of communist states — and the left must reckon with this rather than defending it as an eternal horizon.social democracy / welfare state
asserts
The emerging Chinese model of capitalism — highly efficient yet apparently not generating democratic pressure — is a genuinely new and threatening phenomenon that cancels capitalism's historical tendency to produce demands for democracy.Chinese capitalism / democracy
asserts
Addressing ecological crisis will require four things once associated with revolutionary egalitarian politics: strict egalitarian justice, a form of terror (strict enforcement and whistleblowing), voluntarism, and popular trust.ecological politics / radical egalitarianism
asserts
The term 'communism' remains the right name for a politics addressing global commons problems, not because of any continuity with 20th-century states, but because the problems are structurally problems of the commons.communism / commons
rejects
The impossibility attributed to radical social change is ideological, not objective: true political intervention means taking risks and doing what is declared impossible.impossibility / maturity discourse
asserts
Scientific uncertainty about ecological causality does not license continued exploitation; it means the situation is even more open and that politics cannot be replaced by expert management.science, politics, and ecological uncertainty
rejects
The Louisiana oil spill should not be treated as BP's legal problem but as a crisis of our entire way of life requiring transnational mobilisation beyond the legal-culprit framework.legal-responsibility framing of ecological disasters
asserts
The liberal left should acknowledge that only a renewed radical left can, in the long run, save what is worth saving in liberal freedoms, since liberalism on its own will keep conceding ground to the extreme right.liberals / radical left alliance
Quotes 12
“the key to actual freedom rather resides in the apolitical network of social relations from market to family and so on where the change needed if we want an actual improvement is not a political reform but a change in apolitical social relations of productions”Slavoj Žižek · Marx's insight on real freedom vs. formal political rights
“no matter how radical our anti-capitalism is the solution is sought in applying democratic mechanisms which one should never forget are part of the state apparatus which guarantees the undisturbed functioning of the capitalist reproduction”Slavoj Žižek · democratic mechanisms as guarantee of capitalist reproduction
“today the name of the ultimate enemy is not capitalism exploitation or anything similar but democracy — the democratic illusion, the acceptance of democratic mechanisms as the ultimate frame of every change”Slavoj Žižek · Badiou's (qualified) claim that democracy is the enemy
“new ecological concerns are squeezed into the old capitalist form so that instead of overcoming commodification one extends it ad absurdum”Slavoj Žižek · natural capitalism as hyper-commodification
“in so far as we remain within capitalism even if we expand the notion of capital to all reality this reality will continue to function as an indifferent ultimately expendable stuff whose goal is to serve profit-making”Slavoj Žižek · structural impossibility of greening capitalism
“we will be able to visit stars but if you want a little bit more of welfare state that's impossible”Slavoj Žižek · asymmetry between technological and social possibility
“this impossibility which is usually published as maturity — we are finally becoming mature, there are things which you cannot do — is not an objective impossibility it's precisely where politics should intervene”Slavoj Žižek · impossibility as ideology
“science cannot replace politics here”Slavoj Žižek · limits of technocratic governance of ecology
“it's the ghost which comes not from the past but the future of the left — this is how politics is done”Slavoj Žižek · political 'we' as retroactive performative construction
“only a new strong dose of the left in the long term will redeem ... will save what is worth saving in your freedoms otherwise you will be slowly losing ground and forced to concede more and more to the extreme right”Slavoj Žižek · radical left as condition for saving liberal freedoms
“by communism I don't mean any comrade Lenin is back ... I simply mean that we are facing problems for which capital market and the state in the narrow legal sense parliamentary democracy state of law is not enough”Slavoj Žižek · minimal definition of communism as name for commons problems
“a true intervention is not an intervention within the scape of what goes on where you pick up the best possibility — sometimes you have to take risks and do the impossible”Slavoj Žižek · true politics as doing the impossible
Transcript 44 turns
Slavoj Žižek
I hope this works I mean technically [unintelligible] never mind okay thanks very much I'm really really honored to be here and I hope I will not disappoint you but what I will do is not of course not I never understood philosophers but they exist I will not name them who are able to do seminars on their own work you know like you read a page from your own book and then ask what did the thinker want to say with this no that I'm not able to do I will simply do I will do something very simple I must tell you something which if you read my work I hope I hope it will not make you sad I'm getting a little bit tired of this how should I put it ironically communist propaganda series that I'm doing in defense of lost causes and so on I'm already for two years doing a book on Hegel it already to put it in Stalinist philosophical terms exists objectively out of my consciousness in objective reality as over pages of the manuscript and it's not yet ended but my love is there why I think we need more than ever pure thinking theory today I will return to this at the end what I want to do is just to pursue a certain line of how capitalism reacts to ecological catastrophes of course I will develop some reflections apropos of two of the latest not very threatening at least the first one but nonetheless known to us all ecological catastrophes that Eyjafjallajökull ash cloud from the Iceland volcano and of course the south of Louisiana big oil spill first did you notice something it is my friend from India Saroj Giri who is really one of the most gifted new social philosophers that I know and is from what I can say a typical victim of you know that I'm not politically correct and so on but when I see implicit racism even I can admit it like because he is from there he is also an excellent theorist he did a wonderful analysis of Laclau Badiou me critical towards all of us but the reaction in the west is always but you come from there why don't you write something about Nepal India and so on as if you know leave to us pure theory no local report he developed in at a conference about communism in Berlin where I am practically coming from a week ago he developed something wonderful namely the idea that our public media even are today full of anti-capitalism that we are even witnessing a kind of overload of the critique of the horrors of capitalism I mean if you open up TV it's always this corrupted bank manager that corrupted businessman that company is polluting environment that other company owns sweatshops where child children work overtime and so on and so on there is however a catch to this overflow of critique what is as a rule not questioned in this critique ruthless as it may appear is the democratic liberal frame of fighting these excesses that is to say the explicit or implied goal is to democratize capitalism to extend the democratic control onto economy through the pressure of the public media parliamentary inquiries harsher laws honest police investigations and so on and so on but never questioning the democratic institutional frame of the state of law this democratic institutional frame remains the sacred cow even for the most radical forms of this let's call it ethical anti-capitalism the Porto Alegre forum the Seattle movement it is here I think that the key insight of Marx remains valid today perhaps more than ever for Marx the question of freedom should not be located primarily into the political sphere proper does a country have free elections are the judges independent is the press free from hidden pressures are human rights respected and the similar list of questions different independent or not so independent western institutions apply when they want to pronounce a judgment on a country the key to actual freedom rather resides in the apolitical network of social relations from market to family and so on where the change needed if we want an actual improvement is not a political reform but a change in apolitical social relations of productions so this is a change which cannot be made at the level of democratic elections or other political measures in the narrow sense of the term we do not vote about who owns what about relations in a factory and so on all this is left to processes outside the sphere of the political in the narrower sense of the term and it is illusory to expect that one can effectively change things by extending democracy into this sphere say by organizing democratic banks under people's control radical changes in this domain should be made outside the sphere of legal rights and so on in such democratic procedures which of course can have their positive role to play no matter how radical our anti-capitalism is the solution is sought in applying democratic mechanisms which one should never forget are part of the state apparatus which guarantees the undisturbed functioning of the capitalist reproduction in this sense only although I find this statement today problematic Alain Badiou was right or at least made the right point with his crazy claim that today the name of the ultimate enemy is not capitalism exploitation or anything similar but democracy the democratic illusion the acceptance of democratic mechanisms as the ultimate frame of every change and let me avoid a misunderstanding here what I just said doesn't mean so haha no democracy but coup d'etat killing and so on and so on all I'm saying is that democracy restrained to what we are perceiving as the core of the democratic process multiparty elections state of law and so on is not enough that a different let's call it social political mobilization which I'm more and more inclined even still to call democratic should is the place where things should happen what I find so interesting is how strictly correlative to this apparently ruthless critique of capitalism but again if you look at it closely it's always directed this kind of critique at excesses which are not read in a classical Marxian Freudian way as symptoms that is to say as necessary excesses as something which registered a necessary flaw in the system but as simple excesses which one could one could one could abolish I don't know through better legislation and so on and so on so what is crucial for me is that the strict opposite to this personalized anti-capitalism where I even think that sometimes this personalized anti-capitalism can be so brutal that although I know that people there often attacking are scum I feel also some sympathy for the victims like do you remember a year and a half ago the scandal with Bernard Madoff okay of course a scum should be arrested whatever but I didn't like how they personalize it first you know he was a bad guy but as such he was just the extreme point of following the logic of the system he was a typical postmodern capitalist with with you know by postmodern I mean first you gather billions then you give half back for charity and so on and so on so what I'm saying is that this overload of fanatical but personalized we like concrete bad guys not what is wrong with the system itself this overload of vulgar anti-capitalist critique anti-capitalist criticism is just one side of the global phenomenon its other side is different attempts to what we may call the postmodern ethical capitalism the idea is and it's again quite honorable idea I'm not a priori opposed to it the idea is that one can render the ecological and social responsibility profitable as they like to put it in their New Age terminology the partisans of this orientation that this idea of on the one hand sleazy private capitalist