Signs from the Future
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2012-05-14 · 1:18:11 · 9,263 words
capitalismcommunism-socialismideologyrevolution-violencepsychoanalysishegel-dialecticsreligion-theologydemocracygeopolitics-warcinema-art-cultureliberalism-political-correctnesseconomics
Žižek delivers a public lecture critiquing dominant liberal and left responses to the wave of protests circa 2011-2012 (Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, European austerity protests), arguing that surface reactions, celebrating protest as spectacle, blaming corruption over systemic capitalism, nostalgizing the welfare state, or limiting critique to financial capital, all fail to address the structural crisis of global capitalism. He develops a quasi-theological framework drawing on Pascal's hidden God (Deus Absconditus) and Walter Benjamin's notion of past images legible only from the future, to argue that emancipatory events must be read as 'signs from the future' visible only from an engaged subjective position. He closes by constructing a composite model of the committed emancipatory subject drawn from TV sociopaths (Jack Bauer, social climbers, Homer Simpson), proposing we need dedicated purpose, creative risk-taking, and innocent joy in struggle.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 19
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Žižek uses Beethoven's Ninth to illustrate how a cultural form can be appropriated by entirely opposed political forces (Nazis, Communists, Rhodesian apartheid, Sendero Luminoso) precisely because it is ideologically empty and thus universally adaptable.
A Persian idiom meaning to murder someone, bury the body, grow flowers over it and walk nervously lest anyone find the corpse, used to describe how mainstream media neutralizes radical emancipatory potential by covering over the true dimension of events.
as “circle of life (critique of)”
Žižek attacks the conservative-liberal wisdom that revolution merely reproduces the old order (as planets circle the sun), arguing instead that genuine revolution changes the very circle, not just an element within it.
Implied in Žižek's discussion of how capitalist compulsion to expand is inscribed in the system as such rather than in individual psychology or greed.
as “negation as part of positive identity”
Hegelian principle that an object's identity includes what it is not; Žižek mobilizes this to argue that the specific absence (no cream vs. no milk) constitutively shapes what is present.
as “coffee without cream / coffee without milk”
A Hegelian joke from Ninotchka used to show that negation is constitutive of positive identity: the thing you lack determines what you actually get, so Eastern Europeans who wanted 'freedom without exploitation' received 'freedom without solidarity'.
Marx's core concept of appropriated labor time; Žižek uses it to anchor the claim that the new bourgeoisie appropriates surplus value in the mystified form of surplus wages.
as “collective cognitive capital”
Žižek's gloss on Marx's 'general intellect' from the Grundrisse: the social knowledge embodied in science, culture, and material practices that becomes the main source of wealth under contemporary capitalism but is now privatized.
as “managerial capitalism without bourgeoisie”
Žižek's characterization of contemporary capitalism where the classical entrepreneur-owner is replaced by salaried manager-boards, instantiating a new class structure that paradoxically vindicates Stalinist cadre logic.
as “structurally unemployable”
Žižek's term for workers who are not just temporarily unemployed but rendered permanently superfluous by the structural transformation of contemporary capitalism, beyond the reserve army of labor.
Jean-Claude Milner's term adopted by Žižek for the premium earned by managers, experts, intellectuals and state employees above the proletarian minimum wage, the ideological mechanism by which the new bourgeoisie reproduces class distinction without owning capital.
as “salaried bourgeoisie”
Žižek's term for the new ruling class of managers, CEOs, experts and intellectuals who appropriate surplus value in the form of surplus wages rather than through ownership of capital, blurring the classical bourgeois/proletarian distinction.
Yanis Varoufakis's term, cited approvingly by Žižek, for the post-1970s global economic engine in which US deficits function as a vacuum cleaner absorbing the world's surplus capital and goods, sustaining asymmetric global growth until its collapse.
Žižek's framework, derived from Walter Benjamin, for reading emancipatory events (Tahrir Square, Occupy) not through their historical genesis but as legible fragments of a virtual communist future that only an engaged subjective position can recognize.
Pascal's 'hidden God' who neither fully reveals nor fully conceals himself but sends miracles recognizable only to authentic believers, Žižek uses it as a structural model for the communist Idea's relation to historical events.
Žižek's coinage modeled on Pascal's Deus Absconditus: a communist future that does not reveal itself objectively but leaves miracles, emancipatory events, readable only from the engaged position of subjective fidelity.
as “miracle (atheist notion)”
Žižek rehabilitates the word 'miracle' in a strictly materialist sense: an unexpected emancipatory event (Tahrir Square, Occupy) that could not have been predicted and is readable as such only from an engaged subjective position.
Kotsko's dialectical reversal adopted by Žižek: TV sociopaths are problematic not because they are too antisocial but because they are not sociopathic enough, they still serve socially acceptable ends and leave the big Other intact.
as “big Other”
Lacanian symbolic order; Žižek notes it remains operative even in TV sociopaths because their goals (money, recognition, patriotism) are still socially sanctioned.
Stories he reaches for 5
A café customer orders coffee without cream; the waiter says they're out of cream so he can only offer coffee without milk. The joke shows that the specific negation is part of the identity of what you receive, used to analyze how Eastern Europeans got freedom without solidarity rather than the freedom without exploitation they demanded.
“Sorry but we have run out of cream we only have milk so can I bring you coffee without milk?”
Lacan told the 1968 Paris protesters 'What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new master. You will get one.', Žižek reads this as a diagnostic-prognostic with a grain of truth, manifested in the subsequent appointment of technocratic governments.
“What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new master. You will get one.”
In a famous interview Stalin described the ideal Bolshevik as a combination of Russian dedicated obsession and American pragmatic spirit, Žižek repurposes this formula for the emancipatory subject today, substituting Jack Bauer / climbers / Homer Simpson.
“The ideal Bolshevik is a combination of Russian obsession dedication and American pragmatic practical spirit.”
Žižek imagines Roberto Benigni in La Vita Bella having to explain the Holocaust to his son by singing the Lion King's 'Circle of Life', Nazis kill Jews but will rot into grass eaten by cattle, etc., to expose the obscenity of conservative wisdom that naturalizes structural injustice.
“I would love to see Roberto Benigni starting to sing a song oh my son it's all one big circle of life.”
Foxconn responded to mass suicides among its workers by requiring them to sign anti-suicide pledges and by installing nets around buildings, Žižek calls this 'humanism' ironically, so that if you jump you are caught but still punished for attempting it.
“Foxconn put nets around the buildings—this is humanism—so that if you just... okay.”
Works invoked 17
Ninotchka film
Cited as a 'classical comedy' by Ernst Lubitsch; the coffee without cream joke is described as having 'deep ideological consequences for critique of ideology.'
Grundrisse book
Marx's fragment on the 'general intellect' (Fragment on Machines) is cited as prophesying a society where social knowledge replaces labor time as the source of value, which capitalism has managed to privatize.
Used in a reductio: imagining the film's father explaining the Holocaust via the Circle of Life exposes the obscenity of naturalizing structural injustice.
The Wire tv
McNulty cited as an enforcer sociopath comparable to Jack Bauer, dedicated to a goal beyond normal life.
24 tv
Jack Bauer identified as the 'enforcer' sociopath type; his redemptive feature, dedication to a cause larger than personal life, is extracted for the model of the emancipatory subject.
The Lion King film
Žižek says he 'really hates' this film but uses its Circle of Life song as an example in a reductio ad absurdum of conservative naturalistic wisdom.
Plato's Republic book
Marx's critique of the Republic, that its problem is not being too utopian but being the ideal image of the existing order, is applied mutatis mutandis to welfare state nostalgia.
Analyzed at length as ideology at its purest; Žižek says he gave a ten-page analysis in one of his books; admires its structural complexity including the Marcha Turca as embedded contradiction.
Drive book
Daniel Pink's book summarizing behavioral research on motivation; Žižek cites it for the finding that financial incentives are counterproductive for creative tasks.
The Global Minotaur book
Varoufakis's book; Žižek quotes it extensively and calls Varoufakis 'the Greek economist whom I appreciate pretty much.'
The Simpsons tv
Homer Simpson identified as the 'schemer' sociopath type; his childlike innocent joy at succeeding in his petty plots is extracted as the third redemptive feature of the emancipatory subject.
Arcades Project book
Walter Benjamin's work from which Žižek takes the André Monglond quote about the future as developer of past images, the foundation of his 'signs from the future' framework.
Dexter tv
Dexter cited as a serial killer sociopath type within the TV sociopath gallery.
Mozart's opera briefly referenced as a structural comparison: Beethoven's empty finale in the Ninth resembles the finale of this opera, both failing to resolve their constitutive contradictions.
House tv
Dr. House identified as 'the most perfidious pathological sociopath' because he breaks rules precisely to serve the system (saving lives), making his transgression perfectly functional.
The Sopranos tv
Tony Soprano cited as paradigmatic sociopath type; part of the HBO TV series phenomenon Žižek identifies as the new locus of creative popular culture.
Adam Kotsko's book providing the typology of TV sociopaths; Žižek describes Kotsko's analysis as 'perspicuous' and builds his model of the emancipatory subject on it.
People invoked 32
André Monglond positive
French historian quoted via Benjamin: 'The past has left images of itself in literary texts... The future alone possesses developers active enough to scan such surface perfectly.'
Franz Kafka positive
Described as 'a heroic figure' whose work functions as the retroactive developer making earlier authors (Dostoevsky, Blake, Poe, Milton) properly legible.
The fictional painter in Žižek's cited sci-fi story is 'vaguely modeled on Jackson Pollock', used to illustrate the circular temporal structure of signs from the future.
Marcel Proust positive
The Madeleine episode cited (via Deleuze) as an example of something present in space but whose true time is elsewhere, illustration of signs from the future.
Cited for his 1971 decision to abandon the gold standard, which Žižek (via Varoufakis) identifies as the origin of the Global Minotaur cycle.
Roberto Benigni negative
Žižek uses La Vita Bella in a reductio ad absurdum: imagining Benigni singing the Lion King's Circle of Life to explain the Holocaust exposes the obscenity of conservative circular wisdom.
Daniel Pink positive
Žižek cites Pink's book Drive for its behavioral research showing financial incentives are counterproductive for creative tasks.
Boris Gunjević positive
Described as 'a friend of mine'; Žižek mentions Adam Kotsko as an American equivalent of this Croatian leftist theologian.
Adam Kotsko positive
Described as 'a good friend' and 'American theologian, very leftist'; Žižek draws extensively on Kotsko's Why We Love Sociopaths for his typology of TV sociopaths and the emancipatory subject.
Blaise Pascal positive
Žižek calls Pascal 'a proto-Marxist' for his Deus Absconditus and the idea that miracles are visible only from an engaged believing position, directly parallel to his communism absconditus.
Srećko Horvat positive
Mentioned as having already raised the point about Michael Hardt and the ecstasy of protest.
Edgar Allan Poe positive
Cited as one of the writers retroactively rendered legible by Kafka.
Cited as having pursued 'capitalism without bourgeoisie' in China's reforms, which Žižek argues generated permanent instability from lack of stable class hierarchy.
Jacques Lacan positive
Žižek cites Lacan's 1968 quip 'You will get a new master' as having a grain of truth despite its conservative surface; also invokes the big Other.
Gilles Deleuze positive
Quoted on Proust: 'People and things occupy a place in time incommensurable with the one they have in space', used to support the framework of signs from the future.
Ludwig van Beethoven positive
Žižek analyzes the Ninth Symphony at length as the purest example of ideological emptiness and structural contradiction (Marcha Turca); admires the structural complexity.
Antonio Negri positive
Co-cited with Hardt; Žižek credits Negri's claim that the bourgeoisie is becoming purely parasitical but finds the analysis incomplete regarding workers' structural superfluousness.
Alain Badiou positive
Mentioned among Marxists (with Lucien Goldmann) who recognized the proto-Communist dimension of Pascal's thought.
Mentioned as Sendero Luminoso leader who counted Beethoven's Ninth as his favorite music, illustrating the universality of the melody as ideological container.
Jean-Claude Milner positive
Žižek cites Milner's concept of 'surplus wage' as the key to understanding how the new bourgeoisie appropriates value without classical ownership.
Yanis Varoufakis positive
Cited extensively as the 'Greek economist whom I appreciate pretty much'; Žižek quotes his Global Minotaur thesis at length as the correct framework for understanding the structural crisis.
William Blake positive
Cited as one of the writers retroactively rendered legible by Kafka.
Lucien Goldmann positive
Mentioned as having recognized the proto-Communist dimension of Pascal alongside Badiou.
