The Transformation of Civilization and the Future of Asia
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2017-09 · 0:51:55 · 6,042 words
communism-socialismideologycapitalismdemocracytechnology-ai-cyberspaceecology-climateliberalism-political-correctnessrevolution-violencegeopolitics-warhegel-dialecticsphilosophy-general
Žižek diagnoses the crisis of the contemporary left by tracing the failure of the classic revolutionary sequence (rage → rebellion → new power), using Syriza's capitulation as a key case study. He argues that the left needs more alienation and proper bureaucratic state apparatus, not romantic direct democracy. The talk then pivots to three structural threats to global capitalism: the commons (intellectual, ecological, biogenetic, social), the rise of algorithmic machines that know us better than we know ourselves (drawing on Harari), and the limits of liberal democracy. Žižek concludes that a New World Order of civilizational cooperation is necessary to avoid catastrophe, while rejecting both cheap humanist universalism and nationalist sovereigntism (critiquing Brexit as cover for deeper market liberalization).
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 20
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Žižek's tripartite formula for the classical left revolutionary sequence, which he argues almost never completes itself: chaotic rage gets diluted or turns populist, rebellion loses steam, and new power fails to reinvent governmental form.
as “post-ideological revolt”
A revolt without any program, religious, utopian, or otherwise, exemplified by the Paris suburban riots, reflecting the dominance of a post-ideological era in which even resistance takes a purely negative, programless form.
as “precarious freedom”
The ideological operation by which precarious labour (short-term contracts, instability) is sold to workers as a new form of creative freedom and self-reinvention, masking domination as liberation.
as “we need more alienation”
Žižek's counter-intuitive political motto: against anarchist dreams of transparent self-organization, he argues that complex modern societies require robust alienated bureaucratic structures operating invisibly in the background.
Implicitly operative in Žižek's account of digital commons and rent: the abstract circuits of capital that organize social life independently of individual intentions.
The common foundation of social being that should not be privatized; Žižek identifies four: intellectual/cultural commons, ecological commons (external nature), biogenetic commons (internal nature), and the shared social-political space of humanity.
as “regression from profit to rent”
Žižek's thesis that contemporary capitalism increasingly reproduces itself not through standard exploitation and profit extraction but through rent, charging access fees to shared commons such as the digital/internet space.
as “intellectual property”
Žižek invokes intellectual property as a commons under threat: unlike material objects, information gains value through use rather than losing it, making its privatization structurally incompatible with capitalism's logic.
The geological-political epoch in which human productive activity has become the dominant force shaping Earth's systems, so that its side effects can no longer be treated as background noise but must be accounted for politically.
Following Sloterdijk, the metaphor that Earth is a limited, closed system for which humanity is collectively responsible, requiring us to treat collateral environmental damage as unavoidable and demanding radical political response.
Sloterdijk's term (invoked approvingly by Žižek) for the next civilizational task: just as states civilized individuals internally, cultures themselves must now be civilized through universal solidarity and cooperation.
Harari's term, taken up by Žižek, for the liberal subject that believes its inner story constitutes a coherent, authoritative self whose choices should be sovereign, a fiction that machines now expose as inconsistent.
Used by Žižek as evidence that machine decision-making already outperforms human judgment in financial markets, pointing to a broader obsolescence of the liberal rational agent.
The transhumanist prospect (associated with Kurzweil) that man-machine interaction will produce a new collective post-human awareness; Žižek remains agnostic between this and a bleaker scenario of blind machine control.
as “new ruling class / new species”
Žižek's prediction that biotechnology and algorithmic power will produce a ruling class that is literally a new biological species, with an engineered gap between those who control the technology and those left behind facing extinction.
as “immanently multiculturalist capitalism”
Žižek's claim that global capitalism, especially colonialism, has always coexisted perfectly with local cultural diversity, making 'defend local culture against global capital' a false resistance strategy.
as “false respect for the other”
The worst form of racism, according to Žižek: the patronizing liberal idealization of the other (e.g. the noble savage myth about Native Americans), which denies the other's status as a full moral agent capable of wrongdoing.
as “false humanitarian universalism”
The cheap liberal humanism that enjoins empathy and understanding across all cultures ('we are all one big humanity'), which Žižek rejects as a form of ideological cover that avoids genuine political antagonism.
Žižek's implicit concept in his defense of Merkel: a true political leader acts against the majority's current will, betting that long-term success will retroactively legitimate the decision.
as “New World Order”
Used non-ironically by Žižek as the necessary outcome: a genuine global political organization capable of imposing cooperation and protecting the commons, without which growing disorder and class bifurcation are inevitable.
Stories he reaches for 7
Gates became the world's richest person not through standard Marxist exploitation of workers (who are actually better paid than average) but by charging rent for access to the digital space, the internet commons, that we all share.
“I claim you cannot explain his wealth through standard Marxist notion of exploitation... it's not profit, it's rent.”
Žižek declares total indifference to the ecstatic moments of millions on Tahrir Square or Syntagma Square, caring only about what happens the day after: whether ordinary life actually changes.
“I am more and more totally indifferent towards such ecstatic moments. What interests me is: what happens the day after?”
Young immigrants in Paris suburbs burned thousands of cars and buildings in massive protests with no program, no Islamist agenda, indeed, they burned their own Islamist cultural institutions. Žižek reads this as paradigmatic post-ideological revolt: pure rage without utopian content.
“there was no program, not even any awareness of some general goal... It was as if... we now also get a post-ideological revolt. A revolt without any program”
Merkel admitted over a million refugees to Germany without a democratic mandate, right-wingers argued she had no legitimacy. Žižek defends her as an example of a true political leader acting against majority will and seeking retroactive legitimation.
