Slavoj Zizek - Por qué soy comunista (subtitulado EN ESPAÑOL)
Talk · Filosofía en castellano ·
2019-12-07 · 0:43:05 · 5,428 words
capitalismcommunism-socialismideologyecology-climategeopolitics-wartechnology-ai-cyberspacerevolution-violencefascism-populismliberalism-political-correctnessdemocracysubjectivityethicsreligion-theology
Žižek defends why he remains a communist after the 20th-century failure, insisting the original vision (including Marx) had problems rather than merely being corrupted by totalitarianism. He reads today's China (authoritarian state plus wild capitalist dynamics) as the most efficient existing form of socialism, diagnoses the global protest wave as an Unbehagen in liberal capitalism rather than a mere catch-up revolution, and walks through three apocalyptic threats to the commons: migration/refugees, ecology, and digital control. He rejects naive tolerance, localism and deep ecology, reframes alienation as something to be enforced rather than overcome, and closes by proposing 'voluntarism and terror', the whistleblower as today's authentic hero, plus a pessimist ethics that prefers trauma and passionate love over the cult of happiness.
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
Freud's mechanism applied to 1989: what was repressed from the dissident imaginary (socialist ideals) returned in the distorted form of right populism.
A major battlefield (ecology above all); it operates by making us responsible and offering an easy way out, recycling Coca-Cola cans, buying organic apples to feel good.
His twist on Freud: the ongoing protest wave bears witness to a discontent within liberal capitalism itself, not merely a failed catch-up revolution.
Freud's Unbehagen in der Kultur returns today, thirty years after the Wall, as an Unbehagen in liberal capitalism.
His signature concern with what happens the day after the ecstatic revolutionary victory, how ordinary people reorganize daily life once the passion is over.
Treats alienation not as an evil to overcome but as the necessary anonymous institutional mechanism that sustains non-alienated communities, the welfare state does good precisely by being impersonal.
His term for Thatcher-style personalization of social relations that falsely dis-alienates by making the poor responsible for their own fate.
as “enjoyment (jouissance)”
A specific enjoyment attaches to living in the end time, fixating on forthcoming catastrophe as a way to avoid really confronting it.
His phrase for the enjoyment of living under the shadow of catastrophe, a fixation that avoids really confronting it.
as “poetic military complex”
His coinage for ex-Yugoslavia's equivalent of the industrial-military complex: ethnic cleansing prepared by poets (Karadžić) joined to generals (Mladić).
In a properly Hegelian way universality and particularity coincide: naked refugees stand for the universality of being human while clinging to their particular cultural identity.
What proletarians create through exploitation, the key moment of the valorization of capital, and the criterion distinguishing proletarians from valueless refugees.
His coinage for refugees as a mirror image of surplus value, a trash remainder of global capital, valueless and outside its circulation.
His framing of the three apocalyptic threats as attacks on the common ground of existence, natural environs, global digital space, the unity of the human species.
The symbolic order whose gaze structures reality; here appears in digital form as the 'digital big Other' that collects the data we lay bare while freely surfing.
as “digital big Other”
His usage for the digital apparatus that collects the behavioral surplus we lay bare through our free online activity.
as “voluntarism and terror”
His proposed combination for confronting catastrophe: large-scale collective decisions countering capitalism's spontaneous logic, plus 'terror' as the informer/whistleblower.
His reversal: today's authentic terrorist-hero is the whistleblower who betrays power, not the bomber.
as “the true utopia”
His reversal: the truly utopian position today is the moderate belief that we can manage to survive without radical measures.
Stories he reaches for 7
In the final scene of V for Vendetta thousands of unarmed Londoners march on parliament and the people take over; Žižek says he would sell his mother into slavery to see Part 2, what happens the day after the victory.
“I am ready to sell my mother into slavery in order to see V for Vendetta part 2”
His friends admit they don't really believe expensive half-rotten organic apples are healthier, the point is ideology: you feel good because you did something for humanity and Mother Earth. Ideology in everyday life.
“do you really believe that the half-rotten and expensive organic apples are really healthier?”
In some Chinese elementary classes pupils already wear a headframe that monitors brain activity so the teacher can see on a screen who is listening and who is dozing, for him the beginning of the direct brain-machine interface threat.
“pupils already have to wear some kind of a frame of their head which controls the activity of their brain”
Against the claim that religion makes bad people do good things, he prefers Weinberg: without religion good people do good and bad people do bad, but only religion can make good people do bad things.
“only religion can make good people do bad things”
Following ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Rwanda, there is always a poet behind it: soldiers alone are not deadly per se, soldiers mobilized by nationalist poetry or religion are. To do horrible things we must be anesthetized, and for that a sacred cause is needed.
“there is no ethnic cleansing without poetry”
Against the claim that an enemy is just someone whose story you haven't heard, he answers that the more he knows and understands Hitler, the more Hitler is his enemy.
“the more i know about and understand hitler, the more he is my enemy”
A desperate ecological proposal, continuous massive dispersals of aerosols into the atmosphere to absorb sunlight and cool the planet, is extremely risky and may trigger unpredictable effects; for him it shows there is no simple clear way out.
“the continuous massive dispersals of aerosols into our atmosphere to absorb sunlight and thus cool the planet”
Works invoked 7
V for Vendetta film
Dislikes the film but uses its final scene, thousands marching on parliament, to ask what happens the morning after the people win; he wants a Part 2.
The Republic book
Rehabilitates Plato's claim that poets should be thrown out of the city in light of the ex-Yugoslav ethnic cleansing prepared by poets.
Bends Freud's Unbehagen in der Kultur into an Unbehagen in liberal capitalism thirty years after the fall of the Wall.
Frankenstein book
The monster speaking for himself illustrates the limit of humanizing the enemy by simply hearing their story.
Quotes Zuboff's definition of surveillance capital treating us as human natural resources whose self-determination has vanished from the map of our own experience.
Capital and Ideology book
Discusses Piketty's proposal for a radicalized social democracy, redistributing assets via progressive taxes, basic income, worker board seats and personalized carbon tax, while maintaining capitalism.
The source of the emergency-brake image, voluntarism against the old Marxist historicism that history is on our side.
People invoked 22
Mary Shelley positive
Uses Frankenstein's monster speaking for himself to mark the limit of humanizing the enemy by hearing their story.
Radovan Karadžić negative
The poet behind the ethnic cleansing, symbol of the poetic military complex, paired with general Mladić.
Edward Snowden positive
Named alongside Assange as a traitor-hero embodying ethical fidelity to humanity over the nation-state.
Shoshana Zuboff positive
Quotes her 'surveillance capitalism' and 'behavioral surplus' to frame the digital exploitation of our freely generated data.
Steven Weinberg positive
Quotes approvingly that only religion can make good people do bad things.
Francis Fukuyama negative
Targets the Fukuyamaist assumption silently accepted by Habermas, that the existing liberal-democratic order is the best possible.
Donald Trump negative
Cites as the figure of simple ecological ignorance, 'it's a marginal phenomenon, life goes on, don't worry.'
Chelsea Manning positive
Named alongside Assange as a traitor-hero embodying ethical fidelity to humanity over the nation-state.
Alain Badiou negative
Rejects Badiou's promotion of nomadic refugees into today's exemplary revolutionary figure, proletarians, not refugees, create surplus value.
Henry Farrell positive
Cites Farrell's term 'networked authoritarianism' to describe China's model of surveillance-driven rule.
Adolf Hitler negative
The exemplary enemy: the more he is understood, the more, not less, he is the enemy.
Julian Assange positive
A figure of ethical fidelity, the informer/whistleblower as today's authentic hero, even a kind of terrorist in the liberating sense.
Walter Benjamin positive
Invokes the thesis on the concept of history: the task today is to pull the emergency brake on the train of progress.
Gregor Gysi positive
Praises Gysi's TV-debate answer that only responsibility for the third-world poor can protect our way of life, more appropriate than abstract humanitarianism.
Margaret Thatcher negative
Attacks her 'society doesn't exist' quip as a fake disalienation that personalizes social relations and blames the poor for their fate.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Calls him the 'ultimate left Fukuyamaist' for treating 1989 as mere rectifying catch-up revolutions rejoining Western European normality.
Vladimir Putin negative
Putin's solemn zero-tolerance for traitors shows he has no sympathy for Snowden or Assange and only uses them to annoy his enemies.