Walter Benjamin positive
Žižek draws his key framework of 'signs from the future' / past images legible only from the future from Benjamin's Arcades Project and the quote from André Monglond.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau positive
Cited at the end for knowing 'in a perverted way' that capitalism is driven not by egotism but by envy and resentment.
Emmanuel Todd positive
Cited as having a 'moment of truth' in his characterization of the US as a non-productive predatory empire in decline, though Žižek notes the vision may be 'too one-sided'.
John Milton positive
Cited as one of the writers retroactively rendered legible by Kafka.
Joseph Stalin positive
Quoted on 'cadres decide everything'; Žižek argues Stalinist managerial logic was ahead of its time in anticipating contemporary managerial capitalism, and repurposes Stalin's ideal Bolshevik formula.
Karl Marx positive
Cited on Plato's Republic as idealized image of the existing order; Grundrisse on general intellect; and the communist formula 'from each according to ability.'
Michael Hardt positive
Žižek agrees with Hardt and Negri up to a point but critiques their failure to grasp the privatization of cognitive capital and the growing structural superfluousness of workers.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Invoked for the principle that negation is constitutive of positive identity (illustrated by the coffee joke); also referenced for the Weltgeist now residing in TV series.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky positive
Cited as one of the writers whose true meaning becomes legible only retroactively from Kafka.
What it argues
ideology as universal container (Beethoven's Ninth fits everyone)critique of liberal-moralistic anti-capitalism that leaves the system untouchedstructural crisis of global capitalism and the end of the 'Global Minotaur' cycleemancipatory events as signs from the future legible only from an engaged positionPascal's hidden God as model for communist absconditusthe new salaried bourgeoisie and the paradox of strikesthe sociopath as inadvertent model for the emancipatory subject
Dialectical moves 9
“The problem is not with this obscenity which intrudes. The problem is with the melody itself.”
What appears as the exception (Turkish march, immigration, populism) is not the threat; the supposed norm (the European melody/liberal consensus) is itself the problem that must be replaced.
“A true revolution precisely is not an element of the circle of life but it changes the very circle.”
The conservative wisdom that revolution always returns to the same is refuted not by denying circularity but by distinguishing between an element within a circle and the circle itself, genuine change alters the structure, not just its contents.
“Sorry, we don't have cream, we only have milk—can I bring you coffee without milk?”
Negation is constitutive: the specific form of absence shapes what is present; Eastern Europeans got freedom, but the freedom was without solidarity, a different negation from what they demanded.
“The problem with these sociopaths is that they are not sociopathic enough.”
TV sociopaths appear transgressive but ultimately serve socially acceptable ends; genuine radicalism would require breaking with the big Other itself, not merely violating its minor rules in its service.
“Stalinism was really ahead of time—cadres decide everything.”
The seemingly backward Stalinist cult of party cadres anticipates today's managerial capitalism, where technical expertise rather than ownership determines class position, Stalinism as inadvertent proto-neoliberalism.
“The future alone possesses developers active enough to scan such surface perfectly.”
We should invert the usual historical direction: past events (including present ones) are signs not read forward from causes but retroactively illuminated by the future they prefigure.
“It's not true that at a certain level you can organize production so that quality is not conditioned by finances—the financial aspect if it's too much emphasized is even counter-productive.”
The standard capitalist assumption that more incentive always yields more output is reversed for creative tasks: excess financial motivation degrades performance, suggesting the communist formula is empirically vindicated.
“The point of capitalism is not I want to win, it's you must lose.”
Capitalism is driven not by rational self-interest (egotism) but by envious negation of the other, making the competitor lose matters more than one's own gain.
“Many of the strikes going on today are effectively the strikes of this salaried bourgeoisie... a strike whose implicit goal was precisely to maintain the distance, not to join the proletarians.”
What presents itself as working-class solidarity is actually its opposite: the privileged strata striking to preserve their distinction from genuine proletarians, not to abolish it.
Claims 20
asserts
Beethoven's Ninth is ideology at its purest because the melody is semantically empty enough to be appropriated by Nazis, Communists, Rhodesian apartheid supporters, and Latin American guerrillas alike.ideology / Beethoven's Ninth Symphony
asserts
The problem with Europe today is not the intruding 'obscenity' (immigration, populism) but the melody itself—Europe needs a new anthem, a new political vision.European political crisis
asserts
Mainstream media's response to the 2011 protest wave was a form of Var nam nihadan—burying the radical emancipatory potential and planting flowers over the corpse.media ideology
asserts
The problem with capitalism is not corruption or individual greed but the system itself, which structurally compels expansion and exploitation regardless of who runs it.capitalism / moralistic critique
asserts
Limiting critique to financial capital is one step from a proto-fascist, anti-Semitic logic that pits productive capitalists against corrupt Jewish bankers.anti-financial capitalism / proto-fascism
asserts
Protests celebrated merely as protests risk creating a space for a new master, as Lacan's 1968 quip predicted.protest politics / new master
asserts
The trend toward technocratic government in Greece, Italy, and Spain is the ironic fulfillment of Lacan's warning that protesters would get a new master.technocracy / democratic deficit
rejects
Nostalgia for the social-democratic welfare state is idealist because it opposes an ideal image to the existing order rather than diagnosing the structural flaw that made the welfare state unsustainable in the first place.welfare state nostalgia / social democracy
asserts
Today's strikes in Europe are predominantly strikes of the salaried bourgeoisie—state employees, intellectuals, police—aimed at maintaining their distance from the proletariat, not at solidarity with it.European strikes / salaried bourgeoisie
asserts
The ongoing crisis is not about greed or bad regulation but signals the end of the Global Minotaur cycle inaugurated by Nixon's 1971 abandonment of the gold standard.global capitalism / structural crisis
asserts
The United States is an empire in decline functioning as a non-productive predator that absorbs over a billion dollars daily from surplus economies to sustain its consumption and military-ideological hegemony.US empire / global economic imbalance
asserts
Emancipatory events like Tahrir Square and Occupy Wall Street should be read not through their historical genesis but as signs from a virtual communist future legible only from an engaged subjective position.emancipatory politics / method of reading events
asserts
Communist theory is not an objective social science but a truth accessible only from an engaged subjective position—analogous to Pascal's point that miracles are miracles only for those already searching for them.epistemology of communism / subjectivity
asserts
Behavioral research (including Federal Reserve Bank experiments) empirically confirms that above a certain threshold financial incentives are counterproductive for creative tasks, vindicating the communist formula 'from each according to ability, to each according to need'.human motivation / capitalism vs. communism
asserts
Contemporary capitalism has managed to privatize the general intellect—collective cognitive capital—which Marx thought would make capitalism obsolete.cognitive capitalism / Marx's Grundrisse
asserts
The ideal emancipatory subject today should combine Jack Bauer's dedication to a cause larger than personal happiness, the ruthless creativity of social climbers, and Homer Simpson's innocent childlike joy in doing the task well.emancipatory subjectivity / model communist
asserts
Ex-communist managers are re-emerging as the most efficient managers of capitalism because their historical enmity toward the bourgeoisie as a class fits today's managerial capitalism without classical bourgeoisie.Stalinism / managerial capitalism
asserts
Capitalism is not fundamentally driven by egotism but by envy and resentment—the point is not 'I want to win' but 'you must lose'.capitalism / Rousseau / human nature
reframes
The 20th-century Stalinist communism was a communism of revealed religion; what we need today is a communism absconditus readable only from an engaged position.Stalinism / communist idea
asserts
Dr. House is the most pathological sociopath on television precisely because he breaks all rules to save people—his sociopathy is perfectly functional for the system.sociopathy / ideology in TV series
Quotes 15
“The problem is not with this obscenity which intrudes. The problem is with the melody itself. We need a new European melody. We need a new anthem.”Slavoj Žižek · European crisis / need for new political vision
“The compulsion to expand is inscribed into the capitalist system as such and we should not translate it into personal sin into a private psychological propensity.”Slavoj Žižek · systemic vs. moralistic critique of capitalism
“What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new master. You will get one.”Slavoj Žižek · Lacan's warning on revolutionary desire
“One should read the ongoing dismantling of the welfare state not as a betrayal of this noble idea but as a failure which retroactively enables us to discern a fatal flaw in the very notion of welfare state.”Slavoj Žižek · retroactive reading / welfare state critique
“The future alone possesses developers active enough to scan such surface perfectly.”Slavoj Žižek · Benjamin on retroactive legibility of history
“Theory of communism is not an objective social theory. It's a theory which is true but you have access to this truth only from an engaged subjective position.”Slavoj Žižek · epistemology of communism / subjectivity
“Not Deus Absconditus but communism absconditus.”Slavoj Žižek · communism as hidden God / engaged subjectivity
“Wasn't Tahrir Square in some sense of course not metaphysical a miracle? Absolutely no one expected it.”Slavoj Žižek · atheist miracle / Tahrir Square
“Whenever the mention Apple as the label is mentioned I would say Apple slash Foxconn. Foxconn the truth of Apple.”Slavoj Žižek · Apple/Foxconn as ideological mystification
“The point of capitalism is not I want to win it's you must lose which is much more important.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalism as envy not egotism
“Hegel has moved recently from Hollywood to TV series. The really creative even commercially creative popular culture comes much more from today's some of them HBO TV series than from movies.”Slavoj Žižek · Weltgeist in TV series
“We should not be masochist revolutionaries oh my god I had to forsake my family life for the noble cause—no we should have this childish joy ha ha we screwed them up.”Slavoj Žižek · innocent joy in emancipatory struggle / Homer Simpson model
“Cadres cadres decide everything. In this sense I think Stalinism was really ahead of time.”Slavoj Žižek · Stalinism anticipates managerial capitalism
“The US is trusted as the safe and stable center so that all others... invest their surplus profits into the United States. Since this trust is primarily ideological and military not economic.”Slavoj Žižek · US hegemony as ideological-military not economic
“The goal of our life is not the pursuit of happiness. It's something larger for which we should even be ready if necessary to risk our life.”Slavoj Žižek · rejection of liberal pursuit of happiness / dedication to cause
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Let me begin with the answer should be obvious maybe I even already mentioned this example once in the last five years here why this clip? We all know it. It’s in the middle of the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It’s you know that the melody is the unofficial but I think even half-official anthem of European Union. And I’m always again and again struck by the irony of it. This music is at least the melody ideology at its purest already in the elementary sense that it fits everyone. Like let's go through the Nazis loved it. Uh Communists loved it. For the Nazis it was German Volksgemeinschaft for the Communists it was international brotherhood. In World War II Japan I read Japan military loved it because it has somewhere in the words the motive of joy through suffering. Now every authentic fascist loves this. Now we go on. Do you know that during the Chinese Cultural Revolution when all Western music classical was banned prohibited the only exception was Beethoven's Ninth Symphony? Yeah progressive unity of the people and so on. Now let's go to the other extreme. Do you know that when in the 70s I think South Rhodesia today's Zimbabwe proclaimed independence proclaimed independence with a from England as a colony from the because with only one goal to retain apartheid you know what was their national anthem? Yes this melody. They just changed the words oh Rhodesia happy country and so on but this was it. Then if you go to Latin America Abimael Guzmán uh of Sendero Luminoso also said this is his favorite piece of music and so on and so on. So this is ideology. You can take all today's official enemies and imagine them you know like uh George Bush embracing Obama Bin Laden Putin embracing the Chechens oh this is the moment when we are nonetheless all humans we all love this. So what is then so even in Germany maybe you know that before full legalization of the two Germanys legalization in the sense of admission to United Nations and so on I remember when I was young in the 60s even early 70s you know that when a German athlete won the Olympic Games this was played as instead of German East or West national anthem. So what's so interesting about it? What effectively happens? Usually people's attention focuses on this melody. The song repeated first three times orchestrally then four times with four singers chorus and then something strange happens in the middle of the fourth movement. After this sublime climax you have when you aha you started applauding you wanted to oppress the ordinary people because then after the silence there are some b-b-b obscene sounds which interestingly enough the first critics in Beethoven's time to the premiere of the symphony compared them to vulgar sounds of wind breaking of flatulence and so on. And then you have the obscene popular version. And I find this so sublime with a view to the fact that Turkey was the traumatic point whose entrance entrance was blocked by France and others to Europe. You know that that rhythm of that obscene part the beginning of which you heard is called Marcha Turca. So it’s exactly as if Beethoven saw where we are today alle Brüder all Europeans together but Marcha Turca Turks everything goes wrong. Literally because if you know the symphony in one of my books I forgot which one I give ten pages analysis uh uh after that structurally it it cannot Beethoven is not able to find balance. The first reaction of chorus to this obscene music is some confused up and down singing then some vague reference to God who is beyond it’s total no balance. At the end there is a kind of synthesis which is totally empty resembling a little bit the finale of Entführung aus dem Serail and so on and so on. So I claim that this is our choice today. Either what Western okay conservatives