amassing profit on the other hand those who care for the global good that this is still haha the old paradigm no that in the new emerging paradigm the two dimensions can go together again up to a point they can but up to a point what do I mean by this maybe you know this movement again nothing bad about it I only think it has limits it's I'm referring her to the movement of so-called natural capitalism instigated by Peter Hawken what they propose is a kind of new revolution in production comparable to the first industrial revolution which as we all know generated a breathtaking material development but at an immense cost to the earth depletion of natural wealth loss of the topsoil destruction of species and so on and so on in order to counteract this destructive tendency we have to change our entire approach till now we included into the price of commodities only what we have to invest to produce them ignoring the costs to nature our prosperity was thus illusory since by way of ruthlessly exploiting natural resources we were drawing our income not from earnings but from principal from inherited wealth the sum of this inherited wealth is natural capital the store of commodities produced by nature in the billions of years of its development commodities like water minerals trees soil air plus all living systems grasslands forests oceans and so on all these living systems not only supply non-renewable resources for our material production they also render services indispensable for our survival regeneration of atmosphere soil fertilization and so on so here is the proposal to our standard notion of capital as stored value we should add the economic value of nature as a system as well as the value of human resources we thus obtain four forms of capital financial capital investments monetary instruments manufactured capital machines the entire infrastructure natural capital resources living systems and human capital labor intelligence culture organization admitting the difficulty of assigning monetary value to for the time being at least non-substitutable services like the oxygen production by plants natural capitalists nonetheless risk estimates according to which for example the worldwide oxygen production is worth trillion dollars annually and as they like to point out more or less the same as the gross world product or they claim the monetary value of all human capital is three times greater than all financial and manufactured capital so the idea of natural capitalism is to change radically our accountancy by way of treating as the capital which should be enriched through its expanded reproduction all the four components not only the first two this can be done they claim Peter Hawken and his colleagues in four main ways first radical resource productivity promoting industrial efficiency and so on second point biomimicry eliminating waste by redesigning industrial systems on biological lines three a service and flow economy shifting from a perception of wealth as goods and purchases to a perception of value as desired services and satisfaction of human needs and last way investing in natural capital developing markets for activities which enhance and restore our environment so that's their position I hope it was at least clear this is a position I was describing not my position why because you know that something quite comical is happening if you allow me a brief two minutes detour which makes me a little bit depressed what that guy Adam Kirsch who attacked me two years ago in New Republic started is now circulating in France in already three German newspapers and so on namely they quote a passage from my in defense of lost causes where I am clearly unambiguously describing a position which of course is not mine the position of what Jean-Claude Milner in his very weird book called Criminal Tendencies of Modern Europe his thesis is that European Union is he directly claims this I'm not like extrapolating it that that European Union is a continuation of Hitler with other means and this is why the only solution for Europe is to eliminate the Jews that it's still the I mean Milner doesn't claim this he is a Zionist he claims that this is the reality of Europe I describe this position and it's incredible again and again this is quoted as a proof that I am a radical anti-semite advising mass killing of all Jews and it's incredible how I tried to write to newspapers in Germany the last one was Die Zeit I did think we published this a letter where I explained unambiguously that I'm describing another guy's position the answer I got was a very brutal ironic that now I'm trying to squeeze out by claiming that I didn't quite mean what I wrote there and so on and so on no it's we live in strange times but sorry for this digression let's go on so now comes my opinion while in a first approach it might it may appear that such a radical redefinition of capital has beneficent effects and undoubtedly it has them of course you have to change all strategy why not I think there are nonetheless first unsurmountable empirical problems here if this redefinition is to become even minimally operative it would demand an incredibly complex worldwide state control and regulation like some state or whatever agency must determine the price of natural commodities and then must enforce them onto the market and so on so all I'm saying is that although Peter this is the first contradiction I see and it's a typical contradiction I had a nice public fight a friendly one but nonetheless it was shouting but friendly shouting with with Toni Negri also Badiou had it in in Berlin where my basic problem with Negri developed through again his notion of multitude claiming that that's the new positive productivity the new political subjectivity and you know he then exploded in his ecstatic dream can't we see communism is practically here capitalists are purely parasitic we just have to cut them off and we are there one step from communism I told him that doesn't he see that A all examples that he gives of multitude I hope you would agree at least here with me strictly presuppose not only a minimal a minimal law and order but even a very strong state guaranteeing many things and point two that all the most convincing examples that he gives of multitude are political sorry are examples within capitalism so that I simply see no foundation in what he describes of how to pull this miracle to cut off the capitalists and to generalize the model of multitude to the entire society so then I okay he told me you don't understand anything because you are a Hegelian okay maybe but then I asked him okay treat me as an idiot and give me one simple I told him even more viciously treat me as an Anglo-Saxon idiot sorry don't take me seriously and give me at least one empirical example of a multitude which wouldn't be just this poetic you know multitude of postmodern capitalists speculating on Wall Street this is Negri's favorite topic of communists of today but like where multitude really started to function on its own and he was a little bit perplexed and then he said well Chinese Cultural Revolution and you know me and Badiou we were a little bit shocked because I mean if there ever was a failure that was one I mean for me now quite seriously you know where is my problem with Negri here again I appreciate him very much I said publicly in Berlin at some level I am with Negri even against Badiou the problem with Badiou for me is the same problem as with all these let's call them French or French-oriented political philosophers Rancière up to a point he's getting better now Balibar Ernesto Laclau and so on did you notice how there is de facto no role of in no role no place for what in Marxism we call critique of political economy in their work I mean Badiou is quite open here he says openly economy that's the domain of human animal of utilitarian games and so on and so on it has nothing to do with authentic with authentic politics here I agree with Negri economy is the place where the struggle should be won or lost but where I again where I disagree with Negri is in what I claim that and he admitted this to me when we talked that Negri is still a a fanatic in a good sense I don't use this word here in any ironic sense of the secret history of 20th century which was as for any democratic leftists this story of immediate democracy councils soviets whatever and they see the 20th century as one big kidnapping or reappropriation of authentic revolutionary outburst which was done at the level of soviets and so on by the state bureaucracy and so on some of my nothing against them they are my friends I appreciate but nonetheless some of my Trotskyite friends here in the UK have the same dream the way they describe the 20th century can't you see they say okay sorry I'm blind myopic I don't see but can't you see how for example Solidarność was a worker's movement council which was somehow mysteriously then kidnapped by by the church CIA whomever you want and so on and so on I think that the lesson of the Chinese Cultural Revolution is much more tragic one what we should abandon here I agree with Badiou is not only the state socialist form of the left of the 20th century what we usually called communist states although again we should still maybe learn something from their experience but as a form it's over not only I go a step further should be abandoned not again it's not a question of totally abandoning but the form as such is no longer workable the so-called social democratic welfare state and maybe we are now noticing with years delay that not only communist totalitarianism did did die in but I think also the social democratic welfare state and if you allow me again a brief improvisation I wonder if you agree you are here my liberal fellow traveler I hope you don't take it personally if I characterize you I you know what Marxists liked these were people whom they tolerated but then at a certain point they had to be sent to Gulag and so on no what they called progressive bourgeois intelligence you know somehow you fit this don't ask me why okay sorry but seriously seriously I hope you will I hope you will agree with this that with with years delay we see that again social democracy is also losing ground and something which genuinely worries me is not only the fact about which I've written a lot how in China and Far East a certain new model is emerging with a capitalism more efficient than ours but at the same time with at least I think no need for democracy this is something very harsh to swallow you know because again as I wrote in my I think the previous book no I put it you know one thing you can say about capitalism if you are honest that we should as Catholics like to put it first give to the devil what belongs what belongs that although you have here and there years of dictatorship Chile South Korea but when things start to function again always in the long term democracy did generate some kind of demand for democracy with all the bourgeois limitation blah blah but it did it what I worry is that now we have a new form of capitalism which unfortunately no longer does and it's even more efficient than our capitalism so something to worry but what I'm saying is that let's forget about this let's look at Europe is not the part of this deep crisis if not disappearing of old social democracies I think a kind of a new division of political space let me simplify things to the utmost till recently our political space was structured so that usually you have a left of center and right of center party these were usually the two populist party not in Ernesto Laclau sense but populist in the simple sense of addressing as voters the entire population and then you have parties which consciously or out of necessity limited their appeal to a certain strata like Green party old left fringe or neo-fascist or whatever I claim that now I wonder if you agree sincerely here no bad jokes a new polarity is emerging we have more and more on the one hand what I cannot by call a neutral pro-capitalist country and it's not necessarily bad it's usually a country for pure efficient capitalism but at the same time liberal usually multiculturalist pro-abortion all that stuff and the opponent which is emerging the main opposition is usually some kind of a populist fundamentalist anti-immigrant reaction to it this