Plato positive
Rehabilitates Plato's advice to throw poets out of the city in light of the ex-Yugoslav poets who prepared ethnic cleansing.
Insists on a severe reassessment of Marx himself, since problems existed already in the original communist vision, not only in totalitarian corruption.
Sigmund Freud positive
Invokes the return of the repressed to explain right populism after 1989, and bends Unbehagen in der Kultur into an Unbehagen in liberal capitalism.
Ratko Mladić negative
The general paired with poet Karadžić in the poetic military complex.
Thomas Piketty positive
Agrees with Piketty's redistributive project but insists it already presupposes a radical social change that Piketty himself does not address.
What it argues
Why remain a communist after the 20th-century failureChina as authoritarian-capitalist 'efficient socialism'Protest waves as discontent in liberal capitalism, not a catch-up revolutionThe morning after the ecstatic revolutionThree apocalyptic threats to the commons: migration, ecology, digital controlAlienation as something to enforce, not overcomeVoluntarism and terror: the whistleblower as authentic heroPessimism as the proper ethical mood
Dialectical moves 14
“What was repressed from the dissident imaginary returned in the guise of right populism.”
The repressed socialist ideals of 1989 return distorted as right populism, a Freudian inversion of the revolution's meaning.
“The more I know about and understand Hitler, the more he is my enemy.”
Knowing the enemy makes him more, not less, an enemy, reversing the tolerance wisdom that understanding dissolves enmity.
“What all the talk about how we humanity pose a threat to the life on the earth really amounts to is our worry about our own fate.”
Ecology is really about us, not nature, the earth is indifferent, so ecological worry is inverted into self-worry.
“The true utopia today is to think that we can somehow manage to survive without similar radical measures.”
The truly utopian position is the moderate one, not the radical one, the inversion that frames his pessimism.
“My figure of the terrorist is the informer.”
The terrorist-hero is the whistleblower who betrays power from within, not the external bomber.
“Today to be in a good mood, you have to be a pessimist.”
Pessimism is the route to well-being; optimism, its opposite, leads to suicide.
“The wild barbarian relations between states serve as the foundation of the ethical life within a state.”
External barbarism is the very ground of internal ethical life, the Hegelian reversal at the heart of state ethics.
“We should change the goal of emancipatory struggles from overcoming alienation to enforcing the right kind of alienation.”
Alienation is to be enforced rather than overcome, the signature reversal of the talk.
“We experience this unequal exchange, the activity which effectively enslaves us, as our highest exercise of freedom.”
Our freedom is the very activity that enslaves us, the paradox of digital surveillance capitalism.
“There are circumstances when treason, the betrayal of one's own nation state, is the greatest act of ethical fidelity.”
Betraying the nation-state can be the highest ethical act, the inversion grounding his whistleblower ethics.
“The more our communities are self-ruling, the more they have to rely on a thick texture of alienated institutional mechanisms.”
Autonomy depends on alienation, reversing the localist hope that self-rule overcomes alienation.
“Nomadic immigrants are not proletarians.”
The exemplary revolutionary figure is the exploited worker, not the refugee, reversing Badiou's elevation of the nomad.
“There is no ethnic cleansing without poetry.”
Atrocity requires poetic/sacred mobilization, reversing poetry's humanizing image and rehabilitating Plato.
“What if in some sense the united states are right to denounce wikileaks as a terrorist organization?”
He endorses the enemy's condemnation, WikiLeaks really does break the order, and that is precisely its virtue.
Claims 39
asserts
China — a strong authoritarian state combined with wild capitalist dynamics — is the most efficient form of socialism today.communism/socialism today
asserts
The 20th-century communist project had problems already in the original vision, including in Marx himself, not only in its totalitarian corruption.the original communist vision
rejects
Rejects the mantra that communism was a good idea merely corrupted by totalitarian perverts.the good-idea-corrupted view
asserts
Beneath ideological and geopolitical tensions, those in power across regimes share the same basic interest in holding on to power.cross-regime power solidarity
reframes
What the majority protesting against communist regimes wanted was largely taken from socialist ideology itself — social security, solidarity, freedom from ideological indoctrination and cynical hypocrisy.the 1989 revolutions
asserts
What was repressed from the dissident imaginary returned in the distorted guise of right populism.the return of the repressed
asserts
The populist disappointment at liberal democracy proves 1990 was not just a catch-up revolution — it aimed at more than liberal-capitalist normality.discontent with liberal capitalism
rejects
Rejects rejuvenated local democracy as a solution: the more communities are self-ruling, the more they rely on a thick texture of alienated institutional mechanisms.localism and self-ruling communities
reframes
The goal of emancipatory struggles should shift from overcoming alienation to enforcing the right kind of alienation.alienation
asserts
The welfare state is attractive because its anonymous apparatuses help the poor so we do not have to confront the excluded and underprivileged face-to-face.the welfare state and alienation
asserts
Thatcher's 'society doesn't exist' introduces a fake disalienation, a false repersonalization that makes the poor responsible for their fate.Thatcherite ideology
asserts
The alienated system regulating our lives is not just an illusion but the actuality of our lives, so every direct personalization is an ideological lie.alienation as actuality
rejects
Rejects 'an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard' as stupidity masquerading as deep wisdom.naive tolerance of the enemy
asserts
The more one knows and understands Hitler, the more he is one's enemy.enemies and knowledge
asserts
The experience of our lives from within — the stories we tell ourselves — is fundamentally a lie; the truth lies outside, in our actions.self-narrative and truth
asserts
There is no ethnic cleansing without poetry: soldiers must be mobilized by nationalist poetry or religion to do horrible things.poetry and violence
asserts
Religion can make good people do bad things (Weinberg); in ex-Yugoslavia poets prepared the ethnic cleansing.religion and evil
asserts
Only a radical social-economic change can protect our way of life — the opposite of opening ourselves to migrants as a desperate measure to preserve liberal capitalism.migration and radical change
reframes
Nomadic immigrants are not proletarians: proletarians are exploited and create surplus value, while refugees are valueless — a surplus humanity.refugees vs proletarians
asserts
Refugees stand for the universality of being human; how we relate to refugees indicates how we relate to humanity as such.refugees and universality
asserts
In some circumstances treason — the betrayal of one's own nation-state — is the greatest act of ethical fidelity, personified by Assange, Manning and Snowden.treason as ethical fidelity
asserts
The wild barbarian relations between states serve as the foundation of the ethical life within a state.the foundation of state ethics
asserts
There is no natural balance; nature is chaotic and indifferent — deep ecology's return to Mother Nature is wrong.nature and balance
rejects
Rejects deep ecology — renouncing arrogant human life to become respectful children of Mother Nature — as the worst version of ecology ideology.deep ecology
reframes
When we worry about the environment, what we really worry about is our own environment, our own fate — the earth itself is indifferent.the true object of ecological worry
asserts
Buying half-rotten expensive organic food is ideology in everyday life — it makes you feel good without real effect.organic food as ideology
asserts
The super-ego pressure of personal responsibility (recycling Coca-Cola cans) is ideology at its best — it makes you responsible and offers an easy way out.personal-responsibility ideology
asserts
Neither the market nor state apparatuses as we know them can solve the apocalyptic threats; there is no simple democratic solution.institutional solutions
asserts
The only way to confront ecological catastrophe is large-scale collective decisions countering the spontaneous logic of capitalist development.voluntarist ecological action
asserts
We can no longer rely on the old Marxist assurance that history is on our side; we must act in a voluntarist way.historicism and progress
asserts
The figure of the terrorist today is the informer/whistleblower; traitors like Assange are the only authentic heroes.the terrorist as informer
reframes
The true utopia today is to think we can manage to survive without radical measures — it is more utopian than the radical measures themselves.the true utopia
asserts
To be in a good mood today one must be a pessimist; being an optimist is the way to suicide.pessimism as ethical mood
rejects
Rejects the obsession with happiness and the good life; he wants traumas and shock — passionate love ruins life and that is what he wants.the cult of happiness
reframes
Surveillance capitalism is important but not the true game changer; direct brain-machine interface is a much greater potential threat.digital control
asserts
The distance between inner life and external reality is the basis of our self-perception as free; direct brain-machine interface threatens this.inner life and freedom
asserts
Putin has no personal sympathy for Snowden or Assange; he helps them only in order to annoy his enemies.Putin's real stance
rejects
Rejects western leftists who view Putin with sympathy as an obstacle to American world domination.western leftist sympathy for Putin
asserts
The three apocalyptic threats — migration, ecology, digital control — all concern the commons of our existence and cannot be addressed within the frame of nation-states.the commons under threat
Quotes 22
“the only real triumph of communism in power is, I think, what happened in China in the last decades”Slavoj Žižek · China as the real communist triumph
“beneath our ideological and geopolitical tensions they all share the same basic interest in holding on to power”Slavoj Žižek · cross-regime power solidarity
“what was repressed from the dissident imaginary returned in the guise of right populism”Slavoj Žižek · return of the repressed
“we should change the goal of emancipatory struggles from overcoming alienation to enforcing the right kind of alienation”Slavoj Žižek · alienation reframed
“an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard — I cannot imagine a more stupid thing to say”Slavoj Žižek · against naive tolerance