want just the pure melody. Conservatives are like you when you started to applaud let’s stop it here erase Marcha Turca. Liberals would like to say let’s expand let’s invite them also to sing with us so that we all together sing this melody. But I think our conclusion should be clear. The problem is not with this obscenity which intrudes. The problem is with the melody itself. We need a new European melody. We need a new anthem. Why? Where are we? Okay. Uh there is a wonderful expression I hope I will pronounce it correctly I’m not sure in Persian. It’s something like so I was told by a Persian friend Var nam nihadan which means I love this it’s a condensed everyday expression which means if you translate it literally to murder somebody bury his body then grow flowers over the body to conceal it and then walk nervously on those flowers nervously that someone will discover the body beneath. And this is the reality of our media I claim. In we were witnessing and participating in a series of shattering events from the Arab Spring to the Occupy Wall Street movement from the United Kingdom suburban protests to Breivik's ideological madness but still ideological madness in Oslo. was thus the year of dreaming dangerously in both directions. There were emancipatory dreams mobilizing protesters all around the world and there were the obscure destructive dreams propelling Breivik and racial racist populists all around Europe from Netherlands to Hungary. The primary task of the hegemonic ideology and big media was to neutralize the true dimension of these events. That is to say it was precisely some kind of Var nam nihadan. Let’s bury the corpse and let’s plant some grass on it. The media were killing the radical emancipatory potential of the events by obfuscating their threat to democracy or they were sorry obfuscating their threat to democracy and they were growing flowers over the buried corpse. This is why it is so important to set the record straight what is effectively happening in Europe but not only in Europe from onwards. My first reaction to the events will be just no wisdom please. Because the predominant liberal reaction if you noticed in the media is one of wisdom. Oh we all need illusions it was wonderful millions of people on Tahrir Square but let’s be realists did you see now Islamists Muslim Brotherhood won the election? You see that's the reality. It always returns not only to the same but even to something worse so better not to shake things too much the result will be an even worse one. In other words the this vulgar wisdom is something the form of which or the most popular expression of which would be and for this I am ready in a Stalinist way to say we should burn the movie the vulgar song of one of the films that I really hate The Lion King. You remember how in the middle of the film the young lion asks the father but if we lions are good guys how comes that we eat zebras? This isn't just. And then father the king sings the famous song uh the Circle of Life. Here it is. It's the circle of life and it moves us all through despair and hope through faith and love till we find our place on the path unwinding in the circle the circle of life. This means as it is further explained true we eat zebras but we will also die we will rot in the earth our rotten flesh will fill grass will feed grass grass will be eaten by zebras and so on. So it’s a circle of life and so on and so on. What's wrong with this wisdom? Everything because uh can you imagine if your mind is dirty enough mine is in uh otherwise I don't like the film but as an example in in Roberto Benigni’s La Vita Bella let's say that the son notices that it’s really Auschwitz killing machine and asks the father father why are the Nazis killing us Jews? And I would love to see Roberto Benigni starting to sing a song oh my son it's all one big circle of life. It's true that Nazis are killing us but Nazis will also die they will rot their flesh will feed grass grass will be eaten by cows uh butchers will kill the cows and we Jews will buy the steaks and eat them. So it’s one big circle of life and so on. So our answer and you know this is the the fundamental conservative liberal-conservative even argument against shaking things. Oh it's all revolution they they claim that they they act as if they say something so deep if they when they point out that the original meaning predominant use of the word revolution is precisely just like planets circulating around. You move it but the old old order re-establishes itself and so on and so on. Our answer should be clear. Yes of course there is a circle of life. But the whole point is that there are different circles of life. A true revolution precisely is not an element of the circle of life but it changes the very circle. Like at social level maybe we can have a circle of life where it’s not necessary to have the Nazis killing the Jews no? Or maybe there is a circle of life where where I don't know a tribal chief in Congo years ago doesn't have to sing to his child it's true Belgians are killing us but Belgians will die and we will eat the grass they will feed or whatever. So uh and this is important also as a political lesson. Uh true there is now a new circle of life a new circular struggle in Egypt but with all the justified pessimism and precaution it’s not the same circle of life as before. Even if nothing radical will happen at the end we have to admit we have now a thriving civil society there trade unions women students organizing themselves and so on and so on. So don't fall into this false wisdom of it’s not worth to shake things and so on and so on. Okay. The second uh the second thing that I uh reject is critique of corruption and critique limited to financial capitalism. Don't misunderstand me. Of course all the criminals bankers and others should be ruthlessly persecuted. I don't have any problems here. I’m one of the few persons whom I know who is even still for death penalty so don't misunderstand me here. I’m saying something else. Do not blame people and their attitudes. The problem is not corruption or greed. The problem is the system that pushes you or enables you to be corrupt. The solution is not as some mild moderate protesters were shouting in United States Main Street not Wall Street but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street. Public figures from Pope from Rome downwards bombard us with injunctions to fight our culture of excessive greed and consumption. This disgusting spectacle of cheap moralization is a pure ideological operation if there ever was one. The compulsion uh the compulsion to expand is inscribed into the capitalist system as such and we should not translate it into personal sin into a private psychological propensity. No wonder that one of the theologians around Pope said here I quote it literally the present crisis is not the crisis of capitalism but the crisis of morality. That's what I find really disgusting like don't touch the system. This I think is the true stake of moralistic critics of capitalism. Uh what is wrong here? I want to evoke a joke which probably you already know a wonderful anecdote which has I think deep ideological consequences for critique of ideology a wonderful joke from Ernst Lubitsch classical comedy with Greta Garbo Ninotchka. The film's hero enters a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream. And the waiter gives a unique reply. The waiter says sorry but we have run out of cream we only have milk so can I bring you coffee without milk? Like you know like and this is I think a deep Hegelian point because if you want to understand what Hegel means when he says that negation is part of the positive identity of an object. An object is not only what it is it’s part of its identity you have to include what what it is not. This is why I think this joke has wonderful political consequences for example already immediately with us we didn't have such lack of with in Yugoslav socialism lack of consumerist object in stores but a friend of Poland told me that they had exactly the same version of this joke sorry a version of this joke related to to socialist reality. A guy enters a store and says is it still that you don't have toilet paper? And the salesperson answers no sorry we are the store which doesn't have milk the store across the street is the one which doesn't have toilet paper and so on and so on. But uh a more serious example is would have been precisely the uh the uh the events in uh the dissolution of East European communist regimes. People who who protested dissidents crowds wanted freedom and democracy without corruption and exploitation. Like this would be we want coffee without cream. They got freedom and democracy without solidarity and justice without milk no? It's as if Western people telling me sorry we don't have that we can only give you this one and so on. Likewise the Catholic theologian close to Pope is carefully emphasizing that the protester protesters should target moral injustice greed consumerism without targeting capitalism. One should even congratulate the honesty of this theologian who openly formulates the negation implied in the moralizing critique. Like he is telling them coffee without milk. That is to say criticize greed but don't criticize uh capitalism. So again the question today is that of the system. Bankers were always evil and so on and so on. The second thing don't focus on financial capital. This also bothers me when the target is all too often just financial capital. You know why I’m afraid of this? Because we are then one step from some kind of proto-fascist anti-Semitic logic. If we go too far in the critique of financial capital banks and so on then we are one step from the idea that which is well known from its very basis of fascism that we should get productive honest capitalists and workers. Corruption doesn't come from the basic labor-capital relation but from intruding Jewish bankers and so on and so on. So again I’m not again don't misunderstand me I’m not praising corrupted bankers. All I’m saying is that the the true question is what structural change happened in the last decades in global capitalism that financial capital acquired such a central role. Now uh the next point even when we do celebrate protests is uh to celebrate them just as protests. This was already mentioned Srećko mentioned that Michael Hardt emphasized this uh ecstasies aspect of it. You know it's the same story as in France today where every self-respectful right-wing politician will tell you with proud in '68 of course I was on barricades and so on and so on. You know that what I’m afraid is that for most of the people who are protesting it will become a wonderful youthful adventure and I can imagine this is my evil dream people who were protesting on Wall Street years from now they meet in a bar for a lunch break each have a drink wasn't it wonderful years ago and then the phone rang from someone sorry my my boss is calling me to the bank I have to run away and so on and so on. Don't fall into this. Reacting to the Paris protests of Jacques Lacan wrote I quote him "What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new master. You will get one." end of quote. This diagnostic-prognostic should be rejected as a kind of a almost conservative statement like every revolution asks for a new master but I claim there is a grain of truth in it if we apply this Lacan's statement to some of the protests. If you just protest and demand you effectively expose yourself to the danger that you are creating the space for a new master. And we already got the first glimpses of this new master in Greece in Italy maybe Spain will follow and so on and so on. As if ironically answering uh the lack of expert programs of the protesters the trend is now to replace politicians in the government with neutral government of depoliticized technocrats mostly mostly bankers. And again the only way to fight this is to move a step further from protests. So uh uh next thing we should oppose is uh social democratic welfare state nostalgia. Let me be now very brutal then I will be more kind the more we progress into. If you ask a figure that I will invent now the archetypal European left-liberal moron. I don't mean the word moron in a in an aggressive way. By moron I mean the typical common-sense wisdom like you know it's uh Watson for Sherlock Holmes Captain Hastings for Hercule Poirot in Agatha Christie this type of moron average intelligence intellectual. If you ask him what is wrong with Europe today what will he tell you? I think something like this. First he will no doubt begin by sharing his deep worry. The moron is worried about Europe. As a politically correct anti-racist moron he will immediately add that of course he rejects the anti-immigrant populism. The danger comes from within not from Islam. The two main threats to Europe are this very anti-immigrant populist defense of Europe and neoliberal economics. So you know when we say let's save Europe from its false defenders from Brussels technocrats and from racist anti-populists we are still at the level of the moron. Against this double threat the moron would propose to resuscitate social solidarity multicultural tolerance material conditions for cultural development and so on and so on. What is his solution? How to do it? The main moron idea is to return to authentic welfare state. We need maybe even a new political party which will simply stick to the good old principles abandoned under the neoliberal pressure. We need to regulate banks and control financial excesses we need to guarantee free universal healthcare and education and so on and so on. Now you will say so what is wrong with this attitude? Everything I think. Such an approach is strictly idealist. It opposes to the existing deadlock its own idealized ideological supplement. Recall what Marx wrote about Plato’s Republic. Its problem is not that it is too utopian but on the contrary that it remains the ideal image of the existing politico-economic order. And mutatis mutandis one should read the ongoing dismantling of the welfare state not as a betrayal of this noble idea but as a failure which retroactively enables us to discern a fatal flaw in the very notion of welfare state. The lesson is that thus if we want to save the emancipatory kernel of the notion of welfare state uh universal material conditions for freedom like healthcare free education and so on we should change the terrain and move over its basic implications like the long-term viability of a social market economy that is to say of a socially responsible capitalism. I think that if we don't do this step if we remain within the horizon of how to change just some things to still combine capitalism with welfare state we are just contributing to the process which we try to reverse. What are then further traps here? Michael Hardt’s and Toni Negri’s analysis which I share up to a certain point underestimates I think the extent to which today’s capitalism successfully in short term at least privatized common knowledge itself. This is I think again I already repeated this last year I know one of the crucial things happening today. You remember how in Grundrisse fragment Marx dreams about a society which is basically already here today for us where the main source of wealth will no longer be work labor measured by time but social knowledge embodied in science in material practices culture and so on. And the idea of Marx is that once this happens capitalism is over because capitalism is based on exploitation exploitation is uh the appropriation of of of surplus value which is based on uh time as the labor time as source of value and so on. What Marx wasn’t able to imagine is how even if we have common knowledge this let's call it collective cognitive capital as the main source of wealth it can also be privatized. Uh so uh this they don't see another thing that I think they Hardt and Negri don't uh emphasize enough is the extent to which not only as Negri likes to emphasize bourgeoisie is becoming purely parasitical no longer playing a necessary structural role in social production but workers