is clearly a situation in in now re-emerging again and again in most of the post-communist East European new members of the European Union where ex-communists who tried to play the role of the left-of-center party are simply disappearing and take Poland you have Donald Tusk pure liberal apolitical of course falsely but atheoretical and so on we are just trying to build a tolerant working capitalist system and then you have the Twiddle-Dee and Twiddle-Dum the Kaczynski okay now it's only Twiddle-Dee no but you know what I mean no like and the same thing is in Hungary but not only there they told me in Norway that there also this anti-immigrant party is the second one already they fear that in Dutch it will become and this dynamic which is exclusively the dynamic of liberalism and not a kind of radical liberalism but this traditional market liberalism versus right-wing anti-immigrant nationalism I claim this is I will not go into it too far but I claim this is a very a very dangerous dynamic so let me now return after this short detour to my basic line so what I'm trying to say is that the first thing to say here wouldn't you agree when we debate with liberals we shouldn't say no no you are the bourgeois enemies we should tell them we also like very much your freedoms but like only a new strong dose of the left in the long term will redeem that's my sincere belief will save what is worth saving in your freedoms otherwise you will be slowly losing ground and forced to concede more and more more and more to the extreme right I mean Jean-Marie Le Pen who is unfortunately not an idiot formulated this very nicely when at some elections he lost and he said he was quite right we lost because we won in the sense of because the center parties in a more civilized way if you want integrated our problematic you know how liberals or standard democratic conservative like to say they say of course we condemn Le Pen it's horrible disgusting no place in our civilized societies but then comes a but they say but they are manipulating and addressing legitimate fears of the people so in other words we should do it in a more softer way and so on and so on so the first thing we should say is I think
I hope this works I mean technically [unintelligible] never mind okay thanks very much I'm really really honored to be here and I hope I will not disappoint you but what I will do is not of course not I never understood philosophers but they exist I will not name them who are able to do seminars on their own work you know like you read a page from your own book and then ask what did the thinker want to say with this no that I'm not able to do I will simply do I will do something very simple I must tell you something which if you read my work I hope I hope it will not make you sad I'm getting a little bit tired of this how should I put it ironically communist propaganda series that I'm doing in defense of lost causes and so on I'm already for two years doing a book on Hegel it already to put it in Stalinist philosophical terms exists objectively out of my consciousness in objective reality as over pages of the manuscript and it's not yet ended but my love is there why I think we need more than ever pure thinking theory today I will return to this at the end what I want to do is just to pursue a certain line of how capitalism reacts to ecological catastrophes of course I will develop some reflections apropos of two of the latest not very threatening at least the first one but nonetheless known to us all ecological catastrophes that Eyjafjallajökull ash cloud from the Iceland volcano and of course the south of Louisiana big oil spill first did you notice something it is my friend from India Saroj Giri who is really one of the most gifted new social philosophers that I know and is from what I can say a typical victim of you know that I'm not politically correct and so on but when I see implicit racism even I can admit it like because he is from there he is also an excellent theorist he did a wonderful analysis of Laclau Badiou me critical towards all of us but the reaction in the west is always but you come from there why don't you write something about Nepal India and so on as if you know leave to us pure theory no local report he developed in at a conference about communism in Berlin where I am practically coming from a week ago he developed something wonderful namely the idea that our public media even are today full of anti-capitalism that we are even witnessing a kind of overload of the critique of the horrors of capitalism I mean if you open up TV it's always this corrupted bank manager that corrupted businessman that company is polluting environment that other company owns sweatshops where child children work overtime and so on and so on there is however a catch to this overflow of critique what is as a rule not questioned in this critique ruthless as it may appear is the democratic liberal frame of fighting these excesses that is to say the explicit or implied goal is to democratize capitalism to extend the democratic control onto economy through the pressure of the public media parliamentary inquiries harsher laws honest police investigations and so on and so on but never questioning the democratic institutional frame of the state of law this democratic institutional frame remains the sacred cow even for the most radical forms of this let's call it ethical anti-capitalism the Porto Alegre forum the Seattle movement it is here I think that the key insight of Marx remains valid today perhaps more than ever for Marx the question of freedom should not be located primarily into the political sphere proper does a country have free elections are the judges independent is the press free from hidden pressures are human rights respected and the similar list of questions different independent or not so independent western institutions apply when they want to pronounce a judgment on a country the key to actual freedom rather resides in the apolitical network of social relations from market to family and so on where the change needed if we want an actual improvement is not a political reform but a change in apolitical social relations of productions so this is a change which cannot be made at the level of democratic elections or other political measures in the narrow sense of the term we do not vote about who owns what about relations in a factory and so on all this is left to processes outside the sphere of the political in the narrower sense of the term and it is illusory to expect that one can effectively change things by extending democracy into this sphere say by organizing democratic banks under people's control radical changes in this domain should be made outside the sphere of legal rights and so on in such democratic procedures which of course can have their positive role to play no matter how radical our anti-capitalism is the solution is sought in applying democratic mechanisms which one should never forget are part of the state apparatus which guarantees the undisturbed functioning of the capitalist reproduction in this sense only although I find this statement today problematic Alain Badiou was right or at least made the right point with his crazy claim that today the name of the ultimate enemy is not capitalism exploitation or anything similar but democracy the democratic illusion the acceptance of democratic mechanisms as the ultimate frame of every change and let me avoid a misunderstanding here what I just said doesn't mean so haha no democracy but coup d'etat killing and so on and so on all I'm saying is that democracy restrained to what we are perceiving as the core of the democratic process multiparty elections state of law and so on is not enough that a different let's call it social political mobilization which I'm more and more inclined even still to call democratic should is the place where things should happen what I find so interesting is how strictly correlative to this apparently ruthless critique of capitalism but again if you look at it closely it's always directed this kind of critique at excesses which are not read in a classical Marxian Freudian way as symptoms that is to say as necessary excesses as something which registered a necessary flaw in the system but as simple excesses which one could one could one could abolish I don't know through better legislation and so on and so on so what is crucial for me is that the strict opposite to this personalized anti-capitalism where I even think that sometimes this personalized anti-capitalism can be so brutal that although I know that people there often attacking are scum I feel also some sympathy for the victims like do you remember a year and a half ago the scandal with Bernard Madoff okay of course a scum should be arrested whatever but I didn't like how they personalize it first you know he was a bad guy but as such he was just the extreme point of following the logic of the system he was a typical postmodern capitalist with with you know by postmodern I mean first you gather billions then you give half back for charity and so on and so on so what I'm saying is that this overload of fanatical but personalized we like concrete bad guys not what is wrong with the system itself this overload of vulgar anti-capitalist critique anti-capitalist criticism is just one side of the global phenomenon its other side is different attempts to what we may call the postmodern ethical capitalism the idea is and it's again quite honorable idea I'm not a priori opposed to it the idea is that one can render the ecological and social responsibility profitable as they like to put it in their New Age terminology the partisans of this orientation that this idea of on the one hand sleazy private capitalist amassing profit on the other hand those who care for the global good that this is still haha the old paradigm no that in the new emerging paradigm the two dimensions can go together again up to a point they can but up to a point what do I mean by this maybe you know this movement again nothing bad about it I only think it has limits it's I'm referring her to the movement of so-called natural capitalism instigated by Peter Hawken what they propose is a kind of new revolution in production comparable to the first industrial revolution which as we all know generated a breathtaking material development but at an immense cost to the earth depletion of natural wealth loss of the topsoil destruction of species and so on and so on in order to counteract this destructive tendency we have to change our entire approach till now we included into the price of commodities only what we have to invest to produce them ignoring the costs to nature our prosperity was thus illusory since by way of ruthlessly exploiting natural resources we were drawing our income not from earnings but from principal from inherited wealth the sum of this inherited wealth is natural capital the store of commodities produced by nature in the billions of years of its development commodities like water minerals trees soil air plus all living systems grasslands forests oceans and so on all these living systems not only supply non-renewable resources for our material production they also render services indispensable for our survival regeneration of atmosphere soil fertilization and so on so here is the proposal to our standard notion of capital as stored value we should add the economic value of nature as a system as well as the value of human resources we thus obtain four forms of capital financial capital investments monetary instruments manufactured capital machines the entire infrastructure natural capital resources living systems and human capital labor intelligence culture organization admitting the difficulty of assigning monetary value to for the time being at least non-substitutable services like the oxygen production by plants natural capitalists nonetheless risk estimates according to which for example the worldwide oxygen production is worth trillion dollars annually and as they like to point out more or less the same as the gross world product or they claim the monetary value of all human capital is three times greater than all financial and manufactured capital so the idea of natural capitalism is to change radically our accountancy by way of treating as the capital which should be enriched through its expanded