“the more I know about and understand Hitler, the more he is my enemy”Slavoj Žižek · enemies and knowledge
“there is no ethnic cleansing without poetry”Slavoj Žižek · poetry and violence
“instead of industrial military complex, we had the poetic military complex”Slavoj Žižek · poetic military complex
“refugees are put in a position of surplus humanity, a mirror image of surplus value”Slavoj Žižek · surplus humanity
“there are circumstances when treason, the betrayal of one's own nation state, is the greatest act of ethical fidelity”Slavoj Žižek · treason as fidelity
“the wild barbarian relations between states serve as the foundation of the ethical life within a state”Slavoj Žižek · Hegelian state ethics
“there is no natural balance”Slavoj Žižek · against deep ecology
“when we worry about environment, let's be at least honest, we worry about our own environment”Slavoj Žižek · ecology is about us
“we experience this unequal exchange, the activity which effectively enslaves us as our highest exercise of freedom”Slavoj Žižek · freedom as enslavement
“the distance between our inner life, the flow of our thoughts and external reality is the basis of our self-perception as free beings”Slavoj Žižek · inner/outer freedom
“my figure of the terrorist is the informer”Slavoj Žižek · terrorist as whistleblower
“it is even more utopian to think that we can somehow manage to survive without similar radical measures”Slavoj Žižek · the true utopia
“to be in a good mood, you have to be a pessimist”Slavoj Žižek · pessimism as mood
“if you are today an optimist, it's the way to suicide”Slavoj Žižek · against optimism
“happiness is for pimps”Slavoj Žižek · against happiness
“I want traumas, I want shock”Slavoj Žižek · trauma over comfort
“we have to act in a voluntarist way”Slavoj Žižek · voluntarism
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
okay. listen. don't applaud too much my old joke. sorry, oh no, no problem. keep the energy. when we communists take over, you will have to no, but more seriously, because i speak too much, usually i have to be brief and go through fast. let me begin by expressing a sincere gratitude for this invitation. it's an honor for me and also my love for bergen, the city. there is a well-known joke in my country at least about a small boy who asks his father dad why don't they build cities in the countryside where the air is much cleaner i know i'm wrong probably but bergen comes for me at least pretty close to this idea okay let me begin why am i still a communist when the communist dream of the 20th century is clearly over, together with the dreams of the dissident communists about socialism with a human face? i am also as far as imaginable from the old mantra that communism was a good idea which just got corrupted by totalitarian perverts. no, there are problems already in the original vision and one should submit to severe reassessment also marx himself. yes, communist power did some good things we know the litany education, health, fight against fascism and so on but overall the only real. triumph of communismists in power is, i think, what happened in china in the last decades. arguably the greatest economic success story in human history. hundreds of millions were raised from poverty. how did china achieve this? the 20th century left was defined by its opposition to two fundamental tendencies of modernity. the reign of capital with its aggressive individualism and alienating dynamics and the authoritarian bureaucratic state power. what we get in today's china is exactly the combination of these two features in its extreme form. strong authoritarian state, wild capitalist dynamics. and this is the most efficient form of socialism today. china is becoming the model of what henry farrell called network networked authoritarianism. if a state, that's the idea, spies on people enough and allows machine learning systems to incorporate their behavior and respond to it, it is possible to provide for everyone's needs better than a democracy could. that's the idea. but this isn't what's happening in china. china is very unstable, plagued by wildcat strikes. concentration camps massive corruption and so on this instability was signalled by a strange event in mid-october 2019. the chinese media launched an offensive promoting the claim that, i quote, demonstrations in europe and south america are the direct result of western tolerance for hong kong unrest. quote goes on. there are many problems. in the west and all kinds of undercurrents of dissatisfaction. many of them will eventually manifest in the way the hong kong protests did end of quote what cannot but strike the eye here is that the communist china discreetly plays on the solidarity of those in power all around the world against the rebellious populations, warning the west not to underestimate the dissatisfaction in their own countries, as if beneath our ideological and geopolitical tensions they all share the same basic interest in holding on to power. these protests are not taking place only in poor and desolate countries countries like iran, but also in countries of relative at least prosperity they express a growing dissatisfaction that cannot be channeled into established modes of political representation. what awaits us is a society of permanent state of exception and civil unrest. this strange protest wave enables us to take a fresh look at the fall of the berlin wall. it is a commonplace place to emphasize the miraculous nature of the fall of the wall thirty years ago. something happened that one couldn't even imagine a couple of months earlier, the communist regimes collapsed like a house of cards. however, one should add that an even greater miracle happened only a couple of years later, the return of ex-communists to power through free elections. remember poland. wałęsa was totally marginalized and much less popular than general jaruzelski, who crushed solidarity with a military coup d'etat. now, two decades later, today came the third surprise. poland is now in the grip of rightist populists who reject both communism and liberal democracy. so what goes on? what the large majority of those who protested against the communist regimes had in mind, i claim, was not simply capitalism. they wanted social security, solidarity, a rough kind of justice, freedom to live their own life outside the oppressive state control, honesty, sincerity. they wanted to be liberated from the primitive ideological indoctrination and the prevailing cynical hypocrisy. in short the vague ideals that led the protesters were to a large extent taken from socialist ideology itself. and as we learned from freud, what is repressed returns in a distorted form. in our case, what was repressed from the dissident imaginary returned to in the guise of right populism. in his interpretation of the fall of east european communism, jürgen habermas proved to be the ultimate left fukuyamaist. i'm referring of course to fukuyama silently accepting that. the existing liberal democratic order is the best possible. this is why he welcomed precisely what many leftists saw as the big deficiency of the anti-communist protests in eastern europe. the fact that they were not motivated by a new vision of some post-communist future. as habermas put it, the central and eastern european revolutions were just what he called rectifying or catch-up nachholende revolutions. their aim was to enable central and eastern european societies to gain what the western europeans already possessed. in short, to rejoin the west european normality. however, the yellow vests and other similar protests are definitely not catch-up movements. the populist disappointment at liberal democracy is the proof that 1990 was not just a catch-up revolution. it aimed at more than liberal capitalist normality. freud spoke about unbehagen in der kultur, the discontent an in culture. today, 30 years after the fall of the wall, the ongoing new wave of protests bears witness to a kind of unbebehagen in liberal capitalism. and the key question is, who will articulate this discontent? will it be left to national national populists to exploit it. therein resides the big task for the left. i will now refer to a movie that i hope you saw, though i don't like it. in the final scene of v for vendetta, thousands of unarmed londoners wearing guy fawkes masks march towards parliament. the military allows the crowd to pass and the people take over. okay, a nice ecstatic moment. but sorry for the plastic expression, i am ready to sell my mother into slavery. in order to see v for vendetta part 2. what i asked at the end of the film triumph people won over what would have happened the day after the victory of the people? how would they reorganize daily life? i was never fascinated by hundreds of thousands assembling on a large square in athens or in istanbul and so on. what interests me is the morning after, when the ecstatic passion is over. how will ordinary people experience the change? thomas picketty tries to address this issue in his second book. capital and ideology he proposes a radicalized social democracy not to nationalize all wealth like the soviet-style communism but to maintain capitalism and. redistribute assets. so sorry. progressive income taxes should allow governments to give everyone a basic income equivalent to 60% of the average wage. and to cover the costs of decarbonizing economy, employees should have 50% of the seats on company boards and individualized carbon tax calculated by a personalized card should track each person's contribution to global heating and so on and so on. but what if the rich decide to emigrate? pikt proposes an exit tax and a global justice system that makes it impossible to hide from expropriation anywhere to that end he imagined a supranational parliament comprised of members drawn from national legislators the two extremes of the deadlock of today's radical left are best exemplified by a long tv dialogue between piquetty and the french maoist great philosopher alain badieu. badieu's vision is that of nomadic proletarians who will emerge as a new revolutionary force. piquetty's proposal is no less utopian, although it presents itself as pragmatic, looking for a solution within the frame of capitalism and democratic procedures. his utopia is that it can be done within this frame. you know, i agree with pt. i'm just saying, in order to do what he wants, they're already. a radical social change already. has to happen and he doesn't talk about this. there is of course now comes trigger warning for politically correct people, now come my usual provocations there is a third dream, that of rejuvenated local democracy, which is, i think, if anything even worse. the more our communities are self-ruling, relatively autonomous, the more they have to rely on a thick texture of alienated institutional mechanisms. where does electricity or water come from? who guarantees the rule of law? to whom do we turn for healthcare and so on. that's my proposal. we should change the goal of emancipatory struggles from