themselves are more and more in our Western societies of course mostly becoming superfluous. Larger and larger numbers of them are turning into not just temporarily unemployed but structurally unemployable workers. Furthermore now I want to pursue in another direction. Even if it is in principle true that bourgeoisie is progressively becoming non-functional one should qualify this statement non-functional for whom? For capitalism itself. That is to say if the old capitalism ideally involved an entrepreneur who invested his own or borrowed money into production organized and run by himself reaping the profit a new ideal type is emerging today. No longer the entrepreneur who owns his company but the expert manager or a managerial board presided by a CEO who runs a company owned by banks also run by managers who don’t own the bank or by dispersed investors. In this new ideal type of capitalism without bourgeoisie in the classical sense the old bourgeoisie rendered non-functional is refunctionalized as salaried managers. The new bourgeoisie itself gets wages wages and even if they own part of their company they earn stocks as part of the remuneration for their work bonuses for their successful management and so on and so on. This new bourgeoisie still appropriates surplus value but in the mystified form of what Jean-Claude Milner calls surplus wage. In general they are paid more than the proletarian minimal wage uh this minimal wage is the point of reference whose real example would have been in today's global economy the salary of a worker in a sweatshop in China or Indonesia and so on and it is this difference from common proletarians this distinction which determines their status of the new bourgeoisie. Bourgeoisie in the classical sense thus tends to disappear capitalists reappear as a subset of salaried workers managers who are qualified to earn more by their competence which of course which is why pseudo-scientific evaluation which legitimizes experts to earn more is crucial today. This category of workers earning a surplus wage is of course not limited to managers. It is extended to all sorts of experts administrators public servants doctors lawyers journalists intellectuals artists in short people like us here in this room. The surplus they get has two forms more money for managers and so on but also less work that is to say more free time for some intellectuals but also for parts of state administration. Therein resides I think for example the deadlock of today’s China. The ideal goal of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms was to introduce capitalism without bourgeoisie as the new ruling class. Now however Chinese leaders are making the painful discovery of how capitalism without stable hierarchy brought by bourgeoisie as a new class generates permanent instability. So what path will China take? More generally this is also arguably the reason why ex-communists are re-emerging as the most efficient managers of capitalism. Their historical enmity against bourgeoisie as a class fits perfectly the tendency of today’s capitalism towards a managerial capitalism without the classical bourgeoisie. In both cases as Stalin put it long ago cadres cadres decide everything. In this sense I think Stalinism was really ahead of time. Do you know that in in the 30s for example uh the new class of Communist managers was incredibly privileged as a salaried bourgeoisie like without shame they admitted that in a new Soviet factory the manager got like two-three hundred times the salary of the ordinary worker. There is also an interesting difference emerging here between today's China and Russia. For example what's the status of university cadres intellectuals? In Russia they are not included into the new salaried bourgeoisie. They are paid like dogs nothing they all have to translate more and more and so on. Chinese are here more intelligent. They pay them very well. So well as a matter of fact that thousands of university professors already moved from Taiwan to China to mainland China. This is also the way to control them. Uh furthermore now I come to my pessimistic conclusion. This notion of surplus wage also allows us to throw a new light on the ongoing anti-capitalist protests on one aspect of them. I fully support them otherwise. In times of crisis the obvious candidate for tightening the belt are the lower levels of this salaried bourgeoisie. Since their surplus wages play an no immanent economic role. The only thing that stands in the way of their joining the proletarians is their political protest. And here I have a problem. Uh in many countries around Europe while I in principle always support strikes of course but I must say frankly although some of you may find this problematic that it makes me sad the extent to which precisely this category of privileged salaried bourgeoisie state employees managers and so on lower managers and so on intellectuals uh they are the ones who still dare to strike. The zero-level proletarians they don't dare to strike. They're happy to retain their job even if it's a minimal salary and so on. And I claim that many of the strikes going on today are effectively the strikes of this salaried bourgeoisie. They unfortunately that was my impression this will sound horrible maybe for some of my friends about the much celebrated general strike in Slovenia one day strike a couple of weeks ago. Of course I support it in principle. But my problem is that this was clearly predominantly the strike of the privileged salaried bourgeoisie professors uh policemen and so on intellectuals and so on precisely the strata which still till now enjoyed a certain safety uh long-term employment less work and so on. It was literally predominantly I claim a strike not in solidarity with workers but a strike whose implicit at least goal was precisely to maintain the distance not to join the not to join the the proletarians. So we are again in a very paradoxical situation where this salaried bourgeoisie is the only one which still dares almost which still dares to strike. Which is why I think it is absolutely crucial to invent develop some kind of solidarity of this new form of salaried bourgeoisie with ordinary proletarians whatever you call them. Without this the prospect is uh very sad. So to go back to my main line. The key feature that we should emphasize about today's society is that the ongoing crisis is not about reckless spending greed ineffectual bank regulations and so on. I claim that something much more radical is happening. An economic cycle is coming to an end. A cycle which began in the early 1970s. The time what the Greek economist whom I appreciate pretty much Yanis Vakufakis sorry Varoufakis uh calls the Global Minotaur. This Global Minotaur was born the monstrous engine that was running the world economy from the early 1980s till That is to say the late 1960s and the early 1970s were not just the times of oil crisis and stagflation. President Richard Nixon’s decision to abandon the gold standard for the US dollar was the sign of a much more radical shift in the basic functioning of the entire capitalist system. By the end of the 1960s the American economy was no longer able to continue the recycling of its surpluses to Europe and Asia. Its surpluses has turned into deficits. Then in the US government responded to this decline with an audacious and I claim quite ingenious strategic move. Instead of tackling the nation's burgeoning deficit the US government decided to do the exact opposite to boost deficits. And I quote here Varoufakis who would pay for them the rest of the world. How? By means of a permanent transfer of capital that rushed ceaselessly across the two great oceans to finance America’s deficits. This deficits thus started to operate a long quote now from Varoufakis like a giant vacuum cleaner absorbing other people’s surplus goods and capital. While that arrangement was the embodiment of the grossest imbalance imagined at a planetary scale nonetheless it did give rise to something resembling global balance. An international system of rapidly accelerating asymmetrical financial and trade flows capable of putting on a semblance of stability and steady growth. Powered by these deficits the world’s leading surplus economies Germany Japan and later China kept churning out the goods while America absorbed them. Almost percent of the profits made globally by these countries were then transferred back to the United States in the form of capital flows to Wall Street. And what did Wall Street do with it? It turned these capital inflows into direct investments shares and so on and so forth. End of quote. Although Emmanuel Todd's the French uh social economic theoretician vision of today’s global order is maybe too one-sided it is difficult to deny its moment of truth. That the United States are in an empire in decline. Its growing negative trade balance demonstrates that the United States is the non-productive predator. It has to suck up one billion dollars daily influx from other nations to buy for its consumption and is as such the universal Keynesian consumer that keeps the world economy running. This influx which is effectively like the money paid to Rome in antiquity or the gifts sacrificed to Minotaur by ancient Greeks this influx relies on a complex economic mechanism. The US is a trust is trusted as the safe and stable center so that all others from the oil-producing Arab countries to Western Europe Japan even Chinese invest their surplus profits into the United States. Since this trust is primarily ideological and military not economic the problem for the United States is how to justify its imperial role. It needs a permanent state of war so that it had to invent the war on terror offering itself as the universal protector of all other normal not rogue states. The entire globe thus tends to function as a universal Sparta with its three classes now emerging as the first second and third world. United States as the military political ideological power Europe and parts of Asia and Latin America as the industrial manufacturing region and the underdeveloped rest today’s Helots. In other words global capitalism brought about a new general trend to oligarchy uh masked as the celebration of the diversity of cultures. And again my point is that this model is today falling apart. This totally perverse we even didn't notice how perverse it was structural imbalance where literally everything turned around the key moment was literally at least one billion per day deficit of the United States. It no longer works this model and capitalism is desperately looking for a way out and I think this is the background of the crisis. If years ago we liked to say that uh uh that the world needed United States now uh the United States needs the world. You know it was very popular when I was young this cynical reasoning I remember an essay was written what were to happen in 1960s if the whole India were to be submerged into the ocean? The answer was nothing minor disturbance. I claim that if the whole of the United States were to submerge into the ocean something similar holds today for the more or less for the United States. So again we have reactions. I enumerated them at the beginning reactions to this crisis. How are we to judge these reactions? What is happening today? What does it mean Tahrir Square Occupy Wall Street all the protests? Here I will proposed a somewhat poetic theological even version but I stick to it very literally. In his Arcades Project Walter Benjamin quotes the French historian André Monglond here is the quote: "The past has left images of itself in literary texts images comparable to those which are imprinted by lights on a photosensitive plate. The future alone possesses developers active enough to scan such surface perfectly." You know the idea is a beautiful one that we get literally in art signs from the future. We have fragments in art which are simply not readable in their own time. It’s only from the future that you can retroactively read them. Like a classical example which I think even repeated here years ago uh to read properly Kafka is such a heroic figure we can only read properly today Dostoevsky William Blake Edgar Allan Poe backwards from Kafka. Kafka was the developer rendering them even John Milton rendering them readable. I think that events like Occupy Wall Street protests the Arab Spring demonstrations in Greece and Spain and so on have to be read precisely as such signs from the future. We should turn around the usual historicist perspective of understanding an event out of its context and genesis. Radical emancipatory outbursts cannot be understood in this way. Instead of analyzing them as part of the continuous development from past to present we should bring in the perspective of the future. We should analyze them as limited distorted sometimes even perverted fragments of a utopian future which lies dormant in the present as its hidden potential. According to Gilles Deleuze in Marcel Proust I quote Deleuze: "People and things occupy a place in time which is incommensurable with the one that they have in space." end of quote. For example the notorious Madeleine from the beginning of Proust’s masterpiece is here in place but this is not its true time. In a similar way one should learn the art to recognize from an engaged subjective position elements which are here in our space but whose time is the emancipated future the future of the Communist idea. This is I will pursue now even further up to the utmost point of madness this theological dimension because why in what sense? Uh of course things are here much more complex. I am not saying this is crucial there is a fixed Communist future and we are already getting signs from it. No this future is purely virtual there will be or maybe there will not be this future. But the paradox is that we have this circular structure only by reading what we do now as signs of the future from our engaged position can we maybe bring about this future. Let me give you quote to you a wonderful science fiction story about time travel which renders perfectly the structure I try to describe. Uh it's an old I forgot even the title who is it’s a time travel story which takes place in New York in 25th century where they already developed some kind of primitive time travel machine. So an art historian from 25th century is fascinated by a painter from mid uh 20th century painter vaguely modeled on Jackson Pollock. So he said my God I would like to be there to write the real biography of this Pollock so he takes the time travel machine and moves to New York in mid 40s. What he discovers there just before the career of this painter started what he discovers there is a nightmare. That this painter is a totally stupid vulgar drunkard who is not only without any talent but even evil when this historian introduces himself to this painter the painter steals the machine from him and escapes into the future. Now if you like science fiction paradoxes then and know them you must have already guessed what happens then. Stuck in this time the critic from the future what can he do? He adopts the identity of the painter and paints the very paintings which made the painter famous in the future. It's a nice circular structure. There is something uh like this that we should emphasize. Let me go even deeper in uh in a teleology here. Uh Blaise Pascal his idea of Deus Absconditus Le Dieu caché the hidden God. There were already many Marxists not only Lucien Goldmann and Alain Badiou who recognized the proto-Communist dimension of Pascal there. You know what is Pascal's idea that God doesn't want to reveal himself fully. If God were to reveal himself fully then everybody would be simply convinced my God if you see clearly him haha who would doubt you know. But he says that's not good it cannot be done it's not bad for faith for authentic faith. But God also cannot be completely hidden. If he's completely hidden then nothing then skeptics or as Pascal calls them libertins which you should be very careful here it’s a wonderful semantic shift. In the six in the 17th century libertin didn't mean what you