“sometimes a political leader has to risk and make a decision against the will of the majority, hoping that in the long term, with the success of this risky decision, it will be retroactively accepted.”
Žižek invokes Mao's famous saying, 'There is great disorder under heaven, so the situation is excellent', to express his non-pessimist, non-optimist stance: open situations of disorder are opportunities for new beginnings.
“President Mao's famous saying: 'There is great disorder under heaven, so the situation is excellent'”
The day after winning a referendum against EU austerity with a majority 'No', Syriza completely surrendered to EU pressure, a breathtaking reversal with no mediation, exemplifying the failure of the left to invent a new governmental form.
“A day after winning the referendum against the European pressure... literally the next day, the Syriza government fully surrendered to the pressure of the European Union.”
Experimenters registered voters' full intellectual life and then checked against how they actually voted; the machine could accurately predict when voters voted against their own interests.
“the machine was right to predict where they voted stupidly against their own interests”
Works invoked 2
Paul Mason's book is cited as having convincingly demonstrated how the digital revolution poses a structural threat to capitalism by transforming work, production, and value.
Harari's book is cited twice at length: for the claim that liberal democratic voting will become obsolete as Google knows our opinions better than we do, and for the insight that twenty-first century censorship works through information flooding. Žižek treats it as a key diagnostic text.
People invoked 8
Paul Mason positive
Cited for his book The End of Capitalism as having convincingly demonstrated how digital revolution threatens capitalism by transforming work, production, and value.
Yuval Noah Harari positive
Quoted extensively from Homo Deus on the narrating self, the obsolescence of liberal democracy through algorithmic knowledge, and twenty-first century censorship through information flooding; Žižek treats him as a key interlocutor and largely endorses his diagnoses.
Mentioned as associated with the singularity thesis, the prospect that man-machine interaction produces a new collective post-human awareness; Žižek neither endorses nor dismisses it.
Peter Sloterdijk positive
Described as 'my friend,' a strong anti-communist liberal-conservative, whose program for civilizing civilizations and domesticating wild animal cultures Žižek endorses as containing the 'minimum of communism.'
Angela Merkel positive
Defended for accepting over a million refugees to Germany without a democratic mandate, as an example of a true political leader acting against majority will and trusting retroactive legitimation.
Mao Zedong positive
Acknowledged as responsible for 'all the horrors' of the Great Leap Forward and famine, yet Žižek 'irresistibly' identifies with Mao's dictum 'great disorder under heaven, situation is excellent' as expressing dialectical openness to historical crisis.
Karl Marx positive
Invoked through the concept of the commons, the critique of exploitation, and the Marxist tradition of class analysis; Žižek supplements Marx with rent theory to explain Gates, and updates class theory for biotech.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Cited for the conceptualization of the state's ethical life culminating in heroic sacrifice for the nation and the barbarism of inter-state relations; Žižek uses this to motivate the need to civilize civilizations.
What it argues
failure of the left's revolutionary sequence and the problem of new powerthe case for bureaucratic alienation over direct democracycapitalism's antagonisms through the four commonsalgorithmic governance and the obsolescence of the liberal subjectcivilizing civilizations: Sloterdijk's spaceship EarthBrexit as capitalist maneuver disguised as sovereigntycritique of false humanitarian universalism and multicultural racism
Dialectical moves 12
“The result is not freedom but rage: what is sold to you as new freedom is effectively a life with quite a lot of anxiety.”
The ideological promotion of precarious labor as creative freedom is already its opposite, a source of existential anxiety.
“State socialist regimes didn't have too much bureaucracy—they lacked a true bureaucracy, a kind of efficient anonymous state bureaucracy.”
The standard critique of socialist over-bureaucratization is inverted: the real problem was the absence of a proper impersonal bureaucracy.
“We need more alienation, not less.”
Against the left's dream of transparent community, Žižek asserts alienated institutional structures are the precondition of real freedom.
“The wild barbarian relations between states serve as the foundation of the ethical life within a state—the true ethical moment is war.”
Hegel's insight, appropriated by Žižek: the internal ethical order of a state depends on external barbarism, an antagonism that must now be overcome at the civilizational level.
“Information functions in a totally different way: the more it is used, the wealthier it gets. Through use, its value grows.”
Unlike material property, intellectual commons gain rather than lose value through use, making their privatization a structural antagonism within capitalism.
“Having power means knowing what to ignore—in the twenty-first century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information.”
Power has inverted from controlling scarcity of information to controlling the surplus of it; intelligence is now simplification, not accumulation.
“The machine which controls all this gets a much more accurate picture of ourselves—which, as we know from cognitive sciences, even doesn't exist as a consistent entity.”
The machine knows us better than we know ourselves precisely because there is no unified self to know, cognitive science and algorithms converge on the non-existence of the liberal subject.
“Global capitalism is immanently multiculturalist—capitalism always perfectly coexisted with local cultures.”
The apparent opposition between global capitalism and local culture is false; defending cultural particularity is not resistance to capital.
“We are not taking them seriously as moral agents—the true anti-racist move is not understanding the other but holding them to the same moral standards.”
The liberal demand to understand and excuse the other's cultural difference is itself a form of racism, denying them full moral agency.
“Far from protecting sovereignty against global markets, Brexit was about opening Britain even more radically to the world market.”
Brexit's apparent anti-globalism was its opposite, an accelerationist capitalist maneuver disguised as national self-determination.
“We know where history is moving: in the long term towards catastrophe. So we have to act against the grain, against the spontaneous tendency.”
Historical materialism's optimism is inverted: knowing history's direction means knowing we must oppose it, not ride it.
“The truth is outside. We invent our stories to escape from the horror of what we are doing.”
Against hermeneutics of inner truth, Žižek argues that inner narratives are ideological escape from external reality, not access to it.