overcoming alienation to enforcing the right kind of alienation. how to achieve a smooth functioning of alienated, invisible social mechanisms which sustain the space of non-alated communities. this is what makes welfare state so attractive to me. i don't have to help the poor myself. the state and its anonymous apparatuses do it for me, so that i don't have to confront the excluded and underprivileged face to-face. this is what is so dangerous for me about the process that began in ideology and practice with margaret thatcher. recall her famous quip that society doesn't exist. there are only individuals who struggle and work. fully responsible for their fate. this introduces a kind of fake disalienation, a false repersonalization of social relations. the poor are ultimately responsible for their fate and the aim of health should be to enable them to regain their responsibility. it is no longer the abstract state, it is me and other hardworking people who are covering the costs and those who receive help are also personalized they acquire faces often. faces of lazy and evil people abusing our generosity. is this in some sense not true? i think no, because the alienated system that regulates our lives is not just an illusion, but the actuality of our lives. in such a universe, every direct personalization, like the one proposed by thatcher, is an ideological lie. so again, why do i still cling to the cursed name of communism when i know that the 20th century communist project failed, giving birth to a new form of murderous terror? let me begin with the fact that we live in an age permitted by apocalyptic prospects a proviso when i talk about apocalyptic threats i'm fully aware of how tricky this domain is. only a thin line separates the correct perception of real dangers from the fantasy scenarios about a global catastrophe that awaits us. there is a specific enjoyment of living in the end time, living in the shadow of a catastrophe. and the paradox is that such a fixation on some forthcoming catastrophe is precisely one of the ways to avoid really confronting it rightist populists paint a catastrophic vision of our entire civilization under threat from muslim and other refugees. if today's trends go on, so they say, in a decade or so, europe will be a muslim province of europistan. plus they rightist apocalyptic thinkers, they see lgbt plus and political correctness as part of the cultural marxist plot to destroy western civilization. muslim fundamentalists and political feminists are thus for them two sides of the same coin. leftists focused on another couple of apocalyptic threats. ecology. and digital control of our lives. now, if we discount the so-called rational optimists. who claim that life is nonetheless generally getting better, let me focus on three apocalypses to be taken seriously. migrations, ecological threats, digital control. they all concern the fate of our commerce, of what is the common ground of our existence. natural environs, the global digital space, the unity of human species. these threats are by definition national. they cannot be approached within the frame of nation-states, which nation-states are today unfortunately making a comeback. so let me begin with new forms of apartheid. which is the leftist version of the fear of immigrants. for the right, immigrants pose a threat to our way of life, while for the left, building new walls is a threat to our global civilization. while this is basically true. i would nonetheless like second trigger warming now you will really hate me i would like to nonetheless point out that debt. we should reject the simple lesson of mutual tolerance best rendered by a well-known utter stupidity, i think, masquerading as a deep wisdom. quote an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard i cannot imagine a more stupid thing to say. why? i know what they want to say. there is a wonderful literary example. mary shelley's frankenstein. in the central part of the novel, shelley allows the monster to speak for himself, to tell the story from his own perspective. and in this way, she humanizes him. there is however, a clear limit to this procedure. whenever people tell me, oh, there are no enemies, enemies is somebody to whom you are not ready to listen to, my answer is, ah, good to learn. so hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to listen to him or whatever. now, i think the more... i know about and understand hitler, the more he is my enemy. now comes my lesson. the experience that we have of our lives from within, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing are fundamentally a lie. the truth lies outside, in our actions, in what we do. these stories, the way we act experience a situation. and i'm recently following ethnic cleansingings done here and there, bosnia, rwanda. there always is a poet behind. these stories are usually written by poet. my thesis. soldiers are not dead per se. what is dead are soldiers combined with poets, soldiers mobilized by nationalist poetry or religion. there is no ethnic cleansing without poetry. why? to do horrible things, most of us need to be anestheticized against our elementary sensitivity to others suffering. and for this, a sacred cause is needed. religious ideologies usually claim that, true or not, religion makes some otherwise bad people to do some good things. from today's experience, i would rather stick to steven weinberg's claim that while without religion, good people would have been doing good things and bad people bad things, only religion can make good people do bad things. plato's reputation suffers because of his claim that poets should be thrown out of the city. i think, in view of my post-yugoslav experience, rather good advice. in ex-yugoslavia, poets ethnic cleansing was clearly prepared by poet's dangerous dreams. in ex-yugoslavia, instead of industrial military complex, we had the poetic military complex, much more dangerous, symbolized by the two names, radovan karadžić, ratko mladić, poet and a general. in a recent tv debate on german tv, gregor gysi, a key figure of linke, the left party, gave i think, a good answer to an anti-immigrant who aggressively insisted that he feels no responsibility for the poverty and horrors in the third world countries. instead of spending money to help them we should only be responsible for the welfare of our own citizens. the gist of gysi's answer was, if we only, if we don't get responsible for the third world poor and act accordingly, they will come here to us, which is precisely what the anti-immigrant was ferociously opposed to. cynical as this reply may appear, it is, i think, much more appropriate than abstract humanitarianism. the humanitarian approach appeals to our generosity and guilt. we should open our hearts to them also because the ultimate cause of their suffering is european racism and colonialism. and this appeal is often combined by a strange economic reasoning. europe needs immigrants in order to continue to expand economically. our birth rates are falling. we are losing our vitality. it is strange to hear leftists evoke the typical rightist motive of vitality. the hidden stakes of this operation are clear. let's open ourselves to migrants as a desperate measure to avoid the much needed radical change and to maintain our liberal capitalist status quo. the logic that sustains. gysi statement his statement is the opposite one. only a radical social economic change can protect our way of life. in some sense. a refugee is a neighbor next. neighbor in the strict biblical sense the other reduced to. he her their naked presence. without possessions, without home, without a determined place in society, refugees are like a stain in the social edifice, always too close. to us for a racist. since they lack a stable place in our society, they stand for universality of being human. how we relate to refugees indicates how we relate to humanity as such. but in a properly hegelian way, universality and particularity coincide here. refugees come naked only materially. and for this reason, they all the more cling to their cultural identity. from this fact alone, it is clear to me at least that nomadic immigrants are not proletarians, in spite of attempts by alain badiou and others to promulgate refugees into the exemplary figure of today's proletarians. what makes proletarians proletarians is the fact that they are exploited. they are the key moment of the valorization of capital. their labor creates surplus value. in clear contrast to nomadic refugees who are not just perceived as worthless from the racist perspective, but are most of them at least literally valueless. a trash remainder of global capital. left and capitalists dream of the new wave of immigrant debt. they will be integrated into our capitalist machine as it happened back in the 0 in europe and france since again they claim europe needs immigrants but this time i claim it will not work the bulk of them remains outside this fact makes the situation of immigrant refugees very tragic they are caught in a kind of social limbo a deadlock from which fundamentalism a exit. with regard to the circulation of global capital, refugees are put in a position of surplus humanity, a mirror image of surplus value, and no humanitarian help and openness can resolve this tension. only restructuring of the entire international edifice. there is a passage in vladimir putin's recent interview where one can feel how he really speaks from his heart. it occurs when he solemnly declares his zero tolerance for spies who betray their country treason is the gravest crime possible and traitors must be punished end it is clear from these outburst that putin has no personal sympathy for snowden or assange he just helps them to annoy in order to annoy his enemies. and one can only imagine the fate of an eventual russian snowden or assange. one can only wonder. at some western leftists who continue to claim that, in spite of his socially conservative stance, putin poses an obstacle to the american world domination and should be for this reason viewed with sympathy. there are circumstances, i claim, when treason, the betrayal of one's own nation state, is the greatest act of ethical fidelity. today, such treason is personified by names like assange, manning, snowden. why? the entire ethics of a state. of a nation-state culminates in the highest act of heroism, the readiness to sacrifice one's life for one's nation state. which means that the wild barbarian relations between states serve as the foundation of the ethical life within a state. in today's north korea, with its ruthless pursuit of nuclear weapons and rockets, is this not the ultimate example of the logic of unconditional national state sovereignty the moment we fully accept the fact that we live on a spaceship earth. the task that urgently imposes itself is that of civilizing civilizations themselves and this brings us to the second apocalyptic threat. the comments of external nature. threatened by pollution and exploitation. i'm well aware how uncertain analyses and