probably dream about uh sexual debauchery and so on it meant atheist skeptic free thinker. And in years the meaning changed totally. It meant what you all like to dream about and so on. So okay uh Pascal says this also not. So here comes Pascal’s wonderful dialectical idea of a hidden God who sends signs and as Pascal points out these signs are uh miracles. But here is the beauty of Pascal. He says these miracles precisely therein resides the divine wisdom these miracles are miracles only for those who search for them and who want to recognize them as miracles. They are not miracles out there for everyone. Something happens which is a miracle. If you are an ordinary libertin skeptic you will say oh this is just some freakish accident of nature. Only as a believer you will recognize it as a miracle. Uh what does this mean? It means Pascal is here a proto-Marxist. It means theory of communism is not an objective social theory. It’s a theory which is true but you have access to this truth only from an engaged subjective position. It’s not simply that you don't care about workers but you study history and you will see oh my God it looks that workers will win in the long term so let's let's jump on their car or whatever. No it's only from an engaged position uh that you get it. Which is why as Pascal put it wonderfully there is a circular reaction between the teaching the doctrine and miracle. A doctrine is just abstract theory it needs a miracle which means some impossible traumatic event which shakes you. But miracle also needs a doctrine to be recognized at what it is. There is no external objective measure. We have to accept this circle. I claim to put it in a slightly naive way I claim that this is where we are today. If the 20th century communism at least in its Stalinist version was still the communism of revealed religion. You know like neotomists they claim everyone who honestly thinks can recognize God the truth is out there. Our communism should maybe be I love this term not Deus Absconditus but communism absconditus how should I put it hidden. You are able to read its traces only from an engaged position. And we can precisely replace the Pascal's opposition between authentic believer and the what he called libertin with today's terms. Libertin is a liberal skeptic. Oh don't have any illusions it's just a freak of history people are dreaming. Like how would they react to Tahrir Square? A libertin would say it’s interesting a revolt okay uh Mubarak screwed them a little bit but who knows now you see the result don't take it too seriously people are dreaming reality reasserts itself. If you speak from a subjectively engaged position of looking for or fidelity to communism you are able to read for example but not only Tahrir Square Occupy Wall Street as what they were as don't be afraid I’m a total atheist but I think we should rehabilitate the atheist notion of a miracle. Wasn't Tahrir Square in some sense of course not metaphysical a miracle? Absolutely no one expected it. We in the West were racists who thought stupid Arabs the only way to mobilize them is anti-Semitism nationalism and uh and religious fundamentalism. A miracle happened some not of course really a miracle in the sense of something unexpected. Again Occupy Wall Street another miracle. Miracles happen. You need an engaged position to recognize them. Again let me not misunderstand me I’m not saying there is a secret God up there who is or even the Communist version of God a historical necessity which is sending us miracles. No this necessity is the subjective need the subjective urge. It's the miracle in the sense of recognizing potentials traces from the future here and now. They are readable only from an engaged uh engaged position. So uh let me conclude now with three points. The first one I will now I would like now to give you uh one just one or two examples of such a miracle. Of course there are the political miracles. And I hope you find how this is intuitively true. If you analyze Tahrir Square for example just as a sociological phenomenon you get stuck in this bullshit yes primitive Egyptian masses a brief moment of illusion and so on and so on. No you should see the miracle from the future in it. And so on and so on. But I would like to give you two different examples to shock you a little bit. Uh you know we often hear that the communist vision is maybe good interesting but that it relies on dangerous idealization of human beings. It attributes to humans a kind of natural goodness which is simply alien to real people. My God we have a miracle here. A wonderful it’s a very modest naive thing that I will report to you now but it’s wonderful. Daniel Pink wrote a book called Drive. And he in this book refers to a whole body of behavioral scientific research which suggests that sometimes at least external incentives financial reward can even be counterproductive. That is to say let me simplify it so that I don't lose too much time yes shorten it up a little bit. Uh the experiment was this one. They did to a group of people different level tasks. First there were low level tasks mechanical work and they gave them different amounts of financial reward. If there was a non-creative primitive work they discovered the obvious thing: the more you are paid the more you were efficient. But when tasks became minimally creative intellectually challenging they discovered something beautiful. Even if it's naive and it is immediately exploited by capitalists they discover not only that above a certain level money doesn't matter but even that above a certain level money is counterproductive. It's incredibly beautiful. If you have a group of people and tell them here we have a tough nut to grey to break creative one about how to reconstruct cyberspace in this way whatever. If you give them too much money they will do much worse than if you give them no money. Then they did this scientists something uh ah to dispel one misunderstanding now you will say this must have been some crazy lunatic leftist scientists. Yes they were because uh the institution which organized this uh was uh was the notorious left-wing left-wing left-wing group called the Federal Reserve Bank of United States did this. So okay they went on and they said wait a minute maybe this is a cultural specificity people having relatively high standard of living in United States. So they did a wonderful honest simple thing. They went to Africa Mali or where poor Africa they went to India to a village repeated exactly the same experiment of course with lower sums of money and they obtained always the same result. You got the result. It’s not only that money doesn't matter after a certain point that it’s even counter-productive. If you have a creative task and if you are somehow aware that the better you do it more you will be paid if money is too high it's counter-productive. You do it worse. Why I like this example? I know it's a totally naive. B I know how postmodern capitalism likes these examples to screw workers better. You know this is the whole Google Microsoft propaganda: we give you a creative environment where money doesn't matter and and all that stuff and so on and so on. So of course we should know well what is going on here. That this holds for these top companies Microsoft Google Apple but then you know what's the other side of Apple. You know I think that if I were to live in a dictatorship where I would be a dictator who doesn't have this dream one of the irrational rules I would impose is that whenever the mention Apple as the label is mentioned I would say Apple slash Foxconn. You know who is Foxconn the truth of Apple. Literally over million workers in Shanghai suburbs and elsewhere working under the most terrifying conditions and typically for today’s China the obscenity is open and direct. For example it’s incredible what is happening today. The director of Foxconn visited Shanghai and demanded to meet the boss of Shanghai Zoo Zoological Garden. When asked why he said well we have similar problems. My problem is how to run in a disciplined way one million animals. And I hope to learn something from Zoological Garden how they do it there. You know and the story of Foxconn is wonderful you have there human capitalism at its best. You know when they had those massive suicides you know what Foxconn did? Every worker with Foxconn has to uh sign a anti-suicidal pact. Where he promises that he will not kill himself and he promises much nicer that if he sees some of his colleagues in too depressed that he will uh denounce them plus I found this wonderful suicides are made by jumping from high-rise buildings because they work in small multi-stored buildings. Foxconn put nets around the buildings this is humanism so that if you just okay but what what I say is that in spite of this and of the in spite of all the naivety of this experiment isn't there nonetheless something beautiful here? Isn't it at least very naively a kind of empirical confirmation that no capitalist egotism is not our danger? We are not dreaming. It’s not true that at a certain level you can organize production so that not only it’s not conditioned the quality by finances but financial aspect if it's too much underlined emphasized it’s even counter-productive. I mean we may laugh about that Marxist idea definition of communism you know to each to his needs each gives to his abilities. But sorry isn't this exactly the formula of this? Once you give people each to his needs they he doesn't have to give money he will work according to his abilities. I think this is again a wonderful modest sign of the future. How they are even empirically false those who claim oh you communists are dreaming and so on and so on. No egotism is not a thing of nature. In a perverted way even Rousseau knew this. He knew that capitalism is not even really egotist it’s envy resentment you know. The point of capitalism is not I want to win it's you must lose which is much more important. Okay that's another story. Now let me give you to conclude on a lighter note but with what I think we all love and this is also an incitation to you to watch TV series. Because as we all know now I speak as a Hegelian Weltgeist has moved recently from Hollywood to TV series. The really creative even commercially creative popular culture comes much more from today’s some of them HBO and so on TV series than from movies. Movies are getting precisely to compete with more interesting TV narratives they are just getting more and more stupid in a spectacular way like Avengers and so on. All these ultra battles and so on. They just they just mask a total lack they're not even able to construct an interesting narrative that would have functioned on its own. Okay. So a good friend of mine an American theologian very leftist one he would have been a American version of your own Boris Gunjyevič here who is a friend of mine Adam Kotsko he wrote a wonderful book Why We Love Sociopaths. He noticed something that precisely in the domain of TV series almost all almost but nonetheless the the predominant heroes are sociopaths. For example monsters like killing gangsters like Tony Soprano serial killers like Dexter torturing anti-terrorist agents like Jack Bauer up to primitive dysfunctional fathers like Homer Simpson and so on and so on. We obviously seem to love sociopaths. What unites all these figures is that for whatever reason from simple subjective satisfaction or material profit up to protecting the basic fabric of our society these heroes are able without any moral qualms to suspend the basic rules of human concern and decency. They cheat kill torture manipulate humiliate others and so on their neighbors without constraint. How are we to interpret this weird fascination? The obvious answer would have been to read it as an index of the decay of our social link what holds our societies together. Our societies obviously need sociopaths if they are to function normally. Only sociopaths can save us. Society's rule have to be broken for the sake of society itself. However Adam Kotsko proposes a perspicuous analysis where he makes a crucial step further. The problem with these sociopaths is that they are not sociopathic enough. They still need society and in their own way they serve society. In other words what Jacques Lacan calls the big other remains operative. Namely the goals that motivate these sociopaths are still socially acceptable goals material suspect social social social recognition or even patriotic goals like Jack Bauer saving one's country and so on. Uh and it also society also easily incorporates the outcome of their activity. For example I claim that the most perfidious pathological sociopath is Dr. House I claim who breaks all the rules precisely to save people and so on and so on. From this basic dialectical insight Kotsko outlines the idea of a true he says he says wonderfully it's not just that these sociopaths are pathological figures they are because they are not sociopathic enough. We finally a true sociopath a social revolutionary who effectively is able to question the basic coordinates of our social substance. Then Kotsko enumerates the redeeming feature of every main type of a sociopath in series. He classifies sociopaths in three four types. First are the schemers like Homer like uh like Homer Simpson. You know simply a stupid dumb father who enjoys uh humiliating his neighbors winning them over. What do you mean I’m a I know my son knows this for five years he calls me Homer for three years I know. Okay but what I want to say is that but as Kotsko notices there is a wonderful redeeming feature. You remember when it seems that Homer will succeed in his primitive plot plot. He has he displays a kind of a such wonderful innocent childlike joy ha ha I screwed him up and so on. This is a redeeming feature. Then we have the next type of sociopathy climbers people who plot ruthlessly up to murder or whatever or mostly financial cheating to succeed. They nonetheless uh uh display nonetheless an exceptional creativity and willingness to take risks in the ruthless pursuit of their goals. Then we have the most ominous figure of sociopaths enforcers like Jack Bauer up to a point even McNulty from The Wire. Uh they their redeeming feature is that they are dedicated to a goal more important than their normal life with its pursuit of happiness. And now to conclude I want to do something very Stalinist. From these features I want to construct as a sign of the future you know what Stalinists were looking for a model of a future man that we can read and I claim that if we combine these three redeeming features we get maybe the type of a person that we need in our struggle for justice and solidarity. A person who shares something with Jack Bauer and so on which is simply his or her dedication to a task larger than his life. This person doesn't like the first preamble of Declaration of Independence no the goal of our life is not the pursuit of happiness. It’s something larger for which we should even be ready if necessary to risk our life. Second thing it should definitely share with climbers exceptional creativity and willingness to take risks. And the third feature absolutely we should be in our struggles like like Homer Simpson. Not these masochist revolutionaries oh my god I had to forsake my my family life for the for the noble cause of revolution no we should have this childish joy ha ha we screwed them up and so on. We should rediscover this childish innocent joy of doing our task well. So when they asked Stalin in in a famous interview what is the ideal Bolshevik? His answer was the ideal Bolshevik very interesting answer is a combination of Russian obsession dedication and American pragmatic practical spirit. Maybe our answer today should be a true fighter for emancipation should combine the dedication to a higher cause of Jack Bauer the the exceptional creativity and willingness to take risks of brutal social climbers and the innocent joy of Homer Soprano. You bring these three together you have a sign for a future for what kind of a person we should be looking for. Thank you very much for your patience.