reproduction all the four components not only the first two this can be done they claim Peter Hawken and his colleagues in four main ways first radical resource productivity promoting industrial efficiency and so on second point biomimicry eliminating waste by redesigning industrial systems on biological lines three a service and flow economy shifting from a perception of wealth as goods and purchases to a perception of value as desired services and satisfaction of human needs and last way investing in natural capital developing markets for activities which enhance and restore our environment so that's their position I hope it was at least clear this is a position I was describing not my position why because you know that something quite comical is happening if you allow me a brief two minutes detour which makes me a little bit depressed what that guy Adam Kirsch who attacked me two years ago in New Republic started is now circulating in France in already three German newspapers and so on namely they quote a passage from my in defense of lost causes where I am clearly unambiguously describing a position which of course is not mine the position of what Jean-Claude Milner in his very weird book called Criminal Tendencies of Modern Europe his thesis is that European Union is he directly claims this I'm not like extrapolating it that that European Union is a continuation of Hitler with other means and this is why the only solution for Europe is to eliminate the Jews that it's still the I mean Milner doesn't claim this he is a Zionist he claims that this is the reality of Europe I describe this position and it's incredible again and again this is quoted as a proof that I am a radical anti-semite advising mass killing of all Jews and it's incredible how I tried to write to newspapers in Germany the last one was Die Zeit I did think we published this a letter where I explained unambiguously that I'm describing another guy's position the answer I got was a very brutal ironic that now I'm trying to squeeze out by claiming that I didn't quite mean what I wrote there and so on and so on no it's we live in strange times but sorry for this digression let's go on so now comes my opinion while in a first approach it might it may appear that such a radical redefinition of capital has beneficent effects and undoubtedly it has them of course you have to change all strategy why not I think there are nonetheless first unsurmountable empirical problems here if this redefinition is to become even minimally operative it would demand an incredibly complex worldwide state control and regulation like some state or whatever agency must determine the price of natural commodities and then must enforce them onto the market and so on so all I'm saying is that although Peter this is the first contradiction I see and it's a typical contradiction I had a nice public fight a friendly one but nonetheless it was shouting but friendly shouting with with Toni Negri also Badiou had it in in Berlin where my basic problem with Negri developed through again his notion of multitude claiming that that's the new positive productivity the new political subjectivity and you know he then exploded in his ecstatic dream can't we see communism is practically here capitalists are purely parasitic we just have to cut them off and we are there one step from communism I told him that doesn't he see that A all examples that he gives of multitude I hope you would agree at least here with me strictly presuppose not only a minimal a minimal law and order but even a very strong state guaranteeing many things and point two that all the most convincing examples that he gives of multitude are political sorry are examples within capitalism so that I simply see no foundation in what he describes of how to pull this miracle to cut off the capitalists and to generalize the model of multitude to the entire society so then I okay he told me you don't understand anything because you are a Hegelian okay maybe but then I asked him okay treat me as an idiot and give me one simple I told him even more viciously treat me as an Anglo-Saxon idiot sorry don't take me seriously and give me at least one empirical example of a multitude which wouldn't be just this poetic you know multitude of postmodern capitalists speculating on Wall Street this is Negri's favorite topic of communists of today but like where multitude really started to function on its own and he was a little bit perplexed and then he said well Chinese Cultural Revolution and you know me and Badiou we were a little bit shocked because I mean if there ever was a failure that was one I mean for me now quite seriously you know where is my problem with Negri here again I appreciate him very much I said publicly in Berlin at some level I am with Negri even against Badiou the problem with Badiou for me is the same problem as with all these let's call them French or French-oriented political philosophers Rancière up to a point he's getting better now Balibar Ernesto Laclau and so on did you notice how there is de facto no role of in no role no place for what in Marxism we call critique of political economy in their work I mean Badiou is quite open here he says openly economy that's the domain of human animal of utilitarian games and so on and so on it has nothing to do with authentic with authentic politics here I agree with Negri economy is the place where the struggle should be won or lost but where I again where I disagree with Negri is in what I claim that and he admitted this to me when we talked that Negri is still a a fanatic in a good sense I don't use this word here in any ironic sense of the secret history of 20th century which was as for any democratic leftists this story of immediate democracy councils soviets whatever and they see the 20th century as one big kidnapping or reappropriation of authentic revolutionary outburst which was done at the level of soviets and so on by the state bureaucracy and so on some of my nothing against them they are my friends I appreciate but nonetheless some of my Trotskyite friends here in the UK have the same dream the way they describe the 20th century can't you see they say okay sorry I'm blind myopic I don't see but can't you see how for example Solidarność was a worker's movement council which was somehow mysteriously then kidnapped by by the church CIA whomever you want and so on and so on I think that the lesson of the Chinese Cultural Revolution is much more tragic one what we should abandon here I agree with Badiou is not only the state socialist form of the left of the 20th century what we usually called communist states although again we should still maybe learn something from their experience but as a form it's over not only I go a step further should be abandoned not again it's not a question of totally abandoning but the form as such is no longer workable the so-called social democratic welfare state and maybe we are now noticing with years delay that not only communist totalitarianism did did die in but I think also the social democratic welfare state and if you allow me again a brief improvisation I wonder if you agree you are here my liberal fellow traveler I hope you don't take it personally if I characterize you I you know what Marxists liked these were people whom they tolerated but then at a certain point they had to be sent to Gulag and so on no what they called progressive bourgeois intelligence you know somehow you fit this don't ask me why okay sorry but seriously seriously I hope you will I hope you will agree with this that with with years delay we see that again social democracy is also losing ground and something which genuinely worries me is not only the fact about which I've written a lot how in China and Far East a certain new model is emerging with a capitalism more efficient than ours but at the same time with at least I think no need for democracy this is something very harsh to swallow you know because again as I wrote in my I think the previous book no I put it you know one thing you can say about capitalism if you are honest that we should as Catholics like to put it first give to the devil what belongs what belongs that although you have here and there years of dictatorship Chile South Korea but when things start to function again always in the long term democracy did generate some kind of demand for democracy with all the bourgeois limitation blah blah but it did it what I worry is that now we have a new form of capitalism which unfortunately no longer does and it's even more efficient than our capitalism so something to worry but what I'm saying is that let's forget about this let's look at Europe is not the part of this deep crisis if not disappearing of old social democracies I think a kind of a new division of political space let me simplify things to the utmost till recently our political space was structured so that usually you have a left of center and right of center party these were usually the two populist party not in Ernesto Laclau sense but populist in the simple sense of addressing as voters the entire population and then you have parties which consciously or out of necessity limited their appeal to a certain strata like Green party old left fringe or neo-fascist or whatever I claim that now I wonder if you agree sincerely here no bad jokes a new polarity is emerging we have more and more on the one hand what I cannot by call a neutral pro-capitalist country and it's not necessarily bad it's usually a country for pure efficient capitalism but at the same time liberal usually multiculturalist pro-abortion all that stuff and the opponent which is emerging the main opposition is usually some kind of a populist fundamentalist anti-immigrant reaction to it this is clearly a situation in in now re-emerging again and again in most of the post-communist East European new members of the European Union where ex-communists who tried to play the role of the left-of-center party are simply disappearing and take Poland you have Donald Tusk pure liberal apolitical of course falsely but atheoretical and so on we are just trying to build a tolerant working capitalist system and then you have the Twiddle-Dee and Twiddle-Dum the Kaczynski okay now it's only Twiddle-Dee no but you know what I mean no like and the same thing is in Hungary but not only there they told me in Norway that there also this anti-immigrant party is the second one already they fear that in Dutch it will become and this dynamic which is exclusively the dynamic of liberalism and not a kind of radical liberalism but this traditional market liberalism versus right-wing anti-immigrant nationalism I claim this is I will not go into it too far but I claim this is a very a very dangerous dynamic so let me now return after this short detour to my basic line so what I'm trying to say is that the first thing to say here wouldn't you agree when we debate with liberals we shouldn't say no no you are the bourgeois enemies we should tell them we also like very much your freedoms but like only a new strong dose of the left in the long term will redeem that's my sincere belief will save what is worth saving in your freedoms otherwise you will be slowly losing ground and forced to concede more and more more and more to the extreme right I mean Jean-Marie Le Pen who is unfortunately not an idiot formulated this very nicely when at some elections he lost and he said he was quite right we lost because we won in the sense of because the center parties in a more civilized way if you want integrated our problematic you know how liberals or standard democratic conservative like to say they say of course we condemn Le Pen it's horrible disgusting no place in our civilized societies but then comes a but they say but they are manipulating and addressing legitimate fears of the people so in other words we should do it in a more softer way and so on and so on so the first thing we should say is I think
unknown
change the entire terrain like the big enigma for me is where did
change the entire terrain like the big enigma for me is where did
Slavoj Žižek
this myth come which even some leftists like Negri buy that the nation
this myth come which even some leftists like Negri buy that the nation
unknown
state is disappearing and so on isn't
state is disappearing and so on isn't
Slavoj Žižek