projections are in this domain. it will be certain what is going on only when it will be too late. what i nonetheless see as certain is that there is a prospect of a catastrophe here. scientific data seem to me abundant enough. so we should act in some large-scale collective way. how? ideologies today, i think, one of the major, ecology is today one of the major ideological battlefields with a whole series of strategies to obfuscate the true dimension of the threat. first, simple ignorance. donald trump. it's a marginal phenomenon. life goes on. don't worry. second. science and technology can save us. don't worry, scientists will come with solutions. three, leave the solution to the market, higher taxation of the polluters and so on. and the last two, which i really despise, four. the superere ego pressure on personal responsibility instead of large systemic measures. when you criticize the system, the answer you get is, but did you do your duty? did you put all coca-cola cans on one side? did you recycle all the paper? it's a wonderful formula. this is ideology at its best. because first it makes you responsible and it offers you an easy way out. separate your coca-cola. and and you did your duty, you can go on. but the fifth, the worst version is for me so-called deep ecology. the idea that we should renounce traditional life, the arrogant life. we should renounce human who breathe and become again respectful children of our mother nature. this whole paradigm of mother nature derailed by our human excess is, i think, wrong. what mother nature? there is the dirty beach. just imagine all the catastrophes that happened on earth before humanity. where does oil come from? nature is completely chaotic. don't play the game of returning to balance. that's the problem. there is no natural balance. what all the talk about how we humanity pose a threat to the life on the earth really amounts to is our worry about our own fate. what if we cost... the end of human life on earth. earth itself is indifferent to it. earth already went through many similar distractions. when we worry about environment, let's be at least honest, we worry about our own environment. we want our own good and safe life. ideology is at its worst here. why do we buy organic food? i don't know how it is with you, but all my friends admit to me the same point. do you really believe that the half-rotten and expensive organic apples are really healthier? the point is it's ideology. you feel good. you see, i bought them, although they are half rotten. and it's pure ideal because in this way i did something for humanity and mother earth. that's ideology in our everyday life. so how to act? now i go even further. we are in a deep mess there is no simple democratic solution here people talk as if politicians and corrupted scientists are covering up the truth.. okay, but what should we do? there are many desperate proposals, for example, srm, solar radiation management, the continuous massive dispersals of aerosols into our atmosphere to absorb sunlight and thus cool the planet. however, srm is extremely risky. we don't know what it can. trigger maybe some unpredictable effects. so... i think the first step to be serious is to admit that there is no simple, clear way. out. it's a... very sad confused complex situation the least we can do is set the priorities straight and admit the absurdity of our geopolitical war games when the very planet for which we are for which wars are fought is under threat yeah,, we should. begin. this brings me to the third threat, the commons of internal nature. when the threat posed by the digitalization of our lives is debated in our media, the focus is usually on the new face of capitalism called by shoshana zuboff surveillance capitalism. quote, knowledge, authority, and power rest with surveillance capital, for which we are merely human natural resources. we are the native peoples now whose claims to self-determination have vanished from the maps of our own experience. end of quote. so we the watched are not just material, we are also exploited, involved in an unequal exchange, which is why the term behavioral surplus. is justified here. when we are surfing, buying, watching tv and so on, we get what we want, but we give more. we lay ourselves bare, we make the details of our lives and its habits transparent to the digital big other. the paradox is that we experience this unequal exchange, the activity which effectively enslaves us as our highest exercise of freedom. what is more freedom and freely surfing on the web. just by exerting this freedom of ours, we generate the surplus appropriated by the digital big other which collects data. however, and don't be afraid, i am coming. important as this surveillance capitalism is, i think it's not yet the true game changer. i see a much greater potential for new forms of domination in the prospect of direct brain machine interface. all kinds of secret agencies are working intensely on it. what we learn is just the public face of it, the often sensational news about it in our public media. like, you know, a totally crippled man now with his mind alone can make objects move and so on and so on. yeah, but what about billions, billions invested by military machinery into direct mind control and so on and so on. where do i see a threat here? again, a threat in this idea that our mind processes can directly interact without communication media like language and so on with the machine. the distance between our inner life, the flow of our thoughts and external reality is the basis of our self-perception as free beings. we are free in our thoughts precisely because i am aware that what i think stays with me. i can play with my thoughts, i can make thought experiments engage dreaming and so on with no direct consequences in reality. this is now potentially under threat. and let don't tell me it will take century till we do it. at an elementary level, it's already happening. was it reported in your media that? i read somewhere two, three weeks ago that in china, i don't like to focus on china because we like to report things about china to paint them as these eccentric totalitarians, but we are doing the same things in maybe. in order, for example, in some elementary school classes in china, pupils already have to wear some kind of a frame of their head which controls the activity of their brain so that the teacher can see. on a screen if they are listening to his talk or just dozing off and so on. that's just the beginning. i mean, the potentials are absolutely incredible here. and so then how are we? two. fight all this. ah now comes my final pessimism. i don't have a simple, clear answer. all i know is that neither, although they should be used, yes, i am for market regulation, welfare state and so on, but neither market nor... state apparatuses, as we know them, i think, can do the job. so i will just to conclude, propose to shock you a little bit a combination of two things which have this very obscure totalitarian associations, voluntarism and terror. first, voluntarism. the only way to confront the threat of ecological catastrophe, i think, is by means of large-scale collective decisions which will counter to the spontaneous im logic of capitalist development. i refer here implicitly to walter benjamin, who wrote in his thesis on the concept of history that today the task is not, in this old marxist term, to be on the on the train of progress and so on, but to pull the emergency brake on the train. we no longer can afford this old-fashioned marxist alliance history is on our side. no, it's not. we have to act in a voluntarist way by this i mean with no foundation in some objective tendencies of social development and so on and so on. and this i want it combined with terror. don't be afraid. i'm not for new communist terror. just the opposite. my idea is, what if in some sense, the united states are right to denounce now in their pursuit of julian assange, to denounce wikileaks as a terrorist organization? in some sense, they are. they are clearly breaking the laws, disturbing proper relations,, and so on and so on and so on. i think that, you know who is for me, i know how provocative i am. i'm advocating terror. yes, but... my figure of the terrorist is... the informer. you know, this lowest idea of whistleblower, informer who denounces you and so on and so on, that's what we need today. this type of traitors are maybe the only authentic heroes today. now, you are quite right to ask me, but is this not crazy utopia? will people be mobilized in this sense? my answer ich. maybe, probably even no. but my only answer is that it is even more utopian to think that we can somehow manage to survive without similar radical measures. my dogma is dead. to think that somehow we will manage, don't worry too much, go on, somehow it will go, this is the true utopia today. you know, it's no longer ecological threat, digital control and so on. it's no longer something happening in third world countries. it's just slowly progressive. look what's happening happens now in australia, in india, and so on and so on. it will just go on. and i just pray that a not too large... ecatastrophe, ecological or whatever, will b. enough to awaken us if you want. but i'm pessimist i'm a pessimist and that's good because to conclude with a personal thought, i think that today to be in a good mood, you have to be a pessimist. why? because a pessimist doesn't expect a lot. but from time to time nice things happen and that's beautiful, you know, like, oh my god, it's not all so bad. if you are today an optimist, it's the way to suicide. you are all the time so just what i to finish, if you allow me half a minute, even less improvisation. what i'm very traditional, even conservative at this level. i hate this obsession with good life, happiness, and so on and so on. no, happiness is for pimps, whatever. i hate it. i want traumas, i want shock and so on. the third thing for me, okay, at my old age, it doesn't matter. matter what's happening, for example, with sexuality today. did you notice how today passionate love to one person is considered almost something dangerous, outdated, the ideological message that we get from society today is. be plastic, reconstruct yourself, try everything, make experiments and so on and so on. no, i think what do i mean when i say i'm for a catastrophe? imagine yourself not being in love. it's usually very happy life if you have a job and so on. you have your job, afternoon you go to a drink beer with friends, maybe a one night stand here and there. lifees on. then all of a sudden you passionately fall in love. the same role can be also played by engaging writing, scientific discovery, whatever. admit it, your life is ruined. you worry all the time the peaceful times are over. in this sense, yes, i want a traumatic life where you cannot even sleep well and so on and so on. i hope we'll be still, we are still ready. to do it. i'm very sorry if i was too long. i'm very grateful for your attention. thank you very much. i'm sorry.