Claims 21
asserts
The classical left revolutionary sequence of rage, rebellion, and new power almost never completes itself; rage is both the beginning and the outcome of failed emancipatory projects.the structural failure of the left
asserts
The most dangerous ideological operation today is selling new forms of domination (e.g. precarious labor) as new forms of freedom.contemporary ideology
reframes
Syriza's failure was not caused by losing touch with its social movement base, but by failing to invent a new form of government itself.Syriza's collapse
asserts
The left needs more alienation, not less: complex modern societies require robust anonymous bureaucratic structures, not transparent anarchist self-organization.the left's political program
reframes
The state socialist regimes failed not because of too much bureaucracy but because of too little genuine efficient anonymous state bureaucracy.state socialism's failure
asserts
Global capitalism cannot reproduce itself indefinitely because it faces irresolvable antagonisms in the four commons: intellectual, ecological, biogenetic, and social-political.the limits of capitalism
asserts
Bill Gates's wealth is better explained by rent (extracting payment for access to the digital commons) than by Marxist exploitation of surplus labor.capitalism and rent vs. profit
rejects
Treating all of nature as capital with a price tag is an absurd solution to the ecological commons problem.market-based ecological pricing
asserts
Sloterdijk's program for civilizing civilizations is in effect a minimum of communism, requiring overcoming capitalist expansionism and enforcing universal solidarity capable of violating state sovereignty.Sloterdijk's political program
asserts
Machines that track all our behavior already know us better than we know ourselves and can make decisions more adequate to our real interests than we can.algorithmic governance and the subject
asserts
The liberal narrating self—the free agent whose sovereign choices ground democracy—simply does not exist as a consistent entity.liberal subjectivity
asserts
The real act of intelligence is simplification—knowing what to ignore—not the accumulation of complexity; this is also what is hardest to encode in machines.intelligence, mind, and machine cognition
asserts
The most likely outcome of the AI/biotech revolution is a new class division stronger than Marx's: a ruling caste that is literally a new biological species controlling machines, while the rest face extinction.class and technology
rejects
We should not translate the need for new global unity into cheap humanitarian universalism ('we are all one big brotherhood'), which is a form of ideological avoidance.humanitarian universalism
asserts
Global capitalism has always coexisted perfectly with local cultures, so defending local culture against global capital is not genuine resistance.multiculturalism and capitalism
asserts
The idealization of the other (e.g. noble savage myth about Native Americans) is the worst contemporary form of white racism, denying the other full moral agency.liberal racism and the other
asserts
Democracy as majority rule is structurally limited to communities already bound by shared values and cannot serve as the mechanism for global civilizational decisions.the limits of democracy
asserts
Brexit was driven not by resistance to global markets but by the capitalist class's desire to open Britain even more radically to the world market, with anti-refugee racism as its de facto motive.Brexit
asserts
Angela Merkel was right to accept refugees against the will of the majority, because a true political leader must sometimes risk acting counter to popular opinion and seek retroactive legitimation.political leadership and democracy
reframes
History is not moving toward communism but toward catastrophe; we must act against the grain of its spontaneous tendency.historical materialism and progress
rejects
We do not infer the truth from an inner story; rather, we invent stories to escape the horror of what we are actually doing—the truth is outside, not inside.hermeneutics of inner truth and narrative self-understanding
Quotes 14
“The most dangerous form of ideology today is the one which tries to sell you new forms of de facto domination, oppression, as new forms of freedom.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology selling domination as freedom
“We need more alienation.”Slavoj Žižek · counter-intuitive political program against direct democracy
“I am more and more totally indifferent towards such ecstatic moments. What interests me is: what happens the day after?”Slavoj Žižek · skepticism toward spectacular revolutionary moments
“This minimum of communism one finds even in Sloterdijk.”Slavoj Žižek · communist minimum hidden in conservative thought
“In the twenty-first century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. In ancient times, having power meant having access to data. Today, having power means knowing what to ignore.”Slavoj Žižek · power as the capacity to ignore / information overload as censorship
“Liberal habits such as democratic elections will become obsolete, because Google will be able to represent even my own political opinions better than myself.”Slavoj Žižek · algorithmic obsolescence of liberal democracy
“The liberal true self, the free agent which enacts what I really want, simply doesn't exist.”Slavoj Žižek · non-existence of the liberal subject
“I'm not a pessimist, I'm not an optimist, I'm a Maoist.”Slavoj Žižek · Žižek's self-description as dialectical opportunist of disorder
“Please don't follow the worst kind of racism which is the false respect for the other. Allow us at least to be as evil as you, if not worse.”Slavoj Žižek · liberal idealization of the other as racism
“The truth is outside. We invent our stories to escape from the horror of what we are doing.”Slavoj Žižek · ideology as escape from external truth
“We know where the history is moving: in the long term towards catastrophe. So we have to precisely act against the grain, against the spontaneous tendency.”Slavoj Žižek · inverting historical materialism—act against history's direction
“Without a New World Order we are approaching a very dangerous disorder. We will have to act against history.”Slavoj Žižek · necessity of political will against historical drift
“There are people with whom it holds that the more you know their story, the more horrible they are.”Slavoj Žižek · rejection of hermeneutics of understanding perpetrators
“The paradox of today's global capitalism is that the more it gets global at the level of circulation of commodities and money, the more new walls and apartheids are emerging.”Slavoj Žižek · globalization produces new exclusions and class apartheid