state effectively getting stronger and stronger I think that in today's economy where you have the key role
state effectively getting stronger and stronger I think that in today's economy where you have the key role
unknown
of intellectual property all the ecological concerns and so on and so on international situation I think literally state apparatuses are getting stronger and stronger and so on so back to my line this is the first problem with natural capitalism I cannot even imagine
of intellectual property all the ecological concerns and so on and so on international situation I think literally state apparatuses are getting stronger and stronger and so on so back to my line this is the first problem with natural capitalism I cannot even imagine
Slavoj Žižek
how concretely to do it without a gigantic state but more fundamentally the problem with natural capitalism for me resides in the very form of commodity and market exchange the problem for me with the basic notion of natural capitalism is that it reads like a friend from Iran okay maybe not an objective source told me about the first sex and marriage guide recently published in Saudi Arabia it's very interesting book he told me while its form is that of a modern manual it imitates these decadent western manuals its content is the traditional patriarchal advice so in this form of you know easy light chat how to treat marriage you get then advices how to beat your wife without hurting her too much and so on and so on with Hawken it's the opposite I claim that is the case new ecological concerns are squeezed into the old capitalist form so that instead of overcoming commodification one extends it ad absurdum so that you notice the basic operation basically they try to save the ecological problem so that everything becomes a commodity and Hawken at some point even says everything that nature did in the last I don't know how he come to this number billion years is this the date of Big Bang I don't know all that should be considered as a commodity and we should try we should try to formulate its price so again from the air we breathe to our human abilities everything is a commodity now incidentally this is the same mistake so that you will not say that I am only making fun of this commodity capitalism it's an mirror image of the same mistake made in in the last stage by the communist countries like I met at a conference a guy who is now one of the top computer specialists but in the last years years of the East Germany communist Germany he was one of their wonderkids allowed not to go to the west but to read literature of the west doing with digitalization and he told me how they made a similar mistake they totally misread the social consequences of what we call computerization digital revolution on the contrary they thought that digital revolution is what will finally make communism workable they considered that planning doesn't function but they claim because social needs are so fluctuating and so on the central bureaucracy simply cannot do it but they thought with modern mega computers you see their notion was also their notion was also this kind of a primitive Orwellian of a couple of big mega computers in some state agency that finally these computers will be strong enough to take into account all the fluctuations of the needs of different strata of populations and finally communism will become workable again what they did is they simply didn't get it what the irony I've written long ago about this is here beautiful I think because you know we may doubt this Marxist dogma about you know the vulgar one of how you know when forces of production get in contradiction with relations of production then revolution and so but it certainly did help this dogma for the last years of communist countries it's clear that what ruined them was what fashionably we describe as a passage from traditional industrial to whatever we call it post-industrial capitalism that was their end but something similar is doing Hawken I think in the same way that the GDR communist bureaucrats were like ooh mega computers wonderful finally communism will work he thinks ooh we universalize the notion of commodity so that everything is a commodity not only a commodity but a capital which we should care for it so that it is regenerated properly and the problem of ecology is saved I think this is problematic why because while Hawken maintains the basic capitalist matrix profit through expanded self-reproduction proposing to save it from its and our self-destruction through its excessive universalization proposing to save it through precisely through its excessive universalization the core of the problem remains which resides in this very form profit seeking as the motive of economic reproduction I claim that no matter how much we expand the notion of capital the very form of capital presupposes a structural gap between reality the use value of products and services and the real of the financial circulation reproduction which generates profit where the first is subordinated to the second in other words in so far as we remain within capitalism even if we expand the notion of capital to all reality this reality will continue to function as an indifferent ultimately expendable stuff whose goal is to serve profit-making so again I'm claiming that this is a kind of mirror illusion of the illusion of the East German communist bureaucrats where can we see the limit of this approach if you allow me another like I did already percent if I wanted no you can go on for another minutes really if you want to it's a choice or look you can go on until is that not enough more I don't like this metaphysical linear notion of time that you are using now but okay sorry I will try to do it fast yes you asked me earlier to keep a firm control of this event did you not and I said and I said I said I'd be your dominatrix for the evening yeah but you know you should say you should take this in the same way when Stalin said comrades please criticize me and so on you know I meant it in this way you know or in other words you have minutes left you deserve not Gulag but re-education here you know just okay sorry and since you and since you constantly invite me to questions to answer your questions but you never but let just for the sake of the audience and I who is this we you keep appealing to ah the royal we you know you look you looked at the picture of the Queen you know as you passed in earlier and there's a famous notion of the royal we no no I can who is the royal we in your discourse that you keep but it's ah no no I will give you a very clear I will give you a very clear answer here that's uh okay in order to answer you really properly I will have to lose another half an hour go going into speech acts theory and so on but it doesn't yet exist is it the ghost of the left sorry it's the it's the ghost which comes not from the past but the future of the left this is how politics is done you cannot say really I am no no no I am making a very fine point do you know at least I hope so do you know do you know the paradox of the performative how by saying something you create it but did you notice a paradox if you read it closely how and even John Searle who is not the highest on my top of these guys speech act theorists noticed nicely this paradox that the only way to do a performative is to put it in a fetishized way so that you do something not by saying that you are doing something but by reporting it as already done you close a session by saying this session is closed and in the same way I think it's exactly the same problem in a political movement you cannot say now I'm starting something which will you have to say we and we all know that this we will maybe exist as the result of what I'm saying now I am so sad but this is counted already as a debate it's not included in the minutes because no seriously I now read if you know now another digression but it's a beautiful book yeah yeah yeah you know the guy the guy François Bayard a French writer who wrote some wonderful paradoxical books like the one about Agatha Christie the murder of Roger Ackroyd where he in a totally naive proof that the solution there is the wrong one not the narrator but his sister did it he now wrote a book of anticipatory how do you call it plagiarism plagiat where he demonstrates how for example the only way to read properly Maupassant is that he plagiarized Proust who comes after him of course he is not a mystic but what he claims is that sometimes writers do write in this way that the only way to truly get what they arrived at what they were doing is to read them retroactively but nonetheless at the factual level they themselves created this future to which so this would be my we I refer to it but if things will not turn too bad maybe through other idiots like me who refer to it there will be this one okay let me go on okay now I will really try to squeeze it and of jokes how all this works with ecology okay two problems first this oil spill unfortunately this is what I mean by I would just like to illustrate what I developed at the beginning about this how this parliamentary legal state form is not enough the Louisiana oil spill you know Freud's dream on Irma's injection what's the form first this terrifying look into Irma's throat you see the horror then three idiots come three doctors who provide ridiculous reasons for why the treatment didn't work so you have a trauma and then a symbolic comedy that exactly was the structure of course in Washington we saw the trauma which was you remember that undersea TV shot of the that gap oil spilling out and then we had the three idiots the representatives of British Petroleum Transocean Halliburton each of them playing this stupid game putting the blame onto another but more sad not only was this an undignified comedy Obama also disappointed me here because I think that even some conservatives noted this the problem was that his reaction at least till recently remained too much in this formal democratic legal domain he was looking for a legal culprit you know he even said once something which is at a certain common sense level patently not true he said it's BP's problem no sorry it's not BP's I know he didn't mean it in this way he meant like who is guilty it's BP's problem but I'm sorry to tell you it's not BP's problem it's the problem of the millions of people there not only United States even Northern Cuba Mexico spreading around and what I'm simply saying is that and when Obama said I almost became sympathetic to BP when Obama said you know I will kick them in the ass and so on of course they should be kicked in the ass but the first thing to say is that A the problem don't you feel that the problem is way too serious to approach it in this legal responsibility sense I will make BP pay every cent that's nonsense so much is already destroyed that this statement is meaningless point two now I'm not paid by BP but nonetheless my god isn't it that up to a certain point at all it's contingent that it was BP on whose field this accident happens don't all of them use basically the same mechanisms and so on machinery so probably at least up to maybe BP was I don't know a little bit worse than others but it could have happened with somebody else and so on so isn't it that what should be done is A a much larger mobilization not only state playing legal games but mobilizing ecological plans mobilizing people in Louisiana I would even have been at least they would have been doing something something much more rational than fighting wars in Afghanistan mobilizing the army starting to ask questions how do we deal with this kind of problems and so on I mean problems explode here which again that's my point so that you will not suspect me of some that by criticizing just the frame of formal democracy that I'm already dragging behind I don't know comrade Stalin and his Leninists no I'm speaking about even more radical democratic mobilization not only in the sense of mobilization like wider circle of people but also A at a different level it's not a legal game of culprits it's a game of our way of life of how we have to change it why do we drill oil and so on and so on there is I think more truth than in these legal games in a wonderful anecdote that happened to I cannot resist it Ted Kennedy I don't know if you know it years ago Ted