okay. listen. don't applaud too much my old joke. sorry, oh no, no problem. keep the energy. when we communists take over, you will have to no, but more seriously, because i speak too much, usually i have to be brief and go through fast. let me begin by expressing a sincere gratitude for this invitation. it's an honor for me and also my love for bergen, the city. there is a well-known joke in my country at least about a small boy who asks his father dad why don't they build cities in the countryside where the air is much cleaner i know i'm wrong probably but bergen comes for me at least pretty close to this idea okay let me begin why am i still a communist when the communist dream of the 20th century is clearly over, together with the dreams of the dissident communists about socialism with a human face? i am also as far as imaginable from the old mantra that communism was a good idea which just got corrupted by totalitarian perverts. no, there are problems already in the original vision and one should submit to severe reassessment also marx himself. yes, communist power did some good things we know the litany education, health, fight against fascism and so on but overall the only real. triumph of communismists in power is, i think, what happened in china in the last decades. arguably the greatest economic success story in human history. hundreds of millions were raised from poverty. how did china achieve this? the 20th century left was defined by its opposition to two fundamental tendencies of modernity. the reign of capital with its aggressive individualism and alienating dynamics and the authoritarian bureaucratic state power. what we get in today's china is exactly the combination of these two features in its extreme form. strong authoritarian state, wild capitalist dynamics. and this is the most efficient form of socialism today. china is becoming the model of what henry farrell called network networked authoritarianism. if a state, that's the idea, spies on people enough and allows machine learning systems to incorporate their behavior and respond to it, it is possible to provide for everyone's needs better than a democracy could. that's the idea. but this isn't what's happening in china. china is very unstable, plagued by wildcat strikes. concentration camps massive corruption and so on this instability was signalled by a strange event in mid-october 2019. the chinese media launched an offensive promoting the claim that, i quote, demonstrations in europe and south america are the direct result of western tolerance for hong kong unrest. quote goes on. there are many problems. in the west and all kinds of undercurrents of dissatisfaction. many of them will eventually manifest in the way the hong kong protests did end of quote what cannot but strike the eye here is that the communist china discreetly plays on the solidarity of those in power all around the world against the rebellious populations, warning the west not to underestimate the dissatisfaction in their own countries, as if beneath our ideological and geopolitical tensions they all share the same basic interest in holding on to power. these protests are not taking place only in poor and desolate countries countries like iran, but also in countries of relative at least prosperity they express a growing dissatisfaction that cannot be channeled into established modes of political representation. what awaits us is a society of permanent state of exception and civil unrest. this strange protest wave enables us to take a fresh look at the fall of the berlin wall. it is a commonplace place to emphasize the miraculous nature of the fall of the wall thirty years ago. something happened that one couldn't even imagine a couple of months earlier, the communist regimes collapsed like a house of cards. however, one should add that an even greater miracle happened only a couple of years later, the return of ex-communists to power through free elections. remember poland. wałęsa was totally marginalized and much less popular than general jaruzelski, who crushed solidarity with a military coup d'etat. now, two decades later, today came the third surprise. poland is now in the grip of rightist populists who reject both communism and liberal democracy. so what goes on? what the large majority of those who protested against the communist regimes had in mind, i claim, was not simply capitalism. they wanted social security, solidarity, a rough kind of justice, freedom to live their own life outside the oppressive state control, honesty, sincerity. they wanted to be liberated from the primitive ideological indoctrination and the prevailing cynical hypocrisy. in short the vague ideals that led the protesters were to a large extent taken from socialist ideology itself. and as we learned from freud, what is repressed returns in a distorted form. in our case, what was repressed from the dissident imaginary returned to in the guise of right populism. in his interpretation of the fall of east european communism, jürgen habermas proved to be the ultimate left fukuyamaist. i'm referring of course to fukuyama silently accepting that. the existing liberal democratic order is the best possible. this is why he welcomed precisely what many leftists saw as the big deficiency of the anti-communist protests in eastern europe. the fact that they were not motivated by a new vision of some post-communist future. as habermas put it, the central and eastern european revolutions were just what he called rectifying or catch-up nachholende revolutions. their aim was to enable central and eastern european societies to gain what the western europeans already possessed. in short, to rejoin the west european normality. however, the yellow vests and other similar protests are definitely not catch-up movements. the populist disappointment at liberal democracy is the proof that 1990 was not just a catch-up revolution. it aimed at more than liberal capitalist normality. freud spoke about unbehagen in der kultur, the discontent an in culture. today, 30 years after the fall of the wall, the ongoing new wave of protests bears witness to a kind of unbebehagen in liberal capitalism. and the key question is, who will articulate this discontent? will it be left to national national populists to exploit it. therein resides the big task for the left. i will now refer to a movie that i hope you saw, though i don't like it. in the final scene of v for vendetta, thousands of unarmed londoners wearing guy fawkes masks march towards parliament. the military allows the crowd to pass and the people take over. okay, a nice ecstatic moment. but sorry for the plastic expression, i am ready to sell my mother into slavery. in order to see v for vendetta part 2. what i asked at the end of the film triumph people won over what would have happened the day after the victory of the people? how would they reorganize daily life? i was never fascinated by hundreds of thousands assembling on a large square in athens or in istanbul and so on. what interests me is the morning after, when the ecstatic passion is over. how will ordinary people experience the change? thomas picketty tries to address this issue in his second book. capital and ideology he proposes a radicalized social democracy not to nationalize all wealth like the soviet-style communism but to maintain capitalism and. redistribute assets. so sorry. progressive income taxes should allow governments to give everyone a basic income equivalent to 60% of the average wage. and to cover the costs of decarbonizing economy, employees should have 50% of the seats on company boards and individualized carbon tax calculated by a personalized card should track each person's contribution to global heating and so on and so on. but what if the rich decide to emigrate? pikt proposes an exit tax and a global justice system that makes it impossible to hide from expropriation anywhere to that end he imagined a supranational parliament comprised of members drawn from national legislators the two extremes of the deadlock of today's radical left are best exemplified by a long tv dialogue between piquetty and the french maoist great philosopher alain badieu. badieu's vision is that of nomadic proletarians who will emerge as a new revolutionary force. piquetty's proposal is no less utopian, although it presents itself as pragmatic, looking for a solution within the frame of capitalism and democratic procedures. his utopia is that it can be done within this frame. you know, i agree with pt. i'm just saying, in order to do what he wants, they're already. a radical social change already. has to happen and he doesn't talk about this. there is of course now comes trigger warning for politically correct people, now come my usual provocations there is a third dream, that of rejuvenated local democracy, which is, i think, if anything even worse. the more our communities are self-ruling, relatively autonomous, the more they have to rely on a thick texture of alienated institutional mechanisms. where does electricity or water come from? who guarantees the rule of law? to whom do we turn for healthcare and so on. that's my proposal. we should change the goal of emancipatory struggles from overcoming alienation to enforcing the right kind of alienation. how to achieve a smooth functioning of alienated, invisible social mechanisms which sustain the space of non-alated communities. this is what makes welfare state so attractive to me. i don't have to help the poor myself. the state and its anonymous apparatuses do it for me, so that i don't have to confront the excluded and underprivileged face to-face. this is what is so dangerous for me about the process that began in ideology and practice with margaret thatcher. recall her famous quip that society doesn't exist. there are only individuals who struggle and work. fully responsible for their fate. this introduces a kind of fake disalienation, a false repersonalization of social relations. the poor are ultimately responsible for their fate and the aim of health should be to enable them to regain their responsibility. it is no longer the abstract state, it is me and other hardworking people who are covering the costs and those who receive help are also personalized they acquire faces often. faces of lazy and evil people abusing our generosity. is this in some sense not true? i think no, because the alienated system that regulates our lives is not just an illusion, but the