Let me begin with the answer should be obvious maybe I even already mentioned this example once in the last five years here why this clip? We all know it. It’s in the middle of the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It’s you know that the melody is the unofficial but I think even half-official anthem of European Union. And I’m always again and again struck by the irony of it. This music is at least the melody ideology at its purest already in the elementary sense that it fits everyone. Like let's go through the Nazis loved it. Uh Communists loved it. For the Nazis it was German Volksgemeinschaft for the Communists it was international brotherhood. In World War II Japan I read Japan military loved it because it has somewhere in the words the motive of joy through suffering. Now every authentic fascist loves this. Now we go on. Do you know that during the Chinese Cultural Revolution when all Western music classical was banned prohibited the only exception was Beethoven's Ninth Symphony? Yeah progressive unity of the people and so on. Now let's go to the other extreme. Do you know that when in the 70s I think South Rhodesia today's Zimbabwe proclaimed independence proclaimed independence with a from England as a colony from the because with only one goal to retain apartheid you know what was their national anthem? Yes this melody. They just changed the words oh Rhodesia happy country and so on but this was it. Then if you go to Latin America Abimael Guzmán uh of Sendero Luminoso also said this is his favorite piece of music and so on and so on. So this is ideology. You can take all today's official enemies and imagine them you know like uh George Bush embracing Obama Bin Laden Putin embracing the Chechens oh this is the moment when we are nonetheless all humans we all love this. So what is then so even in Germany maybe you know that before full legalization of the two Germanys legalization in the sense of admission to United Nations and so on I remember when I was young in the 60s even early 70s you know that when a German athlete won the Olympic Games this was played as instead of German East or West national anthem. So what's so interesting about it? What effectively happens? Usually people's attention focuses on this melody. The song repeated first three times orchestrally then four times with four singers chorus and then something strange happens in the middle of the fourth movement. After this sublime climax you have when you aha you started applauding you wanted to oppress the ordinary people because then after the silence there are some b-b-b obscene sounds which interestingly enough the first critics in Beethoven's time to the premiere of the symphony compared them to vulgar sounds of wind breaking of flatulence and so on. And then you have the obscene popular version. And I find this so sublime with a view to the fact that Turkey was the traumatic point whose entrance entrance was blocked by France and others to Europe. You know that that rhythm of that obscene part the beginning of which you heard is called Marcha Turca. So it’s exactly as if Beethoven saw where we are today alle Brüder all Europeans together but Marcha Turca Turks everything goes wrong. Literally because if you know the symphony in one of my books I forgot which one I give ten pages analysis uh uh after that structurally it it cannot Beethoven is not able to find balance. The first reaction of chorus to this obscene music is some confused up and down singing then some vague reference to God who is beyond it’s total no balance. At the end there is a kind of synthesis which is totally empty resembling a little bit the finale of Entführung aus dem Serail and so on and so on. So I claim that this is our choice today. Either what Western okay conservatives want just the pure melody. Conservatives are like you when you started to applaud let’s stop it here erase Marcha Turca. Liberals would like to say let’s expand let’s invite them also to sing with us so that we all together sing this melody. But I think our conclusion should be clear. The problem is not with this obscenity which intrudes. The problem is with the melody itself. We need a new European melody. We need a new anthem. Why? Where are we? Okay. Uh there is a wonderful expression I hope I will pronounce it correctly I’m not sure in Persian. It’s something like so I was told by a Persian friend Var nam nihadan which means I love this it’s a condensed everyday expression which means if you translate it literally to murder somebody bury his body then grow flowers over the body to conceal it and then walk nervously on those flowers nervously that someone will discover the body beneath. And this is the reality of our media I claim. In we were witnessing and participating in a series of shattering events from the Arab Spring to the Occupy Wall Street movement from the United Kingdom suburban protests to Breivik's ideological madness but still ideological madness in Oslo. was thus the year of dreaming dangerously in both directions. There were emancipatory dreams mobilizing protesters all around the world and there were the obscure destructive dreams propelling Breivik and racial racist populists all around Europe from Netherlands to Hungary. The primary task of the hegemonic ideology and big media was to neutralize the true dimension of these events. That is to say it was precisely some kind of Var nam nihadan. Let’s bury the corpse and let’s plant some grass on it. The media were killing the radical emancipatory potential of the events by obfuscating their threat to democracy or they were sorry obfuscating their threat to democracy and they were growing flowers over the buried corpse. This is why it is so important to set the record straight what is effectively happening in Europe but not only in Europe from onwards. My first reaction to the events will be just no wisdom please. Because the predominant liberal reaction if you noticed in the media is one of wisdom. Oh we all need illusions it was wonderful millions of people on Tahrir Square but let’s be realists did you see now Islamists Muslim Brotherhood won the election? You see that's the reality. It always returns not only to the same but even to something worse so better not to shake things too much the result will be an even worse one. In other words the this vulgar wisdom is something the form of which or the most popular expression of which would be and for this I am ready in a Stalinist way to say we should burn the movie the vulgar song of one of the films that I really hate The Lion King. You remember how in the middle of the film the young lion asks the father but if we lions are good guys how comes that we eat zebras? This isn't just. And then father the king sings the famous song uh the Circle of Life. Here it is. It's the circle of life and it moves us all through despair and hope through faith and love till we find our place on the path unwinding in the circle the circle of life. This means as it is further explained true we eat zebras but we will also die we will rot in the earth our rotten flesh will fill grass will feed grass grass will be eaten by zebras and so on. So it’s a circle of life and so on and so on. What's wrong with this wisdom? Everything because uh can you imagine if your mind is dirty enough mine is in uh otherwise I don't like the film but as an example in in Roberto Benigni’s La Vita Bella let's say that the son notices that it’s really Auschwitz killing machine and asks the father father why are the Nazis killing us Jews? And I would love to see Roberto Benigni starting to sing a song oh my son it's all one big circle of life. It's true that Nazis are killing us but Nazis will also die they will rot their flesh will feed grass grass will be eaten by cows uh butchers will kill the cows and we Jews will buy the steaks and eat them. So it’s one big circle of life and so on. So our answer and you know this is the the fundamental conservative liberal-conservative even argument against shaking things. Oh it's all revolution they they claim that they they act as if they say something so deep if they when they point out that the original meaning predominant use of the word revolution is precisely just like planets circulating around. You move it but the old old order re-establishes itself and so on and so on. Our answer should be clear. Yes of course there is a circle of life. But the whole point is that there are different circles of life. A true revolution precisely is not an element of the circle of life but it changes the very circle. Like at social level maybe we can have a circle of life where it’s not necessary to have the Nazis killing the Jews no? Or maybe there is a circle of life where where I don't know a tribal chief in Congo years ago doesn't have to sing to his child it's true Belgians are killing us but Belgians will die and we will eat the grass they will feed or whatever. So uh and this is important also as a political lesson. Uh true there is now a new circle of life a new circular struggle in Egypt but with all the justified pessimism and precaution it’s not the same circle of life as before. Even if nothing radical will happen at the end we have to admit we have now a thriving civil society there trade unions women students organizing themselves and so on and so on. So don't fall into this false wisdom of it’s not worth to shake things and so on and so on. Okay. The second uh the second thing that I uh reject is critique of corruption and critique limited to financial capitalism. Don't misunderstand me. Of course all the criminals bankers and others should be ruthlessly persecuted. I don't have any problems here. I’m one of the few persons whom I know who is even still for death penalty so don't misunderstand me here. I’m saying something else. Do not blame people and their attitudes. The problem is not corruption or greed. The problem is the system that pushes you or enables you to be corrupt. The solution is not as some mild moderate protesters were shouting in United States Main Street not Wall Street but to change the system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street. Public figures from Pope from Rome downwards bombard us with injunctions to fight our culture of excessive greed and consumption. This disgusting spectacle of cheap moralization is a pure ideological operation if there ever was one. The compulsion uh the compulsion to expand is inscribed into the capitalist system as such and we should not translate it into personal sin into a private psychological propensity. No wonder that one of the theologians around Pope said here I quote it literally the present crisis is not the crisis of capitalism but the crisis of morality. That's what I find really disgusting like don't touch the system. This I think is the true stake of moralistic critics of capitalism. Uh what is wrong here? I want to evoke a joke which probably you already know a wonderful anecdote which has I think deep ideological consequences for critique of ideology a wonderful joke from Ernst Lubitsch classical comedy with Greta Garbo Ninotchka. The film's hero enters a cafeteria and orders coffee without cream. And the waiter gives a unique reply. The waiter says sorry but we have run out of cream we only have milk so can I bring you coffee without milk? Like you know like and this is I think a deep Hegelian point because if you want to understand what Hegel means when he says that negation is part of the positive identity of an object. An object is not only what it is it’s part of its identity you have to include what what it is not. This is why I think this joke has wonderful political consequences for example already immediately with us we didn't have such lack of with in Yugoslav socialism lack of consumerist object in stores but a friend of Poland told me that they had exactly the same version of this joke sorry a version of this joke related to to socialist reality. A guy enters a store and says is it still that you don't have toilet paper? And the salesperson answers no sorry we are the store which doesn't have milk the store across the street is the one which doesn't have toilet paper and so on and so on. But uh a more serious example is would have been precisely the uh the uh the events in uh the dissolution of East European communist regimes. People who who protested dissidents crowds wanted freedom and democracy without corruption and exploitation. Like this would be we want coffee without cream. They got freedom and democracy without solidarity and justice without milk no? It's as if Western people telling me sorry we don't have that we can only give you this one and so on. Likewise the Catholic theologian close to Pope is carefully emphasizing that the protester protesters should target moral injustice greed consumerism without targeting capitalism. One should even congratulate the honesty of this theologian who openly formulates the negation implied in the moralizing critique. Like he is telling them coffee without milk. That is to say criticize greed but don't criticize uh capitalism. So again the question today is that of the system. Bankers were always evil and so on and so on. The second thing don't focus on financial capital. This also bothers me when the target is all too often just financial capital. You know why I’m afraid of this? Because we are then one step from some kind of proto-fascist anti-Semitic logic. If we go too far in the critique of financial capital banks and so on then we are one step from the idea that which is well known from its very basis of fascism that we should get productive honest capitalists and workers. Corruption doesn't come from the basic labor-capital relation but from intruding Jewish bankers and so on and so on. So again I’m not again don't misunderstand me I’m not praising corrupted bankers. All I’m saying is that the the true question is what structural change happened in the last decades in global capitalism that financial capital acquired such a central role. Now uh the next point even when we do celebrate protests is uh to celebrate them just as protests. This was already mentioned Srećko mentioned that Michael Hardt emphasized this uh ecstasies aspect of it. You know it's the same story as in France today where every self-respectful right-wing politician will tell you with proud in '68 of course I was on barricades and so on and so on. You know that what I’m afraid is that for most of the people who are protesting it will become a wonderful youthful adventure and I can imagine this is my evil dream people who were protesting on Wall Street years from now they meet in a bar for a lunch break each have a drink wasn't it wonderful years ago and then the phone rang from someone sorry my my boss is calling me to the bank I have to run away and so on and so on. Don't fall into this. Reacting to the Paris protests of Jacques Lacan wrote I quote him "What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new master. You will get one." end of quote. This diagnostic-prognostic should be rejected as a kind of a almost conservative statement like every revolution asks for a new master but I claim there is a grain of truth in it if we apply this Lacan's statement to some of the protests. If you just protest and demand you effectively expose yourself to the danger that you are creating the space for a new master. And we already got the first glimpses of this new master in Greece in Italy maybe Spain will follow and so on and so on. As if ironically answering uh the lack of expert programs of the protesters the trend is now to replace politicians in the government with neutral government of depoliticized technocrats mostly mostly bankers. And again the only way to fight this is to move a step further from protests. So uh uh next thing we should oppose is uh social democratic welfare state nostalgia. Let me be now very brutal then I will be more kind the more we progress into. If you ask a figure that I will invent now the archetypal European left-liberal moron. I don't mean the word moron in a in an aggressive way. By moron I mean the typical common-sense wisdom like you know it's uh Watson for Sherlock Holmes Captain Hastings for Hercule Poirot in Agatha Christie this type of moron average intelligence intellectual. If you ask him what is wrong with Europe today what will he tell you? I think something like this. First he will no doubt begin by sharing his deep worry. The moron is worried about Europe. As a politically correct anti-racist moron he will immediately add that of course he rejects the anti-immigrant populism. The danger comes from within not from Islam. The two main threats to Europe are this very anti-immigrant populist defense of Europe and neoliberal economics. So you know when we say let's save Europe from its false defenders from Brussels technocrats and from racist anti-populists we are still at the level of the moron. Against this double threat the moron would propose to resuscitate social solidarity multicultural tolerance material conditions for cultural development and so on and so on. What is his solution? How to do it? The main moron idea is to return to authentic welfare state. We need maybe even a new political party which will simply stick to the good old principles abandoned under the neoliberal pressure. We need to regulate banks and control financial excesses we need to guarantee free universal