Kennedy who was still alive was they they had already a debate in Senate about oil drilling no about sorry about offshore drilling and Kennedy was opposed then something happened the irony is that exactly there off south of New Orleans where oil is spilling now Kennedy was caught then a senator by a paparazzo well doing some drilling that is to say on a boat in the middle there making love it's unambiguous I saw the photos and then here I almost started to appreciate Republicans then at the next session of Senate a Republican senator turned to Ted Kennedy and said I'm glad to see that Senator Kennedy has changed his position on offshore drilling no this is one but Kennedy said denied and I think Kennedy was our slogan should be Kennedy's offshore drilling is the only offshore drilling acceptable to us offshore drilling why okay I have to squeeze the topic but what I am let me for similar okay since the time of the end is approaching I would like to point to another trap of how here I would like to refer even to some people who are generally associated with LSE your school Ulrich Beck again I don't fully agree with him but there are definitely things to be learned from Ulrich Beck especially something which is more than actual confronting all these ecological problems didn't Ulrich Beck I think was the first to draw attention to the wonderful ambiguity and novelty of the term we all use expert opinion my god even when I was young experts didn't have opinions they knew it we common sense idiots had opinions then you ask the expert he tells you how things are but did you notice how now precisely when science is pervading all our spheres of life all of a sudden you don't get from from experts the truth you get opinions he thinks that the other guy thinks that and here I must unfortunately disappoint you I think there is an inherent truth in it that is to say even with global warming I don't buy those leftist paranoiac story who claim that doubts about global warming are simply the result of some dishonest biologists and so on being bribed by big companies of course there is probably that but there are effectively uncertainties so my conclusion is only this doesn't mean we can go on exploiting nature it means that the situation is even more open we we really don't know the causality is so non-transparent which is why which is why another thing the mythic notion which we all use and it's I think pure ideology is limit value
how concretely to do it without a gigantic state but more fundamentally the problem with natural capitalism for me resides in the very form of commodity and market exchange the problem for me with the basic notion of natural capitalism is that it reads like a friend from Iran okay maybe not an objective source told me about the first sex and marriage guide recently published in Saudi Arabia it's very interesting book he told me while its form is that of a modern manual it imitates these decadent western manuals its content is the traditional patriarchal advice so in this form of you know easy light chat how to treat marriage you get then advices how to beat your wife without hurting her too much and so on and so on with Hawken it's the opposite I claim that is the case new ecological concerns are squeezed into the old capitalist form so that instead of overcoming commodification one extends it ad absurdum so that you notice the basic operation basically they try to save the ecological problem so that everything becomes a commodity and Hawken at some point even says everything that nature did in the last I don't know how he come to this number billion years is this the date of Big Bang I don't know all that should be considered as a commodity and we should try we should try to formulate its price so again from the air we breathe to our human abilities everything is a commodity now incidentally this is the same mistake so that you will not say that I am only making fun of this commodity capitalism it's an mirror image of the same mistake made in in the last stage by the communist countries like I met at a conference a guy who is now one of the top computer specialists but in the last years years of the East Germany communist Germany he was one of their wonderkids allowed not to go to the west but to read literature of the west doing with digitalization and he told me how they made a similar mistake they totally misread the social consequences of what we call computerization digital revolution on the contrary they thought that digital revolution is what will finally make communism workable they considered that planning doesn't function but they claim because social needs are so fluctuating and so on the central bureaucracy simply cannot do it but they thought with modern mega computers you see their notion was also their notion was also this kind of a primitive Orwellian of a couple of big mega computers in some state agency that finally these computers will be strong enough to take into account all the fluctuations of the needs of different strata of populations and finally communism will become workable again what they did is they simply didn't get it what the irony I've written long ago about this is here beautiful I think because you know we may doubt this Marxist dogma about you know the vulgar one of how you know when forces of production get in contradiction with relations of production then revolution and so but it certainly did help this dogma for the last years of communist countries it's clear that what ruined them was what fashionably we describe as a passage from traditional industrial to whatever we call it post-industrial capitalism that was their end but something similar is doing Hawken I think in the same way that the GDR communist bureaucrats were like ooh mega computers wonderful finally communism will work he thinks ooh we universalize the notion of commodity so that everything is a commodity not only a commodity but a capital which we should care for it so that it is regenerated properly and the problem of ecology is saved I think this is problematic why because while Hawken maintains the basic capitalist matrix profit through expanded self-reproduction proposing to save it from its and our self-destruction through its excessive universalization proposing to save it through precisely through its excessive universalization the core of the problem remains which resides in this very form profit seeking as the motive of economic reproduction I claim that no matter how much we expand the notion of capital the very form of capital presupposes a structural gap between reality the use value of products and services and the real of the financial circulation reproduction which generates profit where the first is subordinated to the second in other words in so far as we remain within capitalism even if we expand the notion of capital to all reality this reality will continue to function as an indifferent ultimately expendable stuff whose goal is to serve profit-making so again I'm claiming that this is a kind of mirror illusion of the illusion of the East German communist bureaucrats where can we see the limit of this approach if you allow me another like I did already percent if I wanted no you can go on for another minutes really if you want to it's a choice or look you can go on until is that not enough more I don't like this metaphysical linear notion of time that you are using now but okay sorry I will try to do it fast yes you asked me earlier to keep a firm control of this event did you not and I said and I said I said I'd be your dominatrix for the evening yeah but you know you should say you should take this in the same way when Stalin said comrades please criticize me and so on you know I meant it in this way you know or in other words you have minutes left you deserve not Gulag but re-education here you know just okay sorry and since you and since you constantly invite me to questions to answer your questions but you never but let just for the sake of the audience and I who is this we you keep appealing to ah the royal we you know you look you looked at the picture of the Queen you know as you passed in earlier and there's a famous notion of the royal we no no I can who is the royal we in your discourse that you keep but it's ah no no I will give you a very clear I will give you a very clear answer here that's uh okay in order to answer you really properly I will have to lose another half an hour go going into speech acts theory and so on but it doesn't yet exist is it the ghost of the left sorry it's the it's the ghost which comes not from the past but the future of the left this is how politics is done you cannot say really I am no no no I am making a very fine point do you know at least I hope so do you know do you know the paradox of the performative how by saying something you create it but did you notice a paradox if you read it closely how and even John Searle who is not the highest on my top of these guys speech act theorists noticed nicely this paradox that the only way to do a performative is to put it in a fetishized way so that you do something not by saying that you are doing something but by reporting it as already done you close a session by saying this session is closed and in the same way I think it's exactly the same problem in a political movement you cannot say now I'm starting something which will you have to say we and we all know that this we will maybe exist as the result of what I'm saying now I am so sad but this is counted already as a debate it's not included in the minutes because no seriously I now read if you know now another digression but it's a beautiful book yeah yeah yeah you know the guy the guy François Bayard a French writer who wrote some wonderful paradoxical books like the one about Agatha Christie the murder of Roger Ackroyd where he in a totally naive proof that the solution there is the wrong one not the narrator but his sister did it he now wrote a book of anticipatory how do you call it plagiarism plagiat where he demonstrates how for example the only way to read properly Maupassant is that he plagiarized Proust who comes after him of course he is not a mystic but what he claims is that sometimes writers do write in this way that the only way to truly get what they arrived at what they were doing is to read them retroactively but nonetheless at the factual level they themselves created this future to which so this would be my we I refer to it but if things will not turn too bad maybe through other idiots like me who refer to it there will be this one okay let me go on okay now I will really try to squeeze it and of jokes how all this works with ecology okay two problems first this oil spill unfortunately this is what I mean by I would just like to illustrate what I developed at the beginning about this how this parliamentary legal state form is not enough the Louisiana oil spill you know Freud's dream on Irma's injection what's the form first this terrifying look into Irma's throat you see the horror then three idiots come three doctors who provide ridiculous reasons for why the treatment didn't work so you have a trauma and then a symbolic comedy that exactly was the structure of course in Washington we saw the trauma which was you remember that undersea TV shot of the that gap oil spilling out and then we had the three idiots the representatives of British Petroleum Transocean Halliburton each of them playing this stupid game putting the blame onto another but more sad not only was this an undignified comedy Obama also disappointed me here because I think that even some conservatives noted this the problem was that his reaction at least till recently remained too much in this formal democratic legal domain he was looking for a legal culprit you know he even said once something which is at a certain common sense level patently not true he said it's BP's problem no sorry it's not BP's I know he didn't mean it in this way he meant like who is guilty it's BP's problem but I'm sorry to tell you it's not BP's problem it's the problem of the millions of people there not only United States even Northern Cuba Mexico spreading around and what I'm simply saying is that and when Obama said I almost became sympathetic to BP when Obama said you know I will kick them in the ass and so on of course they should be kicked in the ass but the first thing