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thank you very much. It’s a great honor for me to be here. So let me directly address the problem which is: What is going on with the left, political left today? The aim of the left was always some radical change. And the formula of this change traditionally is: rage, rebellion, and a new power. First, there is a chaotic rage. People are dissatisfied and show it in a more or less violent way, but without any clear aim or organization. When this fury, rage, gets organized, we get a rebellion, with a minimal organization and more or less clear awareness of who the enemy is and what has to be changed. Finally, if rebellion succeeds, the new power confronts the immense task of organizing a new society. And here, of course, problems emerge. The problem is that we almost never get this progression: rage, rebellion, new power. Chaotic rage gets diluted or turns into a racist populism. Rebellion succeeds, but as it were, loses steam and gets compromised in multiple ways. This is why rage is not only at the beginning but also at the end, the outcome of failed projects of emancipation. The first that I know of, big example of this rage was, I don’t know if you remember it, in years back, in suburbs of Paris in France, there were violent protests of mostly immigrant youth. They were burning cars, burning buildings and so on, mass protests. I think only in the suburbs of Paris over cars were burned. But there was a big mystery: there was no program, not even any awareness of some general goal. What do they want? First, the authorities thought it was Islamist fundamentalism. Then they discovered: not true. The first thing the young protesters burned were their own Islamist cultural institutions and so on and so on. So there was something very mysterious about it. It was as if, since we officially live in a post-ideological era—like, ideologies are no longer active, we live in a rational pragmatic world—that we now also get a post-ideological revolt. A revolt without any program, religious, utopian or whatever, just plain protest. And I think that this tells us a great deal about our ideological and political predicament. Our situation is very paradoxical. On the one hand, our societies declare themselves, in so far as they are modern, post-traditional societies, societies of choice. The most dangerous form of ideology today is the one which tries to sell you new forms of de facto domination, oppression, as new forms of freedom. For example, again in Europe and United States, the number of so-called precarious workers is exploding. It’s very difficult to get a permanent job today. You know, you get a contract for half a year, one year, two years and so on. Now, the ruling ideology tries to sell you this as a new freedom. They tell you, isn't this wonderful? You are no longer typecasted, fixed into one role. You can reinvent yourself every year, every second year. It’s constant creativity and so on and so on. But you see the trick. What is effectively for you a life with quite a lot of anxiety, it’s sold to you as new freedom. And if you don't accept this new false freedom, you are accused of being traditional, living in the old paradigm and so on and so on. So no wonder, again, the result is an explosion of blind rage, fury. But let me now jump to the other extreme: the construction of a new power. It happened, as you all remember I am sure, in Greece a little bit over a year ago when Syriza won elections. But never forget what happened half a year later, last summer. A day after winning the referendum against the European pressure, and the voters agreed with a "No"—majority was for saying "No" to austerity politics—literally the next day, the Syriza government fully surrendered to the pressure of the European Union. And this breathtaking reversal was really some kind of mysterious coincidence of the opposites. There was no mediation between the two extremes, no slow movement towards a compromise, but today it was "We proudly say no, no to austerity and so on," a day after, total surrender. So what went wrong? We know the story. Syriza was a movement which was based in a very strong network of social movements—feminist, ecological, workers' rights—it wasn't just a political party. It was a political party which grew out of over ten years, sometimes even twelve years, sorry, twenty years development of civil society organizing itself and so on and so on. And the usual accusation of Syriza is that the moment it became the party of government, it forgot, cut off these ties to authentic popular movements, that it simply became just another alienated party. So the idea is that Syriza should have remained in close contact with its base and so on and so on. I don't agree with this diagnosis, because I think that what Syriza obviously did not, was not, sorry, able to do was precisely to find a new form of government itself. I think the problem is not more links, connections with the base. The problem is: how should a new type of government function? They invented nothing there. What they did was just take over the state apparatus the way it was. Here, I think, left, leftists are often escaping the true problem. What do I mean by this? It’s very fashionable still among whatever remains of the radical left to criticize representative democracy as such. The idea is it just represents the people, but it’s an alienated bureaucratic structure and so on, and then we get this anarchist dream of transparent self-organization and engagement of the people themselves. We don't need representation, people should engage in local community in running their own affairs so that the social process becomes transparent. I oppose to this vision. And my program here, political, can also be resumed in a motto: we need more alienation. What do I mean by this? Imagine these anarchist communities, a small town, people organize themselves, they run their own things and so on and so on. But a critical thought should always, like, change the view and focus on: how many things have to function invisibly in the background so that you can have such small transparent community? Okay, we ourselves organize how we distribute water and electricity. Where do water and electricity come from? Somebody attacks us, who will protect us? And so on and so on. These small self-organized communities which function in a non-representative way, there always have to be in the background a strong social network, usually a state, which does work, which does the work. Whenever we are free or we feel free socially, we should always focus on the question of how many things have to function, like, invisibly in the background so that we can enjoy our freedom. And I think that this was the big problem of those countries which attempted to build socialism. Their problem was precisely bureaucracy. I think that the problem of state socialism was precisely that they lacked a true bureaucracy, a kind of efficient anonymous state bureaucracy. The left was always very good in organizing great enthusiastic personal movements, like recently: oh, one million people in Egypt on Tahrir Square, half a million people, Syntagma Square in Athens in Greece and so on. You know these pathetic moments when people are agitated, millions are on the street and so on. But I am more and more totally indifferent towards such ecstatic moments. What interests me is: what happens the day after? That is to say, I'm totally indifferent towards one million people on Tahrir Square. What interests me: how will ordinary people feel the change when things will return back to normal? Will there be any change there? And at this level again, it doesn't look too well for the left. Okay, now we reach a serious problem. If all I'm saying here is true, if the picture is so dark, why not as they say in English, why not call it a day and resign ourselves to modest reformism? Why shouldn't we simply say, okay, the leftist game is over, radical change doesn't work? I have a problem here which I think cannot be contained within the frame of global capitalism and its liberal democracy. So the only true question today is, I think: do we endorse the predominant acceptance of capitalism as a fact of nature, human nature, or does today's global capitalism contain antagonisms which are so strong that it will not be able to reproduce itself indefinitely? I think they all concern what in Marxist tradition is called "commons." The common foundation of our being which should not be privatized, subordinated to private interests. First, there are the commons of culture in the broadest sense—so-called immaterial capital, cognitive