healthcare and education and so on and so on. Now you will say so what is wrong with this attitude? Everything I think. Such an approach is strictly idealist. It opposes to the existing deadlock its own idealized ideological supplement. Recall what Marx wrote about Plato’s Republic. Its problem is not that it is too utopian but on the contrary that it remains the ideal image of the existing politico-economic order. And mutatis mutandis one should read the ongoing dismantling of the welfare state not as a betrayal of this noble idea but as a failure which retroactively enables us to discern a fatal flaw in the very notion of welfare state. The lesson is that thus if we want to save the emancipatory kernel of the notion of welfare state uh universal material conditions for freedom like healthcare free education and so on we should change the terrain and move over its basic implications like the long-term viability of a social market economy that is to say of a socially responsible capitalism. I think that if we don't do this step if we remain within the horizon of how to change just some things to still combine capitalism with welfare state we are just contributing to the process which we try to reverse. What are then further traps here? Michael Hardt’s and Toni Negri’s analysis which I share up to a certain point underestimates I think the extent to which today’s capitalism successfully in short term at least privatized common knowledge itself. This is I think again I already repeated this last year I know one of the crucial things happening today. You remember how in Grundrisse fragment Marx dreams about a society which is basically already here today for us where the main source of wealth will no longer be work labor measured by time but social knowledge embodied in science in material practices culture and so on. And the idea of Marx is that once this happens capitalism is over because capitalism is based on exploitation exploitation is uh the appropriation of of of surplus value which is based on uh time as the labor time as source of value and so on. What Marx wasn’t able to imagine is how even if we have common knowledge this let's call it collective cognitive capital as the main source of wealth it can also be privatized. Uh so uh this they don't see another thing that I think they Hardt and Negri don't uh emphasize enough is the extent to which not only as Negri likes to emphasize bourgeoisie is becoming purely parasitical no longer playing a necessary structural role in social production but workers themselves are more and more in our Western societies of course mostly becoming superfluous. Larger and larger numbers of them are turning into not just temporarily unemployed but structurally unemployable workers. Furthermore now I want to pursue in another direction. Even if it is in principle true that bourgeoisie is progressively becoming non-functional one should qualify this statement non-functional for whom? For capitalism itself. That is to say if the old capitalism ideally involved an entrepreneur who invested his own or borrowed money into production organized and run by himself reaping the profit a new ideal type is emerging today. No longer the entrepreneur who owns his company but the expert manager or a managerial board presided by a CEO who runs a company owned by banks also run by managers who don’t own the bank or by dispersed investors. In this new ideal type of capitalism without bourgeoisie in the classical sense the old bourgeoisie rendered non-functional is refunctionalized as salaried managers. The new bourgeoisie itself gets wages wages and even if they own part of their company they earn stocks as part of the remuneration for their work bonuses for their successful management and so on and so on. This new bourgeoisie still appropriates surplus value but in the mystified form of what Jean-Claude Milner calls surplus wage. In general they are paid more than the proletarian minimal wage uh this minimal wage is the point of reference whose real example would have been in today's global economy the salary of a worker in a sweatshop in China or Indonesia and so on and it is this difference from common proletarians this distinction which determines their status of the new bourgeoisie. Bourgeoisie in the classical sense thus tends to disappear capitalists reappear as a subset of salaried workers managers who are qualified to earn more by their competence which of course which is why pseudo-scientific evaluation which legitimizes experts to earn more is crucial today. This category of workers earning a surplus wage is of course not limited to managers. It is extended to all sorts of experts administrators public servants doctors lawyers journalists intellectuals artists in short people like us here in this room. The surplus they get has two forms more money for managers and so on but also less work that is to say more free time for some intellectuals but also for parts of state administration. Therein resides I think for example the deadlock of today’s China. The ideal goal of Deng Xiaoping’s reforms was to introduce capitalism without bourgeoisie as the new ruling class. Now however Chinese leaders are making the painful discovery of how capitalism without stable hierarchy brought by bourgeoisie as a new class generates permanent instability. So what path will China take? More generally this is also arguably the reason why ex-communists are re-emerging as the most efficient managers of capitalism. Their historical enmity against bourgeoisie as a class fits perfectly the tendency of today’s capitalism towards a managerial capitalism without the classical bourgeoisie. In both cases as Stalin put it long ago cadres cadres decide everything. In this sense I think Stalinism was really ahead of time. Do you know that in in the 30s for example uh the new class of Communist managers was incredibly privileged as a salaried bourgeoisie like without shame they admitted that in a new Soviet factory the manager got like two-three hundred times the salary of the ordinary worker. There is also an interesting difference emerging here between today's China and Russia. For example what's the status of university cadres intellectuals? In Russia they are not included into the new salaried bourgeoisie. They are paid like dogs nothing they all have to translate more and more and so on. Chinese are here more intelligent. They pay them very well. So well as a matter of fact that thousands of university professors already moved from Taiwan to China to mainland China. This is also the way to control them. Uh furthermore now I come to my pessimistic conclusion. This notion of surplus wage also allows us to throw a new light on the ongoing anti-capitalist protests on one aspect of them. I fully support them otherwise. In times of crisis the obvious candidate for tightening the belt are the lower levels of this salaried bourgeoisie. Since their surplus wages play an no immanent economic role. The only thing that stands in the way of their joining the proletarians is their political protest. And here I have a problem. Uh in many countries around Europe while I in principle always support strikes of course but I must say frankly although some of you may find this problematic that it makes me sad the extent to which precisely this category of privileged salaried bourgeoisie state employees managers and so on lower managers and so on intellectuals uh they are the ones who still dare to strike. The zero-level proletarians they don't dare to strike. They're happy to retain their job even if it's a minimal salary and so on. And I claim that many of the strikes going on today are effectively the strikes of this salaried bourgeoisie. They unfortunately that was my impression this will sound horrible maybe for some of my friends about the much celebrated general strike in Slovenia one day strike a couple of weeks ago. Of course I support it in principle. But my problem is that this was clearly predominantly the strike of the privileged salaried bourgeoisie professors uh policemen and so on intellectuals and so on precisely the strata which still till now enjoyed a certain safety uh long-term employment less work and so on. It was literally predominantly I claim a strike not in solidarity with workers but a strike whose implicit at least goal was precisely to maintain the distance not to join the not to join the the proletarians. So we are again in a very paradoxical situation where this salaried bourgeoisie is the only one which still dares almost which still dares to strike. Which is why I think it is absolutely crucial to invent develop some kind of solidarity of this new form of salaried bourgeoisie with ordinary proletarians whatever you call them. Without this the prospect is uh very sad. So to go back to my main line. The key feature that we should emphasize about today's society is that the ongoing crisis is not about reckless spending greed ineffectual bank regulations and so on. I claim that something much more radical is happening. An economic cycle is coming to an end. A cycle which began in the early 1970s. The time what the Greek economist whom I appreciate pretty much Yanis Vakufakis sorry Varoufakis uh calls the Global Minotaur. This Global Minotaur was born the monstrous engine that was running the world economy from the early 1980s till That is to say the late 1960s and the early 1970s were not just the times of oil crisis and stagflation. President Richard Nixon’s decision to abandon the gold standard for the US dollar was the sign of a much more radical shift in the basic functioning of the entire capitalist system. By the end of the 1960s the American economy was no longer able to continue the recycling of its surpluses to Europe and Asia. Its surpluses has turned into deficits. Then in the US government responded to this decline with an audacious and I claim quite ingenious strategic move. Instead of tackling the nation's burgeoning deficit the US government decided to do the exact opposite to boost deficits. And I quote here Varoufakis who would pay for them the rest of the world. How? By means of a permanent transfer of capital that rushed ceaselessly across the two great oceans to finance America’s deficits. This deficits thus started to operate a long quote now from Varoufakis like a giant vacuum cleaner absorbing other people’s surplus goods and capital. While that arrangement was the embodiment of the grossest imbalance imagined at a planetary scale nonetheless it did give rise to something resembling global balance. An international system of rapidly accelerating asymmetrical financial and trade flows capable of putting on a semblance of stability and steady growth. Powered by these deficits the world’s leading surplus economies Germany Japan and later China kept churning out the goods while America absorbed them. Almost percent of the profits made globally by these countries were then transferred back to the United States in the form of capital flows to Wall Street. And what did Wall Street do with it? It turned these capital inflows into direct investments shares and so on and so forth. End of quote. Although Emmanuel Todd's the French uh social economic theoretician vision of today’s global order is maybe too one-sided it is difficult to deny its moment of truth. That the United States are in an empire in decline. Its growing negative trade balance demonstrates that the United States is the non-productive predator. It has to suck up one billion dollars daily influx from other nations to buy for its consumption and is as such the universal Keynesian consumer that keeps the world economy running. This influx which is effectively like the money paid to Rome in antiquity or the gifts sacrificed to Minotaur by ancient Greeks this influx relies on a complex economic mechanism. The US is a trust is trusted as the safe and stable center so that all others from the oil-producing Arab countries to Western Europe Japan even Chinese invest their surplus profits into the United States. Since this trust is primarily ideological and military not economic the problem for the United States is how to justify its imperial role. It needs a permanent state of war so that it had to invent the war on terror offering itself as the universal protector of all other normal not rogue states. The entire globe thus tends to function as a universal Sparta with its three classes now emerging as the first second and third world. United States as the military political ideological power Europe and parts of Asia and Latin America as the industrial manufacturing region and the underdeveloped rest today’s Helots. In other words global capitalism brought about a new general trend to oligarchy uh masked as the celebration of the diversity of cultures. And again my point is that this model is today falling apart. This totally perverse we even didn't notice how perverse it was structural imbalance where literally everything turned around the key moment was literally at least one billion per day deficit of the United States. It no longer works this model and capitalism is desperately looking for a way out and I think this is the background of the crisis. If years ago we liked to say that uh uh that the world needed United States now uh the United States needs the world. You know it was very popular when I was young this cynical reasoning I remember an essay was written what were to happen in 1960s if the whole India were to be submerged into the ocean? The answer was nothing minor disturbance. I claim that if the whole of the United States were to submerge into the ocean something similar holds today for the more or less for the United States. So again we have reactions. I enumerated them at the beginning reactions to this crisis. How are we to judge these reactions? What is happening today? What does it mean Tahrir Square Occupy Wall Street all the protests? Here I will proposed a somewhat poetic theological even version but I stick to it very literally. In his Arcades Project Walter Benjamin quotes the French historian André Monglond here is the quote: "The past has left images of itself in literary texts images comparable to those which are imprinted by lights on a photosensitive plate. The future alone possesses developers active enough to scan such surface perfectly." You know the idea is a beautiful one that we get literally in art signs from the future. We have fragments in art which are simply not readable in their own time. It’s only from the future that you can retroactively read them. Like a classical example which I think even repeated here years ago uh to read properly Kafka is such a heroic figure we can only read properly today Dostoevsky William Blake Edgar Allan Poe backwards from Kafka. Kafka was the developer rendering them even John Milton rendering them readable. I think that events like Occupy Wall Street protests the Arab Spring demonstrations in Greece and Spain and so on have to be read precisely as such signs from the future. We should turn around the usual historicist perspective of understanding an event out of its context and genesis. Radical emancipatory outbursts cannot be understood in this way. Instead of analyzing them as part of the continuous development from past to present we should bring in the perspective of the future. We should analyze them as limited distorted sometimes even perverted fragments of a utopian future which lies dormant in the present as its hidden potential. According to Gilles Deleuze in Marcel Proust I quote Deleuze: "People and things occupy a place in time which is incommensurable with the one that they have in space." end of quote. For example the notorious Madeleine from the beginning of Proust’s masterpiece is here in place but this is not its true time. In a similar way one should learn the art to recognize from an engaged subjective position elements which are here in our space but whose time is the emancipated future the future of the Communist idea. This is I will pursue now even further up to the utmost point of madness this theological dimension because why in what sense? Uh of course things are here much more complex. I am not saying this is crucial there is a fixed Communist future and we are already getting signs from it. No this future is purely virtual there will be or maybe there will not be this future. But the paradox is that we have this circular structure only by reading what we do now as signs of the future from our engaged position can we maybe bring about this future. Let me give you quote to you a wonderful science fiction story about time travel which renders perfectly the structure I try to describe. Uh it's an old I forgot even the title who is it’s a time travel story which takes place in New York in 25th century where they already developed some kind of primitive time travel machine. So an art historian from 25th century is fascinated by a painter from mid uh 20th century painter vaguely modeled on Jackson Pollock. So he said my God I would like to be there to write the real biography of this Pollock so he takes the time travel machine and moves to New York in mid 40s. What he discovers there just before the career of this painter started what he discovers there is a nightmare. That this painter is a totally stupid vulgar drunkard who is not only without any talent but even evil when this historian introduces himself to this painter the painter