to say is that A the problem don't you feel that the problem is way too serious to approach it in this legal responsibility sense I will make BP pay every cent that's nonsense so much is already destroyed that this statement is meaningless point two now I'm not paid by BP but nonetheless my god isn't it that up to a certain point at all it's contingent that it was BP on whose field this accident happens don't all of them use basically the same mechanisms and so on machinery so probably at least up to maybe BP was I don't know a little bit worse than others but it could have happened with somebody else and so on so isn't it that what should be done is A a much larger mobilization not only state playing legal games but mobilizing ecological plans mobilizing people in Louisiana I would even have been at least they would have been doing something something much more rational than fighting wars in Afghanistan mobilizing the army starting to ask questions how do we deal with this kind of problems and so on I mean problems explode here which again that's my point so that you will not suspect me of some that by criticizing just the frame of formal democracy that I'm already dragging behind I don't know comrade Stalin and his Leninists no I'm speaking about even more radical democratic mobilization not only in the sense of mobilization like wider circle of people but also A at a different level it's not a legal game of culprits it's a game of our way of life of how we have to change it why do we drill oil and so on and so on there is I think more truth than in these legal games in a wonderful anecdote that happened to I cannot resist it Ted Kennedy I don't know if you know it years ago Ted Kennedy who was still alive was they they had already a debate in Senate about oil drilling no about sorry about offshore drilling and Kennedy was opposed then something happened the irony is that exactly there off south of New Orleans where oil is spilling now Kennedy was caught then a senator by a paparazzo well doing some drilling that is to say on a boat in the middle there making love it's unambiguous I saw the photos and then here I almost started to appreciate Republicans then at the next session of Senate a Republican senator turned to Ted Kennedy and said I'm glad to see that Senator Kennedy has changed his position on offshore drilling no this is one but Kennedy said denied and I think Kennedy was our slogan should be Kennedy's offshore drilling is the only offshore drilling acceptable to us offshore drilling why okay I have to squeeze the topic but what I am let me for similar okay since the time of the end is approaching I would like to point to another trap of how here I would like to refer even to some people who are generally associated with LSE your school Ulrich Beck again I don't fully agree with him but there are definitely things to be learned from Ulrich Beck especially something which is more than actual confronting all these ecological problems didn't Ulrich Beck I think was the first to draw attention to the wonderful ambiguity and novelty of the term we all use expert opinion my god even when I was young experts didn't have opinions they knew it we common sense idiots had opinions then you ask the expert he tells you how things are but did you notice how now precisely when science is pervading all our spheres of life all of a sudden you don't get from from experts the truth you get opinions he thinks that the other guy thinks that and here I must unfortunately disappoint you I think there is an inherent truth in it that is to say even with global warming I don't buy those leftist paranoiac story who claim that doubts about global warming are simply the result of some dishonest biologists and so on being bribed by big companies of course there is probably that but there are effectively uncertainties so my conclusion is only this doesn't mean we can go on exploiting nature it means that the situation is even more open we we really don't know the causality is so non-transparent which is why which is why another thing the mythic notion which we all use and it's I think pure ideology is limit value
unknown
what you usually get from experts is a limit value like now it's fashionable to say we can afford two degree Celsius of heating but is this are we aware that this is totally mythic I mean usually we take you
what you usually get from experts is a limit value like now it's fashionable to say we can afford two degree Celsius of heating but is this are we aware that this is totally mythic I mean usually we take you
Slavoj Žižek
know it's the same as I spoke with a lawyer in United States
know it's the same as I spoke with a lawyer in United States
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where they try to fixate at what point your Holocaust denial becomes a crime and I'm not kidding they are now the number that is emerging is don't ask me why is and I told them are you crazy like if I said the Nazis killed I'm good guy if I say no they killed only I'm a Holocaust denier it's a Holocaust denial so again another
where they try to fixate at what point your Holocaust denial becomes a crime and I'm not kidding they are now the number that is emerging is don't ask me why is and I told them are you crazy like if I said the Nazis killed I'm good guy if I say no they killed only I'm a Holocaust denier it's a Holocaust denial so again another
Slavoj Žižek
consequence
consequence
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of this uncertainty of ours is the following one did you notice how you know for a long time I thought that we have the Marxist mantra which is even these natural catastrophes are mostly caused by our human hubris of ruthless exploitation of
of this uncertainty of ours is the following one did you notice how you know for a long time I thought that we have the Marxist mantra which is even these natural catastrophes are mostly caused by our human hubris of ruthless exploitation of
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nature but I claim there is something hypocritical
nature but I claim there is something hypocritical
Slavoj Žižek
about it in what
about it in what
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sense I claim that
sense I claim that
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this is don't forget also good news for us because if we are the cause of it then all we have to do
this is don't forget also good news for us because if we are the cause of it then all we have to do
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is change our way of life and we are
is change our way of life and we are
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out of trouble but sorry to tell you although I fully agree with this thesis of social mediation of many natural catastrophes like the story I even
out of trouble but sorry to tell you although I fully agree with this thesis of social mediation of many natural catastrophes like the story I even
Paul Holdengräber
I think repeated here two years ago or when the last time about China how serious geologists there think that the catastrophic two or three years ago earthquake in Sichuan was caused by the Three Gorges Dam because the water there the new lakes
I think repeated here two years ago or when the last time about China how serious geologists there think that the catastrophic two or three years ago earthquake in Sichuan was caused by the Three Gorges Dam because the water there the new lakes
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is exactly above the subterranean cliffs where the movements set in motion
is exactly above the subterranean cliffs where the movements set in motion
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set in motion the earthquake and the idea is that it's the large amount of water there changed the whole
set in motion the earthquake and the idea is that it's the large amount of water there changed the whole
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pressure and so on and so on but isn't it at the same time something else going on again in this way we can save the innocence of nature and so on we we can avoid the very traumatic fact that you know not only us humans are crazy nature is also crazy and things can happen asteroid earthquake whatever you want and we can basically
pressure and so on and so on but isn't it at the same time something else going on again in this way we can save the innocence of nature and so on we we can avoid the very traumatic fact that you know not only us humans are crazy nature is also crazy and things can happen asteroid earthquake whatever you want and we can basically
Slavoj Žižek
can't do anything so I claim that in all this idea of oh my god we should recycle we should pollute less it is a little bit of a superstitious activity in it like you know that it really doesn't matter but you do it because somehow it makes your conscious clearer it's a little bit like you know if you are doing it I'm not I'm anti-patriotic but now in this football match where we Slovenians you know we hated you because you screwed us up which is why we were all for Germany because then you get the message you gave us to Slovenians a week later from Germany but you know like when you watch TV at home you shout boys you know this is meaningless they don't hear you no isn't all this you know an old lady I know lives next to me she carefully throws all bottles there oh oh I'm helping nature to recuperate and so on there is some there is some there is something about this so what I'm saying again is that again science cannot replace cannot replace politics here and now to conclude it may surprise you I will give two points I want to make here the first point is a horrible one this is how far I go to what I would have called the rehabilitation of people ask me but you appear that you are a little bit even for terror no I'm not but I'm ready to say something we have something that Alain Badiou calls the eternal constant invariant of revolutionary egalitarian justice composed of four features strict egalitarian justice terror voluntarism and trust in the people you can guess from this that Badiou is a Maoist but just to provoke you I would like to say something but will not the ecological crisis at some point force us to do something along these lines look strict egalitarian justice everyone knows we will have to apply it we in the west cannot play the games to the third world countries sorry we already spent the resources so we can pollute it at a larger extent you should we we will have to somehow how should I put it give equal right to every individual at least to pollute terror absolutely I claim it will have to be of course not terror in the Stalinist sense but a kind of a strict control overseeing even up to I love it that the Time Magazine at some point no they didn't proclaim that the person of the years but celebrated whistleblowers you know people from companies who would denounce you to the police okay as an old Stalinist as I am accused I loved it you see those who denounce you to the police yes they will have to be in some way perceived as new heroes and incidentally in United States they are because they don't get nothing they just get threats from the company then voluntarism absolutely but this I mean in the anti-in an anti-Marxist way if by traditional Marxism we mean this strange trust into the logic of history you know Marxists had this trust things are moving and even if things look bad now history is on our side we are realizing historical tendency no we are not and the last point trust to the people that by this I mean that I don't believe that either experts or state can do it tremendous things will have to be done for just think about five minutes promise and linear time no dirty tricks here just think about Iceland imagine that the outburst the explosion of that volcano would have were to be a stronger so that it can easily happen the whole of Iceland becomes uninhabitable now we don't even have mechanisms of deciding what to do then should they disperse around the world do and here I agree with you is the true problem of we who will be the we who will decide no you go there I don't know Putin says ho ho since you were so kind your banks to allow us to to launder our mafia's money no because everyone knows that the Russian mafia is the main culprit beneath it Iceland collapse that we give you part of Siberia Siberia even a greater problem you know that Siberia is now getting warmer so the idea is that in ten twenty years it will become much more inhabitable there are some other problems gases released poisonous but nonetheless let's say people can move there on the other hand you have parts of the world sub-Saharan and so on more and more desert again I think it will be quite a serious prospect very soon to we will be faced with the urgency of large movements of people we cannot do it in the old way this is nothing new it happened many times in the history of humanity but it happened spontaneously and through extreme violence millions died and so on and so on we know that we simply cannot afford it so again who how will do it this is what I mean to avoid a misunderstanding by communism I don't mean any comrade Lenin is back or whatever I simply mean that and this is just one example that we are facing problems for which capital market that is to say and the state in the narrow legal sense parliamentary democracy state of law is not enough that a different form of transnational