capital, means of communication, education, not to mention financial sphere and so on and so on. The only way capitalism is able to reproduce itself in these conditions is, I think, through a regression from profit to rent. That’s my old thesis. For example, how did Bill Gates become the richest person in the world? I claim you cannot explain his wealth through standard Marxist notion of exploitation. No, the workers he employs, they are usually not even specially exploited, if anything they are usually on average better paid than others. I think it's not profit, it’s rent. The very space of internet, digital space, which is our commons, through which we communicate daily, through which we interact, and we are paying him a rent for this. Here, I think, capitalism is encountering a limit. Many authors, like lately Paul Mason in his *The End of Capitalism*, I think convincingly demonstrated how digital revolution poses a threat to capitalism, because it changes radically our familiar notions of work, production, value and so on and so on. So a kind of a socialization is already going on of production: parallel currencies, digital cooperatives, self-managed online spaces, even Wikipedia and so on and so on. A whole sphere is emerging, a sphere of commons where we share information or even more, but in a way which is not—at least not fully—subordinated to the logic of the market. Capitalism less and less will be able to contain the so-called intellectual property. Intellectual property tends to function in a totally different way. With ordinary material property, if I use an object, others cannot use it so much. Through use, the object loses its value. Information functions in a totally different way: the more it is used, the wealthier it gets. Through use, its value, its value grows. Then we have, so this is one commons which I think poses a threat to today's global capitalism: intellectual commons, intellectual property. The other problem, of course, ecology: the commons of external nature which is threatened by pollution, exploitation from oil to forests and so on and so on. It's clear that there also some measures will have to be taken to save us from extinction which cannot follow the logic of a free market. Then, the third one: the commons of internal nature, biogenetic inheritance of humanity. Things are happening here—I will immediately briefly talk about them—which are incredible. The possibilities for machines to follow the processes of our brain, to transform us even, to control even our emotions and so on and so on. You know, communists were once dreaming about constructing a new man. But today, constructing a new man is becoming a reality more and more—not a communist reality, but a biogenetic technological reality. And again the question is, who will control this? Private companies shouldn't be left to control this, I think. But I also don't trust the state to control it. So how to do it? Then, last but not least, the commons of humanity itself, of our shared social and political space. The paradox of today's global capitalism is that the more it gets global at the level of circulation of commodities and money, the more new walls and apartheids are emerging, separating those who are in from those who are out. I think that a new world-class society is emerging where the distinction is, some are in, some are out. And this has an explosive potential. The problems we have now, at least in Europe with refugees, are just one of the manifestations of this tension where those who are out want to penetrate in. These problems are the problems of commons. In this basic sense, I am still a communist. What does this mean? Now, not to scare you, no, I am not an agent from the North, no. I will try to ground what I'm saying by a reference to someone who definitely is not a communist: the German philosopher, my friend, Peter Sloterdijk. A strong anti-communist liberal-conservative, if there ever was one. Sloterdijk provides an outline of what is to be done for us, an outline, a plan, which is best encapsulated by the title of the first two essays of his book. The title of the first chapter is "The Anthropocene," and the second chapter, "From the Domestication of Man to the Civilizing of Cultures." Now, you know, I hope, what Anthropocene means. It designates a new epoch in the life of our planet in which we humans cannot any longer rely on the earth as a reservoir ready to absorb the consequences of our productive activity. These side effects cannot any longer be reduced to the background of our collective activity. We have to accept that we live on what Sloterdijk calls, following some other authors, a "spaceship Earth." We are responsible, accountable for the conditions of our Earth. We have to accept that we are also just another animal species on a small planet. And we have to relate to our environment in a totally new way once we realize this. It’s a limited field and we cannot afford to ignore all these side effects. And this can be, and Sloterdijk admits it, the strongest argument against capitalism. Because the very model of ignoring this collateral damage is capitalism. What matters in capitalist reproduction is the self-enhancing circulation focused on profit. And the collateral damage done to our environment is not included into the costs of production, so it is in principle ignored. Even the attempts to take this collateral damage into account through taxation always misfire. There are incidentally some very radical projects, but I think they are too naive, to proclaim that even all—not only natural resources like gold, iron, coal—but that all nature around us should be treated as capital with a certain price. Like for example, we are breathing air and we should put a price tag on it. I think this is an absurd solution. So in order to establish a new mode of relating to our environment, a radical change is necessary. Sloterdijk calls this change the domestication of the wild animal culture. His idea is the following one: till now, each culture disciplined or educated its own members, people who compose it, and guaranteed some kind of peace among them. This peace was guaranteed by state power and so on. But in our history till now, the relationship between different cultures or different states was permanently under the shadow of potential war. As Hegel conceptualized it, the entire ethic of a state culminates in the highest act of heroism, the readiness to sacrifice one's own 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. But the true ethical moment is war, when each of us is mobilized for the higher cause. Usually in war you should forget about your private interests, your community itself is at risk. And that’s crucial for Sloterdijk: 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, of imposing universal solidarity and cooperation among all human communities. And of course, as long as you still have this ethics of heroism, of risking your life for your country as the highest ethical act, this is of course a very difficult thing to do. So now let me just recapitulate: what is Sloterdijk advocating? The measures he proposes as necessary for the survival of humanity—the overcoming of capitalist expansionism, wide international cooperation and solidarity, cooperation which should also be able to transform itself into an executive power ready to violate state sovereignty—are they not all measures destined to protect our natural and cultural commons? I think this minimum of communism one finds even in Sloterdijk. This is the shift we need today. Where, what new world are we approaching today? I will begin with the most obvious fact: the prospect of radical digitalization of our