actuality of our lives. in such a universe, every direct personalization, like the one proposed by thatcher, is an ideological lie. so again, why do i still cling to the cursed name of communism when i know that the 20th century communist project failed, giving birth to a new form of murderous terror? let me begin with the fact that we live in an age permitted by apocalyptic prospects a proviso when i talk about apocalyptic threats i'm fully aware of how tricky this domain is. only a thin line separates the correct perception of real dangers from the fantasy scenarios about a global catastrophe that awaits us. there is a specific enjoyment of living in the end time, living in the shadow of a catastrophe. and the paradox is that such a fixation on some forthcoming catastrophe is precisely one of the ways to avoid really confronting it rightist populists paint a catastrophic vision of our entire civilization under threat from muslim and other refugees. if today's trends go on, so they say, in a decade or so, europe will be a muslim province of europistan. plus they rightist apocalyptic thinkers, they see lgbt plus and political correctness as part of the cultural marxist plot to destroy western civilization. muslim fundamentalists and political feminists are thus for them two sides of the same coin. leftists focused on another couple of apocalyptic threats. ecology. and digital control of our lives. now, if we discount the so-called rational optimists. who claim that life is nonetheless generally getting better, let me focus on three apocalypses to be taken seriously. migrations, ecological threats, digital control. they all concern the fate of our commerce, of what is the common ground of our existence. natural environs, the global digital space, the unity of human species. these threats are by definition national. they cannot be approached within the frame of nation-states, which nation-states are today unfortunately making a comeback. so let me begin with new forms of apartheid. which is the leftist version of the fear of immigrants. for the right, immigrants pose a threat to our way of life, while for the left, building new walls is a threat to our global civilization. while this is basically true. i would nonetheless like second trigger warming now you will really hate me i would like to nonetheless point out that debt. we should reject the simple lesson of mutual tolerance best rendered by a well-known utter stupidity, i think, masquerading as a deep wisdom. quote an enemy is someone whose story you have not heard i cannot imagine a more stupid thing to say. why? i know what they want to say. there is a wonderful literary example. mary shelley's frankenstein. in the central part of the novel, shelley allows the monster to speak for himself, to tell the story from his own perspective. and in this way, she humanizes him. there is however, a clear limit to this procedure. whenever people tell me, oh, there are no enemies, enemies is somebody to whom you are not ready to listen to, my answer is, ah, good to learn. so hitler was our enemy because we were not ready to listen to him or whatever. now, i think the more... i know about and understand hitler, the more he is my enemy. now comes my lesson. the experience that we have of our lives from within, the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing are fundamentally a lie. the truth lies outside, in our actions, in what we do. these stories, the way we act experience a situation. and i'm recently following ethnic cleansingings done here and there, bosnia, rwanda. there always is a poet behind. these stories are usually written by poet. my thesis. soldiers are not dead per se. what is dead are soldiers combined with poets, soldiers mobilized by nationalist poetry or religion. there is no ethnic cleansing without poetry. why? to do horrible things, most of us need to be anestheticized against our elementary sensitivity to others suffering. and for this, a sacred cause is needed. religious ideologies usually claim that, true or not, religion makes some otherwise bad people to do some good things. from today's experience, i would rather stick to steven weinberg's claim that while without religion, good people would have been doing good things and bad people bad things, only religion can make good people do bad things. plato's reputation suffers because of his claim that poets should be thrown out of the city. i think, in view of my post-yugoslav experience, rather good advice. in ex-yugoslavia, poets ethnic cleansing was clearly prepared by poet's dangerous dreams. in ex-yugoslavia, instead of industrial military complex, we had the poetic military complex, much more dangerous, symbolized by the two names, radovan karadžić, ratko mladić, poet and a general. in a recent tv debate on german tv, gregor gysi, a key figure of linke, the left party, gave i think, a good answer to an anti-immigrant who aggressively insisted that he feels no responsibility for the poverty and horrors in the third world countries. instead of spending money to help them we should only be responsible for the welfare of our own citizens. the gist of gysi's answer was, if we only, if we don't get responsible for the third world poor and act accordingly, they will come here to us, which is precisely what the anti-immigrant was ferociously opposed to. cynical as this reply may appear, it is, i think, much more appropriate than abstract humanitarianism. the humanitarian approach appeals to our generosity and guilt. we should open our hearts to them also because the ultimate cause of their suffering is european racism and colonialism. and this appeal is often combined by a strange economic reasoning. europe needs immigrants in order to continue to expand economically. our birth rates are falling. we are losing our vitality. it is strange to hear leftists evoke the typical rightist motive of vitality. the hidden stakes of this operation are clear. let's open ourselves to migrants as a desperate measure to avoid the much needed radical change and to maintain our liberal capitalist status quo. the logic that sustains. gysi statement his statement is the opposite one. only a radical social economic change can protect our way of life. in some sense. a refugee is a neighbor next. neighbor in the strict biblical sense the other reduced to. he her their naked presence. without possessions, without home, without a determined place in society, refugees are like a stain in the social edifice, always too close. to us for a racist. since they lack a stable place in our society, they stand for universality of being human. how we relate to refugees indicates how we relate to humanity as such. but in a properly hegelian way, universality and particularity coincide here. refugees come naked only materially. and for this reason, they all the more cling to their cultural identity. from this fact alone, it is clear to me at least that nomadic immigrants are not proletarians, in spite of attempts by alain badiou and others to promulgate refugees into the exemplary figure of today's proletarians. what makes proletarians proletarians is the fact that they are exploited. they are the key moment of the valorization of capital. their labor creates surplus value. in clear contrast to nomadic refugees who are not just perceived as worthless from the racist perspective, but are most of them at least literally valueless. a trash remainder of global capital. left and capitalists dream of the new wave of immigrant debt. they will be integrated into our capitalist machine as it happened back in the 0 in europe and france since again they claim europe needs immigrants but this time i claim it will not work the bulk of them remains outside this fact makes the situation of immigrant refugees very tragic they are caught in a kind of social limbo a deadlock from which fundamentalism a exit. with regard to the circulation of global capital, refugees are put in a position of surplus humanity, a mirror image of surplus value, and no humanitarian help and openness can resolve this tension. only restructuring of the entire international edifice. there is a passage in vladimir putin's recent interview where one can feel how he really speaks from his heart. it occurs when he solemnly declares his zero tolerance for spies who betray their country treason is the gravest crime possible and traitors must be punished end it is clear from these outburst that putin has no personal sympathy for snowden or assange he just helps them to annoy in order to annoy his enemies. and one can only imagine the fate of an eventual russian snowden or assange. one can only wonder. at some western leftists who continue to claim that, in spite of his socially conservative stance, putin poses an obstacle to the american world domination and should be for this reason viewed with sympathy. there are circumstances, i claim, when treason, the betrayal of one's own nation state, is the greatest act of ethical fidelity. today, such treason is personified by names like assange, manning, snowden. why? the entire ethics of a state. of a nation-state culminates in the highest act of heroism, the readiness to sacrifice one's life for one's nation state. which means that the wild barbarian relations between states serve as the foundation of the ethical life within a state. in today's north korea, with its ruthless pursuit of nuclear weapons and rockets, is this not the ultimate example of the logic of unconditional national state sovereignty the moment we fully accept the fact that we live on a spaceship earth. the task that urgently imposes itself is that of civilizing civilizations themselves and this brings us to the second apocalyptic threat. the comments of external nature. threatened by pollution and exploitation. i'm well aware how uncertain analyses and projections are in this domain. it will be certain what is going on only when it will be too late. what i nonetheless see as certain is that there is a prospect of a catastrophe here. scientific data seem to me abundant enough. so we should act in some large-scale collective way. how? ideologies today, i think, one of the major, ecology is today one of the major ideological battlefields with a whole series of strategies to obfuscate the true dimension of the threat. first, simple ignorance. donald trump. it's a marginal phenomenon. life goes on. don't worry. second. science and technology can save us. don't worry, scientists