can't do anything so I claim that in all this idea of oh my god we should recycle we should pollute less it is a little bit of a superstitious activity in it like you know that it really doesn't matter but you do it because somehow it makes your conscious clearer it's a little bit like you know if you are doing it I'm not I'm anti-patriotic but now in this football match where we Slovenians you know we hated you because you screwed us up which is why we were all for Germany because then you get the message you gave us to Slovenians a week later from Germany but you know like when you watch TV at home you shout boys you know this is meaningless they don't hear you no isn't all this you know an old lady I know lives next to me she carefully throws all bottles there oh oh I'm helping nature to recuperate and so on there is some there is some there is something about this so what I'm saying again is that again science cannot replace cannot replace politics here and now to conclude it may surprise you I will give two points I want to make here the first point is a horrible one this is how far I go to what I would have called the rehabilitation of people ask me but you appear that you are a little bit even for terror no I'm not but I'm ready to say something we have something that Alain Badiou calls the eternal constant invariant of revolutionary egalitarian justice composed of four features strict egalitarian justice terror voluntarism and trust in the people you can guess from this that Badiou is a Maoist but just to provoke you I would like to say something but will not the ecological crisis at some point force us to do something along these lines look strict egalitarian justice everyone knows we will have to apply it we in the west cannot play the games to the third world countries sorry we already spent the resources so we can pollute it at a larger extent you should we we will have to somehow how should I put it give equal right to every individual at least to pollute terror absolutely I claim it will have to be of course not terror in the Stalinist sense but a kind of a strict control overseeing even up to I love it that the Time Magazine at some point no they didn't proclaim that the person of the years but celebrated whistleblowers you know people from companies who would denounce you to the police okay as an old Stalinist as I am accused I loved it you see those who denounce you to the police yes they will have to be in some way perceived as new heroes and incidentally in United States they are because they don't get nothing they just get threats from the company then voluntarism absolutely but this I mean in the anti-in an anti-Marxist way if by traditional Marxism we mean this strange trust into the logic of history you know Marxists had this trust things are moving and even if things look bad now history is on our side we are realizing historical tendency no we are not and the last point trust to the people that by this I mean that I don't believe that either experts or state can do it tremendous things will have to be done for just think about five minutes promise and linear time no dirty tricks here just think about Iceland imagine that the outburst the explosion of that volcano would have were to be a stronger so that it can easily happen the whole of Iceland becomes uninhabitable now we don't even have mechanisms of deciding what to do then should they disperse around the world do and here I agree with you is the true problem of we who will be the we who will decide no you go there I don't know Putin says ho ho since you were so kind your banks to allow us to to launder our mafia's money no because everyone knows that the Russian mafia is the main culprit beneath it Iceland collapse that we give you part of Siberia Siberia even a greater problem you know that Siberia is now getting warmer so the idea is that in ten twenty years it will become much more inhabitable there are some other problems gases released poisonous but nonetheless let's say people can move there on the other hand you have parts of the world sub-Saharan and so on more and more desert again I think it will be quite a serious prospect very soon to we will be faced with the urgency of large movements of people we cannot do it in the old way this is nothing new it happened many times in the history of humanity but it happened spontaneously and through extreme violence millions died and so on and so on we know that we simply cannot afford it so again who how will do it this is what I mean to avoid a misunderstanding by communism I don't mean any comrade Lenin is back or whatever I simply mean that and this is just one example that we are facing problems for which capital market that is to say and the state in the narrow legal sense parliamentary democracy state of law is not enough that a different form of transnational
unknown
mobilization don't ask me how it will happen will have to be necessary I absolutely claim that there should be no continuity
mobilization don't ask me how it will happen will have to be necessary I absolutely claim that there should be no continuity
Slavoj Žižek
between
between
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this communism
this communism
unknown
and what happened in the 20th century why not because as we all know if anything the ecological and so on record of ex-communist countries is even much worse than that
and what happened in the 20th century why not because as we all know if anything the ecological and so on record of ex-communist countries is even much worse than that
Slavoj Žižek
of
of
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capitalist countries why do I still insist on the name
capitalist countries why do I still insist on the name
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communism for a simple but it's not so simple reason that A it's really this all these problems are problems of commons enclosure of commons our shared commons earth intellectual property and so on and point two I don't like the word socialism never forget
communism for a simple but it's not so simple reason that A it's really this all these problems are problems of commons enclosure of commons our shared commons earth intellectual property and so on and point two I don't like the word socialism never forget
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so nazism was not national communism it
so nazism was not national communism it
unknown
was national socialism I precisely because I appreciate liberalism I will put it like this you know that Nazis were right when they
was national socialism I precisely because I appreciate liberalism I will put it like this you know that Nazis were right when they
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claimed the opposition between liberalism and
claimed the opposition between liberalism and
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communism should not deceive
communism should not deceive
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you they are much
you they are much
Slavoj Žižek
closer
closer
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to it or as Otto Weininger you know the crazy anti-feminist anti-semite said very
to it or as Otto Weininger you know the crazy anti-feminist anti-semite said very
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bluntly and he was
bluntly and he was
Slavoj Žižek
right the difference between socialism and
right the difference between socialism and
unknown
communism is that socialism is Aryan and communism
communism is that socialism is Aryan and communism
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is Jewish in a way yes because you know in socialism
is Jewish in a way yes because you know in socialism
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we have always an aspect of this organic community and so on and so on just to conclude really now you will say I'm crazy what I want is impossible who will do it oh I just would like to conclude
we have always an aspect of this organic community and so on and so on just to conclude really now you will say I'm crazy what I want is impossible who will do it oh I just would like to conclude
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with a very brief reflection on the world impossible on the
with a very brief reflection on the world impossible on the
Slavoj Žižek
word impossible did you notice how strangely this word functions in our public discourse we have two extremes when we are dealing with personal freedoms sexuality and so on or scientific prospects of change the phrase is anything is possible impossible is becoming possible you know we will be able I don't know to visit stars to have multiple orgasms I was even told okay not to go into dirty sexual details but anything is possible but at the same time in social relations things are less and less possible it is as if you know we will be able to visit stars but if you want a little bit more of welfare state that's impossible I mean it's very nice and what I'm saying is that this impossibility which is usually published as maturity we are finally becoming mature there are things which you cannot do is not an objective impossibility it's precisely where politics should intervene a true intervention intervention is not an intervention within the scape of what goes on where you pick up the best the best possibility sometimes you have to take risks and do the impossible and you succeed and the impossible in this sense becomes possible and you can even be non-democratic here a-ah before you accuse me of being a totalitarian with this I really conclude patience patience you are too nervous you are too nervous you know yin yang balance of cosmic principles you know okay let me finish so I was going to accuse
word impossible did you notice how strangely this word functions in our public discourse we have two extremes when we are dealing with personal freedoms sexuality and so on or scientific prospects of change the phrase is anything is possible impossible is becoming possible you know we will be able I don't know to visit stars to have multiple orgasms I was even told okay not to go into dirty sexual details but anything is possible but at the same time in social relations things are less and less possible it is as if you know we will be able to visit stars but if you want a little bit more of welfare state that's impossible I mean it's very nice and what I'm saying is that this impossibility which is usually published as maturity we are finally becoming mature there are things which you cannot do is not an objective impossibility it's precisely where politics should intervene a true intervention intervention is not an intervention within the scape of what goes on where you pick up the best the best possibility sometimes you have to take risks and do the impossible and you succeed and the impossible in this sense becomes possible and you can even be non-democratic here a-ah before you accuse me of being a totalitarian with this I really conclude patience patience you are too nervous you are too nervous you know yin yang balance of cosmic principles you know okay let me finish so I was going to accuse