life, combined with scanning our brain or tracking our bodily processes with implants. This prospect opens up the realistic possibility of an external machine which will know ourselves—biologically, even psychically, our mind—much better than we know ourselves. These machines which control your life, it can be easily imagined, it’s up to a point already done: they register what we eat, buy, read, watch, listen to, our moods, fears, satisfactions. And the machine which controls all this gets a much more accurate picture of ourselves—which, as we know from cognitive sciences, even doesn't exist as a consistent entity. Say, some of cognitivists, my friends in New York, made a wonderful brutally simple experiment. They scanned, observed—with their agreement of course—some couples who lived together and were deciding to get married or not. The couple thought they are passionately in love. But the machine who followed their life registered everything: their conflicts, dissatisfaction, inner tensions. You know, part of your brain is happy, at another level there is an obliterated trauma. They didn't say anything to the couple, just the machine blindly produced an advice. And then two, three years later, they checked it up. The machine was always right. If the couple after a year or two divorced, the machine knew it already. It’s quite a fascinating. And why not expand, extend this prospect even to political decisions? The machine will take note of all my past frustrations, it will register the inconsistency between my fleeting passions and my other opinions. So they also made this experiment. They observed a couple of voters and again registered all their activities, intellectual life, and then the voters only had to report how they voted. And the machine was right to predict where they voted stupidly against their own interests and so on. So I know at least of one example where such machine would have been of great use: two weeks ago in England with Brexit, you know. It’s clear that a machine would have known better than the British voters. So again, the idea is: it sounds crazy, but already today, with very limited amount of this machine, you can for the average person, you can seriously say, if you are honest: why shouldn't I let a machine to vote? The machine doesn't know what it’s doing, it’s just a mechanical algorithm. But it can make decisions which are much more adequate than those made by human individuals. Much more adequate not only with regard to external reality, but also and above all with regard to myself, to what I really not only need—the machines are not Stalinist, they are not telling you you may want one thing but here—the machine just registers all the inconsistencies of your subjectivity and makes a relatively rational choice. I refer here to a new book, *Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow*. And here is a quote from that book: Liberalism sanctifies the narrating self and allows it to vote in the polling stations, in the supermarket and in the marriage market. That’s the basic belief of liberalism. No, you can be manipulated, but it’s still you, your free self which is manipulated. So that through proper self-discipline, education, if you learn to be able to look deeply into your true self, you will be able to make the right choice. And again the idea is that we vote on the polling station, when we buy things we also vote in a way for this product against the other and so on, in marriage we vote for one woman woman against the other. Now, here I follow Harari: For centuries this made good sense, because though the narrating self believed in all kinds of fictions and fantasies, no alternative system knew me better. Yet once we have a system that really does know me better, it will be foolhardy to leave authority in the hands of my narrating self. Liberal habits such as democratic elections will become obsolete, because Google will be able to represent even my own political opinions better than myself. End of quote. It is not what the computer which registers my activity—it’s not that the computer is omnipotent, infallible. No, cognitive sciences don't claim this. They say of course computer can also make mistakes, it’s imperfect. But it’s simply that on average the decisions of a machine which follows all my activity, its decisions work substantially better than the decisions of my mind. Up to the exploding so-called algorithmic trading on stock markets. Did you find it? I found wonderful news under the title "The Rage on Wall Street," because now I admire them: two young computer programmers posted freely, you can download it on the web, an algorithm, program, which tells you which stocks to buy, how to invest your money. And it was experimentally demonstrated that the decisions of this algorithm, which you can download for free, are much better for you financially than an average expensive advisor, stock advisor and so on. So one thing is clear: the liberal true self, the free agent which enacts what I really want, simply doesn't exist. And fully endorsing this inexistence means abandoning the basic individualist premise of liberal democracy. So now problems emerge. This is a vision which may be nightmarish, which may be attractive, and I think basically it is true, we are already living it. So should we simply surrender to the machines? I think that there are at least a couple of complications here. First, another quote from Harari. In the past, that’s the first problem, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the twenty-first century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. In ancient times, having power meant having access to data. Today, having power means knowing what to ignore. So I think this is a very deep insight: that the true act of intelligence is not to know all the complexity and so on, but to know the right way to simplify. Okay, there is a whole mess of data, what's the key feature? What’s to pick out? Simplification is the resource, and incidentally I am not bluffing here. I have very weird friends, one of them works like crazy with apes in some mysterious animal behavior institute. But he told me again, confirmed this, that it’s not that humans are more complex than apes. No, mechanically remembering things and so on, they can be better. The priority of human mind is simplification, not complexity. So this is the first problem: can we make the machines to not only to simplify but to elaborate the correct algorithm of simplification? Or is it still our decision to give them this general direction? The second point is: it’s easy to say our mind is inconsistent, different stories and so on. But are there machines also not inconsistent? I think it can be proven, many good scientist of computers demonstrated how computers can also be inconsistent and usually what happens when machine gets into an inconsistency, logical, it can be much more destructive than when a human being. Then we have the next problem: so what will happen with this advance of machines which will know us better than we know ourselves? There are two options. First one is: simply blind machines will take over, and we will just be elements, living beings like puppets of the machines, regulated by them. The second tendency is so-called singularity. You know, people like Ray Kurzweil and so on, the idea is that through the interaction of man and machine, a new collective form of post-human awareness will emerge, which will no longer be the individual human awareness. So I cannot decide between "will it be a new post-human awareness, a gigantic self-aware mind, or just blind machines?" Where I am really a pessimist is in this: I think that the, what will probably