steals the machine from him and escapes into the future. Now if you like science fiction paradoxes then and know them you must have already guessed what happens then. Stuck in this time the critic from the future what can he do? He adopts the identity of the painter and paints the very paintings which made the painter famous in the future. It's a nice circular structure. There is something uh like this that we should emphasize. Let me go even deeper in uh in a teleology here. Uh Blaise Pascal his idea of Deus Absconditus Le Dieu caché the hidden God. There were already many Marxists not only Lucien Goldmann and Alain Badiou who recognized the proto-Communist dimension of Pascal there. You know what is Pascal's idea that God doesn't want to reveal himself fully. If God were to reveal himself fully then everybody would be simply convinced my God if you see clearly him haha who would doubt you know. But he says that's not good it cannot be done it's not bad for faith for authentic faith. But God also cannot be completely hidden. If he's completely hidden then nothing then skeptics or as Pascal calls them libertins which you should be very careful here it’s a wonderful semantic shift. In the six in the 17th century libertin didn't mean what you probably dream about uh sexual debauchery and so on it meant atheist skeptic free thinker. And in years the meaning changed totally. It meant what you all like to dream about and so on. So okay uh Pascal says this also not. So here comes Pascal’s wonderful dialectical idea of a hidden God who sends signs and as Pascal points out these signs are uh miracles. But here is the beauty of Pascal. He says these miracles precisely therein resides the divine wisdom these miracles are miracles only for those who search for them and who want to recognize them as miracles. They are not miracles out there for everyone. Something happens which is a miracle. If you are an ordinary libertin skeptic you will say oh this is just some freakish accident of nature. Only as a believer you will recognize it as a miracle. Uh what does this mean? It means Pascal is here a proto-Marxist. It means theory of communism is not an objective social theory. It’s a theory which is true but you have access to this truth only from an engaged subjective position. It’s not simply that you don't care about workers but you study history and you will see oh my God it looks that workers will win in the long term so let's let's jump on their car or whatever. No it's only from an engaged position uh that you get it. Which is why as Pascal put it wonderfully there is a circular reaction between the teaching the doctrine and miracle. A doctrine is just abstract theory it needs a miracle which means some impossible traumatic event which shakes you. But miracle also needs a doctrine to be recognized at what it is. There is no external objective measure. We have to accept this circle. I claim to put it in a slightly naive way I claim that this is where we are today. If the 20th century communism at least in its Stalinist version was still the communism of revealed religion. You know like neotomists they claim everyone who honestly thinks can recognize God the truth is out there. Our communism should maybe be I love this term not Deus Absconditus but communism absconditus how should I put it hidden. You are able to read its traces only from an engaged position. And we can precisely replace the Pascal's opposition between authentic believer and the what he called libertin with today's terms. Libertin is a liberal skeptic. Oh don't have any illusions it's just a freak of history people are dreaming. Like how would they react to Tahrir Square? A libertin would say it’s interesting a revolt okay uh Mubarak screwed them a little bit but who knows now you see the result don't take it too seriously people are dreaming reality reasserts itself. If you speak from a subjectively engaged position of looking for or fidelity to communism you are able to read for example but not only Tahrir Square Occupy Wall Street as what they were as don't be afraid I’m a total atheist but I think we should rehabilitate the atheist notion of a miracle. Wasn't Tahrir Square in some sense of course not metaphysical a miracle? Absolutely no one expected it. We in the West were racists who thought stupid Arabs the only way to mobilize them is anti-Semitism nationalism and uh and religious fundamentalism. A miracle happened some not of course really a miracle in the sense of something unexpected. Again Occupy Wall Street another miracle. Miracles happen. You need an engaged position to recognize them. Again let me not misunderstand me I’m not saying there is a secret God up there who is or even the Communist version of God a historical necessity which is sending us miracles. No this necessity is the subjective need the subjective urge. It's the miracle in the sense of recognizing potentials traces from the future here and now. They are readable only from an engaged uh engaged position. So uh let me conclude now with three points. The first one I will now I would like now to give you uh one just one or two examples of such a miracle. Of course there are the political miracles. And I hope you find how this is intuitively true. If you analyze Tahrir Square for example just as a sociological phenomenon you get stuck in this bullshit yes primitive Egyptian masses a brief moment of illusion and so on and so on. No you should see the miracle from the future in it. And so on and so on. But I would like to give you two different examples to shock you a little bit. Uh you know we often hear that the communist vision is maybe good interesting but that it relies on dangerous idealization of human beings. It attributes to humans a kind of natural goodness which is simply alien to real people. My God we have a miracle here. A wonderful it’s a very modest naive thing that I will report to you now but it’s wonderful. Daniel Pink wrote a book called Drive. And he in this book refers to a whole body of behavioral scientific research which suggests that sometimes at least external incentives financial reward can even be counterproductive. That is to say let me simplify it so that I don't lose too much time yes shorten it up a little bit. Uh the experiment was this one. They did to a group of people different level tasks. First there were low level tasks mechanical work and they gave them different amounts of financial reward. If there was a non-creative primitive work they discovered the obvious thing: the more you are paid the more you were efficient. But when tasks became minimally creative intellectually challenging they discovered something beautiful. Even if it's naive and it is immediately exploited by capitalists they discover not only that above a certain level money doesn't matter but even that above a certain level money is counterproductive. It's incredibly beautiful. If you have a group of people and tell them here we have a tough nut to grey to break creative one about how to reconstruct cyberspace in this way whatever. If you give them too much money they will do much worse than if you give them no money. Then they did this scientists something uh ah to dispel one misunderstanding now you will say this must have been some crazy lunatic leftist scientists. Yes they were because uh the institution which organized this uh was uh was the notorious left-wing left-wing left-wing group called the Federal Reserve Bank of United States did this. So okay they went on and they said wait a minute maybe this is a cultural specificity people having relatively high standard of living in United States. So they did a wonderful honest simple thing. They went to Africa Mali or where poor Africa they went to India to a village repeated exactly the same experiment of course with lower sums of money and they obtained always the same result. You got the result. It’s not only that money doesn't matter after a certain point that it’s even counter-productive. If you have a creative task and if you are somehow aware that the better you do it more you will be paid if money is too high it's counter-productive. You do it worse. Why I like this example? I know it's a totally naive. B I know how postmodern capitalism likes these examples to screw workers better. You know this is the whole Google Microsoft propaganda: we give you a creative environment where money doesn't matter and and all that stuff and so on and so on. So of course we should know well what is going on here. That this holds for these top companies Microsoft Google Apple but then you know what's the other side of Apple. You know I think that if I were to live in a dictatorship where I would be a dictator who doesn't have this dream one of the irrational rules I would impose is that whenever the mention Apple as the label is mentioned I would say Apple slash Foxconn. You know who is Foxconn the truth of Apple. Literally over million workers in Shanghai suburbs and elsewhere working under the most terrifying conditions and typically for today’s China the obscenity is open and direct. For example it’s incredible what is happening today. The director of Foxconn visited Shanghai and demanded to meet the boss of Shanghai Zoo Zoological Garden. When asked why he said well we have similar problems. My problem is how to run in a disciplined way one million animals. And I hope to learn something from Zoological Garden how they do it there. You know and the story of Foxconn is wonderful you have there human capitalism at its best. You know when they had those massive suicides you know what Foxconn did? Every worker with Foxconn has to uh sign a anti-suicidal pact. Where he promises that he will not kill himself and he promises much nicer that if he sees some of his colleagues in too depressed that he will uh denounce them plus I found this wonderful suicides are made by jumping from high-rise buildings because they work in small multi-stored buildings. Foxconn put nets around the buildings this is humanism so that if you just okay but what what I say is that in spite of this and of the in spite of all the naivety of this experiment isn't there nonetheless something beautiful here? Isn't it at least very naively a kind of empirical confirmation that no capitalist egotism is not our danger? We are not dreaming. It’s not true that at a certain level you can organize production so that not only it’s not conditioned the quality by finances but financial aspect if it's too much underlined emphasized it’s even counter-productive. I mean we may laugh about that Marxist idea definition of communism you know to each to his needs each gives to his abilities. But sorry isn't this exactly the formula of this? Once you give people each to his needs they he doesn't have to give money he will work according to his abilities. I think this is again a wonderful modest sign of the future. How they are even empirically false those who claim oh you communists are dreaming and so on and so on. No egotism is not a thing of nature. In a perverted way even Rousseau knew this. He knew that capitalism is not even really egotist it’s envy resentment you know. The point of capitalism is not I want to win it's you must lose which is much more important. Okay that's another story. Now let me give you to conclude on a lighter note but with what I think we all love and this is also an incitation to you to watch TV series. Because as we all know now I speak as a Hegelian Weltgeist has moved recently from Hollywood to TV series. The really creative even commercially creative popular culture comes much more from today’s some of them HBO and so on TV series than from movies. Movies are getting precisely to compete with more interesting TV narratives they are just getting more and more stupid in a spectacular way like Avengers and so on. All these ultra battles and so on. They just they just mask a total lack they're not even able to construct an interesting narrative that would have functioned on its own. Okay. So a good friend of mine an American theologian very leftist one he would have been a American version of your own Boris Gunjyevič here who is a friend of mine Adam Kotsko he wrote a wonderful book Why We Love Sociopaths. He noticed something that precisely in the domain of TV series almost all almost but nonetheless the the predominant heroes are sociopaths. For example monsters like killing gangsters like Tony Soprano serial killers like Dexter torturing anti-terrorist agents like Jack Bauer up to primitive dysfunctional fathers like Homer Simpson and so on and so on. We obviously seem to love sociopaths. What unites all these figures is that for whatever reason from simple subjective satisfaction or material profit up to protecting the basic fabric of our society these heroes are able without any moral qualms to suspend the basic rules of human concern and decency. They cheat kill torture manipulate humiliate others and so on their neighbors without constraint. How are we to interpret this weird fascination? The obvious answer would have been to read it as an index of the decay of our social link what holds our societies together. Our societies obviously need sociopaths if they are to function normally. Only sociopaths can save us. Society's rule have to be broken for the sake of society itself. However Adam Kotsko proposes a perspicuous analysis where he makes a crucial step further. The problem with these sociopaths is that they are not sociopathic enough. They still need society and in their own way they serve society. In other words what Jacques Lacan calls the big other remains operative. Namely the goals that motivate these sociopaths are still socially acceptable goals material suspect social social social recognition or even patriotic goals like Jack Bauer saving one's country and so on. Uh and it also society also easily incorporates the outcome of their activity. For example I claim that the most perfidious pathological sociopath is Dr. House I claim who breaks all the rules precisely to save people and so on and so on. From this basic dialectical insight Kotsko outlines the idea of a true he says he says wonderfully it's not just that these sociopaths are pathological figures they are because they are not sociopathic enough. We finally a true sociopath a social revolutionary who effectively is able to question the basic coordinates of our social substance. Then Kotsko enumerates the redeeming feature of every main type of a sociopath in series. He classifies sociopaths in three four types. First are the schemers like Homer like uh like Homer Simpson. You know simply a stupid dumb father who enjoys uh humiliating his neighbors winning them over. What do you mean I’m a I know my son knows this for five years he calls me Homer for three years I know. Okay but what I want to say is that but as Kotsko notices there is a wonderful redeeming feature. You remember when it seems that Homer will succeed in his primitive plot plot. He has he displays a kind of a such wonderful innocent childlike joy ha ha I screwed him up and so on. This is a redeeming feature. Then we have the next type of sociopathy climbers people who plot ruthlessly up to murder or whatever or mostly financial cheating to succeed. They nonetheless uh uh display nonetheless an exceptional creativity and willingness to take risks in the ruthless pursuit of their goals. Then we have the most ominous figure of sociopaths enforcers like Jack Bauer up to a point even McNulty from The Wire. Uh they their redeeming feature is that they are dedicated to a goal more important than their normal life with its pursuit of happiness. And now to conclude I want to do something very Stalinist. From these features I want to construct as a sign of the future you know what Stalinists were looking for a model of a future man that we can read and I claim that if we combine these three redeeming features we get maybe the type of a person that we need in our struggle for justice and solidarity. A person who shares something with Jack Bauer and so on which is simply his or her dedication to a task larger than his life. This person doesn't like the first preamble of Declaration of Independence no the goal of our life is not the pursuit of happiness. It’s something larger for which we should even be ready if necessary to risk our life. Second thing it should definitely share with climbers exceptional creativity and willingness to take risks. And the third feature absolutely we should be in our struggles like like Homer Simpson. Not these masochist revolutionaries oh my god I had to forsake my my family life for the for the noble cause of revolution no we should have this childish joy ha ha we screwed them up and so on. We should rediscover this childish innocent joy of doing our task well. So when they asked Stalin in in a famous interview what is the ideal Bolshevik? His answer was the ideal Bolshevik very interesting answer is a combination of Russian obsession dedication and American pragmatic practical spirit. Maybe our answer today should be a true fighter for emancipation should combine the dedication to a higher cause of Jack Bauer the the exceptional creativity and willingness to take risks of brutal social climbers and the innocent joy of Homer Soprano. You bring these three together you have a sign for a future for what kind of a person we should be looking for. Thank you very much for your patience.