will come with solutions. three, leave the solution to the market, higher taxation of the polluters and so on. and the last two, which i really despise, four. the superere ego pressure on personal responsibility instead of large systemic measures. when you criticize the system, the answer you get is, but did you do your duty? did you put all coca-cola cans on one side? did you recycle all the paper? it's a wonderful formula. this is ideology at its best. because first it makes you responsible and it offers you an easy way out. separate your coca-cola. and and you did your duty, you can go on. but the fifth, the worst version is for me so-called deep ecology. the idea that we should renounce traditional life, the arrogant life. we should renounce human who breathe and become again respectful children of our mother nature. this whole paradigm of mother nature derailed by our human excess is, i think, wrong. what mother nature? there is the dirty beach. just imagine all the catastrophes that happened on earth before humanity. where does oil come from? nature is completely chaotic. don't play the game of returning to balance. that's the problem. there is no natural balance. what all the talk about how we humanity pose a threat to the life on the earth really amounts to is our worry about our own fate. what if we cost... the end of human life on earth. earth itself is indifferent to it. earth already went through many similar distractions. when we worry about environment, let's be at least honest, we worry about our own environment. we want our own good and safe life. ideology is at its worst here. why do we buy organic food? i don't know how it is with you, but all my friends admit to me the same point. do you really believe that the half-rotten and expensive organic apples are really healthier? the point is it's ideology. you feel good. you see, i bought them, although they are half rotten. and it's pure ideal because in this way i did something for humanity and mother earth. that's ideology in our everyday life. so how to act? now i go even further. we are in a deep mess there is no simple democratic solution here people talk as if politicians and corrupted scientists are covering up the truth.. okay, but what should we do? there are many desperate proposals, for example, srm, solar radiation management, the continuous massive dispersals of aerosols into our atmosphere to absorb sunlight and thus cool the planet. however, srm is extremely risky. we don't know what it can. trigger maybe some unpredictable effects. so... i think the first step to be serious is to admit that there is no simple, clear way. out. it's a... very sad confused complex situation the least we can do is set the priorities straight and admit the absurdity of our geopolitical war games when the very planet for which we are for which wars are fought is under threat yeah,, we should. begin. this brings me to the third threat, the commons of internal nature. when the threat posed by the digitalization of our lives is debated in our media, the focus is usually on the new face of capitalism called by shoshana zuboff surveillance capitalism. quote, knowledge, authority, and power rest with surveillance capital, for which we are merely human natural resources. we are the native peoples now whose claims to self-determination have vanished from the maps of our own experience. end of quote. so we the watched are not just material, we are also exploited, involved in an unequal exchange, which is why the term behavioral surplus. is justified here. when we are surfing, buying, watching tv and so on, we get what we want, but we give more. we lay ourselves bare, we make the details of our lives and its habits transparent to the digital big other. the paradox is that we experience this unequal exchange, the activity which effectively enslaves us as our highest exercise of freedom. what is more freedom and freely surfing on the web. just by exerting this freedom of ours, we generate the surplus appropriated by the digital big other which collects data. however, and don't be afraid, i am coming. important as this surveillance capitalism is, i think it's not yet the true game changer. i see a much greater potential for new forms of domination in the prospect of direct brain machine interface. all kinds of secret agencies are working intensely on it. what we learn is just the public face of it, the often sensational news about it in our public media. like, you know, a totally crippled man now with his mind alone can make objects move and so on and so on. yeah, but what about billions, billions invested by military machinery into direct mind control and so on and so on. where do i see a threat here? again, a threat in this idea that our mind processes can directly interact without communication media like language and so on with the machine. the distance between our inner life, the flow of our thoughts and external reality is the basis of our self-perception as free beings. we are free in our thoughts precisely because i am aware that what i think stays with me. i can play with my thoughts, i can make thought experiments engage dreaming and so on with no direct consequences in reality. this is now potentially under threat. and let don't tell me it will take century till we do it. at an elementary level, it's already happening. was it reported in your media that? i read somewhere two, three weeks ago that in china, i don't like to focus on china because we like to report things about china to paint them as these eccentric totalitarians, but we are doing the same things in maybe. in order, for example, in some elementary school classes in china, pupils already have to wear some kind of a frame of their head which controls the activity of their brain so that the teacher can see. on a screen if they are listening to his talk or just dozing off and so on. that's just the beginning. i mean, the potentials are absolutely incredible here. and so then how are we? two. fight all this. ah now comes my final pessimism. i don't have a simple, clear answer. all i know is that neither, although they should be used, yes, i am for market regulation, welfare state and so on, but neither market nor... state apparatuses, as we know them, i think, can do the job. so i will just to conclude, propose to shock you a little bit a combination of two things which have this very obscure totalitarian associations, voluntarism and terror. first, voluntarism. the only way to confront the threat of ecological catastrophe, i think, is by means of large-scale collective decisions which will counter to the spontaneous im logic of capitalist development. i refer here implicitly to walter benjamin, who wrote in his thesis on the concept of history that today the task is not, in this old marxist term, to be on the on the train of progress and so on, but to pull the emergency brake on the train. we no longer can afford this old-fashioned marxist alliance history is on our side. no, it's not. we have to act in a voluntarist way by this i mean with no foundation in some objective tendencies of social development and so on and so on. and this i want it combined with terror. don't be afraid. i'm not for new communist terror. just the opposite. my idea is, what if in some sense, the united states are right to denounce now in their pursuit of julian assange, to denounce wikileaks as a terrorist organization? in some sense, they are. they are clearly breaking the laws, disturbing proper relations,, and so on and so on and so on. i think that, you know who is for me, i know how provocative i am. i'm advocating terror. yes, but... my figure of the terrorist is... the informer. you know, this lowest idea of whistleblower, informer who denounces you and so on and so on, that's what we need today. this type of traitors are maybe the only authentic heroes today. now, you are quite right to ask me, but is this not crazy utopia? will people be mobilized in this sense? my answer ich. maybe, probably even no. but my only answer is that it is even more utopian to think that we can somehow manage to survive without similar radical measures. my dogma is dead. to think that somehow we will manage, don't worry too much, go on, somehow it will go, this is the true utopia today. you know, it's no longer ecological threat, digital control and so on. it's no longer something happening in third world countries. it's just slowly progressive. look what's happening happens now in australia, in india, and so on and so on. it will just go on. and i just pray that a not too large... ecatastrophe, ecological or whatever, will b. enough to awaken us if you want. but i'm pessimist i'm a pessimist and that's good because to conclude with a personal thought, i think that today to be in a good mood, you have to be a pessimist. why? because a pessimist doesn't expect a lot. but from time to time nice things happen and that's beautiful, you know, like, oh my god, it's not all so bad. if you are today an optimist, it's the way to suicide. you are all the time so just what i to finish, if you allow me half a minute, even less improvisation. what i'm very traditional, even conservative at this level. i hate this obsession with good life, happiness, and so on and so on. no, happiness is for pimps, whatever. i hate it. i want traumas, i want shock and so on. the third thing for me, okay, at my old age, it doesn't matter. matter what's happening, for example, with sexuality today. did you notice how today passionate love to one person is considered almost something dangerous, outdated, the ideological message that we get from society today is. be plastic, reconstruct yourself, try everything, make experiments and so on and so on. no, i think what do i mean when i say i'm for a catastrophe? imagine yourself not being in love. it's usually very happy life if you have a job and so on. you have your job, afternoon you go to a drink beer with friends, maybe a one night stand here and there. lifees on. then all of a sudden you passionately fall in love. the same role can be also played by engaging writing, scientific discovery, whatever. admit it, your life is ruined. you worry all the time the peaceful times are over. in this sense, yes, i want a traumatic life where you cannot even sleep well and so on and so on. i hope we'll be still, we are still ready. to do it. i'm very sorry if i was too long. i'm very grateful for your attention. thank you very much. i'm sorry.