happen is both at the same time. That is to say, there will be a new machine which will control us, but there will be among humans a narrow caste which will maintain at least some kind of control over the machines themselves. So that, in other words, biotechnology and computer algorithms will join their powers in producing bodies, brains, minds, with the gap exploding between those who know how to engineer bodies and brains and those who do not. Those who ride the train of progress will acquire divine abilities of creation, destruction, while those left behind will face extinction. So I think it is a serious prospect and not a matter of centuries, but even decades, that we will get a new ruling class, a new class division much stronger than the old class division of which Marx is speaking. The ruling class will be literally a new species, with even biologically other characteristics and so on and so on. Humanity will be split into different classes biologically also. I don't want to be to give you here a clear answer. I’m not a pessimist, I’m not an optimist, I’m a Maoist. What do I mean by this? You know I’m aware of all the horrors that went on in Maoist China, Hunger, Leap Forward. But I always irresistibly liked that President Mao’s famous saying: "There is great disorder under heaven, so the situation is excellent," you know. Precisely when the situation is as open as it is today, new options, we don't know what it will be—new freedom, new possibilities for man, new subordination, new domination, new suffering—we should not be afraid of these open situations. They always open up a new chance. But I will, to conclude, just emphasize what we should definitely not do. I think one thing we should not do is to translate this, what Sloterdijk spoke about, the new unity that is needed, cooperation of humanity, into some type of cheap humanism. You know, like, oh, we should understand foreigners, all humanity one big brotherhood and so on and so on. There, if there is a stupidity, the greatest, one of the greatest stupidities that I ever encountered. Okay, I will give you a provocative example of your own country. You were for a long time under terrifying occupation by Japan. For many of you it was very dramatic, traumatic. I know all the stories about, you know, thousands of women that they sequestered, kidnapped and used them as prostitutes and so on. So are you ready to say: we shouldn't blame those Japanese who kidnapped our women too fast, maybe we were not ready to listen to their side of the story and so on? No. I become, I remain totally naive here. There are people with whom it holds that the more you know their story, the more horrible they are. I think that I’m totally opposed to the underlying idea of the inner truth. You are doing something horrible, but maybe it just appears to be horrible, if I learn your inner story I will be able to understand it. But I don't think that this is the way our actions are structured. I think it’s the opposite. And we, we invent our stories to escape from the horror of what we are doing. And I always, that’s why I always—it’s a very depressing job—I always try to follow the stories, ideological stories, which those who were doing horrible things were telling to themselves to justify what they were doing. And they can be beautiful myths, beautiful stories, but they are a lie. Again, that's why I'm opposed to this idea: the truth is inside you. No, the truth is outside. Another point that I want to make is that, of course this general process that we are witnessing today of brutal universalization through science, machines controlling us and so on and so on, the standard reaction to it is escape into some cultural identity. To claim: capitalism is global, anonymous, so the way to resist it is local cultures. We should not allow international capital to steal this from us. I claim the exact opposite. Capitalism always perfectly coexisted with local cultures. Global capitalism is, and especially colonialism is, immanently multiculturalist. That’s how today's racism works, I claim. It’s not we should open ourselves to others, yes that’s good, I have nothing against it, but beware especially of the false celebration of the other. I have some Indian friends among Indians—now they are politically correct called Native Americans—who are absolutely disgusted by this. You know, the usual white liberal image is: we white people just exploit nature, ruin forests, rivers and so on, while even when they hunt for animals, Native Americans, Indians do it other ways. For them it’s a sacred process, before they mine a mountain they ask a mountain for permission, they apologize to the mountain at the end and so on. So I have an Indian-American friend who wrote, professor at university in Missoula, Montana, a wonderful short text demonstrating that Native Americans killed more buffalos and ruined more nature than all white men together. And he means this as a defense, in the sense that, please don't follow the worst kind of racism which is the false respect for the other. Allow us at least to be as evil as you, if not worse. It’s incredible to what extent this is the latest form of racism of white people. And I think we find the same with refugees now flooding into Europe. Whenever they do something which clashes with our culture—I don't know, different way of treating women and so on—we always hear the story of: no, it's just, it's just we don't understand them, this is part of their culture, but we should be open to them, we are to be blamed for if they do some horrible things it’s because of our colonialism and so on and so on. We are simply not taking them seriously as moral agents. So again, if we want a new global awareness, we should escape like hell from this false humanitarian universalism: understand the other, we are all one big humanity and so on and so on. I'm almost tempted to say that in order to get a true authentic cooperation, we need more discretion. For me, true anti-racism is not: I try to understand you all. Second thing: I think we should become aware of the conflicts of, or limits of, democracy. In what sense? It is again Harari who in his book has a nice page on it. A quote: People feel bound by democratic elections only when they share a basic bond with most other voters. If the experience of other voters is alien to me, and if I believe they don't understand my feelings and don't care about my vital interests, then even if I am outvoted, I have absolutely no reason to accept the verdict. So if we want really to engage in some worldwide decisions, unfortunately democratic vote it’s not the way to do it. There should be some much more complex negotiations, whatever, but democracy is, as a rule, I claim, limited to a certain community which is already bound by shared values and so on and so on. The last thing what I find problematic in this, how do you call it, in this return to national sovereignty, resisting global capitalism, is that usually—and this is my concluding comment about Brexit—the reason I was opposed to Brexit is that if you look closely at it, you will see that what those who advocated Brexit really wanted is more opening of United Kingdom to global market. The logic of Brexit were not: global market is overrunning us to protect our identity, we need sovereign state which will build a stronger health care or whatever welfare state and so on. It was the opposite. It’s very instructive to look at the conflicts, the main conflicts between United Kingdom and European Union in the last twenty, thirty years. In all these conflicts I was mostly on the side of European Union. For example, fifteen years ago, European Union wanted to impose on all Europe a certain minimum workers' standards: obligatory health care, obligatory minimum of holiday per year, maximum of work hours per week. United Kingdom government protested, claiming it will limit their competitiveness. Or, European Union wanted to prohibit buying oil, petrol, which was produced by fracking—you know, that brutal intervention into the earth. And again, United Kingdom protested it. So the paradox is that it's not that they really wanted sovereignty. Their capitalist class was mostly, in spite of different appearances, for Brexit because they wanted to open themselves even more radically, I claim, to the, to the world market. And last but not least, the saddest moment: it was absolutely clear that the main reason probably for Brexit was, not publicly admitted but de facto, a racist one: the fear of refugees. The idea was once we get Brexit, we no longer can be forced to accept refugees, it’s the problem of Europe. So again, here I’m even tempted to doubt at least the democracy that we have. It’s so crazy that many leftists who want to be open towards refugees—oh, a shame, Europe is building walls, not accepting refugees—at the same time they complain against democracy. If you are talking, if democracy means simply the will of the majority, then are you aware that if in each European country referendums were to be held "should we accept refugees or not," in Germany this was the most intelligent, intelligent, not very intelligent, but interesting argument of right-wingers against Angela Merkel. The argument was, she invited over million foreigners to come to Germany. Who legitimated her? Why didn't she consult the people? So I think Angela Merkel was right. That sometimes a political leader has to risk and make a decision against the will of the majority, hoping that in the long term, with the success of this risky decision, it will be retroactively accepted. A true leader does not simply follow the opinion of the people. So again, I didn't give you a simple answer. All I did, I am well aware, is that I proposed, made you visible how following all these problems—refugees, ecology, up and down, digitalization of our lives—a new beginning is needed. And I am afraid what will happen if there will not be a political will to impose, we really need what that stupid word says which is totally misused: a New World Order. Because without a New World Order we are approaching a very dangerous disorder. We will have to act against history. You know, old Marxists have this belief history is moving towards communism, and we communists know where the history is moving and can act accordingly. No, we know where the history is moving: in the long term towards catastrophe. So we have to precisely act, how do you call it, against the grain, against the spontaneous tendency. And again, it’s a very perplexed situation. So again, I don't have a solution. I just want to confuse you so that maybe you will begin to think outside these standard coordinates. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much. It’s a great honor for me to be here. So let me directly address the problem which is: What is going on with the left, political left today? The aim of the left was always some radical change. And the formula of this change traditionally is: rage, rebellion, and a new power. First, there is a chaotic rage. People are dissatisfied and show it in a more or less violent way, but without any clear aim or organization. When this fury, rage, gets organized, we get a rebellion, with a minimal organization and more or less clear awareness of who the enemy is and what has to be changed. Finally, if rebellion succeeds, the new power confronts the immense task of organizing a new society. And here, of course, problems emerge. The problem is that we almost never get this progression: rage, rebellion, new power. Chaotic rage gets diluted or turns into a racist populism. Rebellion succeeds, but as it were, loses steam and gets compromised in multiple ways. This is why rage is not only at the beginning but also at the end, the outcome of failed projects of emancipation. The first that I know of, big example of this rage was, I don’t know if you remember it, in years back, in suburbs of Paris in France, there were violent protests of mostly immigrant youth. They were burning cars, burning buildings and so on, mass protests. I think only in the suburbs of Paris over cars were burned. But there was a big mystery: there was no program, not even any awareness of some general goal. What do they want? First, the authorities thought it was Islamist fundamentalism. Then they discovered: not true. The first thing the young protesters burned were their own Islamist cultural institutions and so on and so on. So there was something very mysterious about it. It was as if, since we officially live in a post-ideological era—like, ideologies are no longer active, we live in a rational pragmatic world—that we now also get a post-ideological revolt. A revolt without any program, religious, utopian or whatever, just plain protest. And I think that this tells us a great deal about our ideological and political predicament. Our situation is very paradoxical. On the one hand, our societies declare themselves, in so far as they are modern, post-traditional societies, societies of choice. The most dangerous form of ideology today is the one which tries to sell you new forms of de facto domination, oppression, as new forms of freedom. For example, again in Europe and United States, the number of so-called precarious workers is exploding. It’s very difficult to get a permanent job today. You know, you get a contract for half a year, one year, two years and so on. Now, the ruling ideology tries to sell you this as a new freedom. They tell you, isn't this wonderful? You are no longer typecasted, fixed into one role. You can reinvent yourself every year, every second year. It’s constant creativity and so on and so on. But you see the trick. What is effectively for you a life with quite a lot of anxiety, it’s sold to you as new freedom. And if you don't accept this new false freedom, you are accused of being traditional, living in the old paradigm and so on and so on. So no wonder, again, the result is an explosion of blind rage, fury. But let me now jump to the other extreme: the construction of a new power. It happened, as you all remember I am sure, in Greece a little bit over a year ago when Syriza won elections. But never forget what happened half a year later, last summer. A day after winning the referendum against the European pressure, and the voters agreed with a "No"—majority was for saying "No" to austerity politics—literally the next day, the Syriza government fully surrendered to the pressure of the European Union. And this breathtaking reversal was really some kind of mysterious coincidence of the opposites. There was no mediation between the two extremes, no slow movement towards a compromise, but today it was "We proudly say no, no to austerity and so on," a day after, total surrender. So what went wrong? We know the story. Syriza was a movement which was based in a very strong network of social movements—feminist, ecological, workers' rights—it wasn't just a political party. It was a political party which grew out of over ten years, sometimes even twelve years, sorry, twenty years development of civil society organizing itself and so on and so on. And the usual accusation of Syriza is that the moment it became the party of government, it forgot, cut off these ties to authentic popular movements, that it simply became just another alienated party. So the idea is that Syriza should have remained in close contact with its base and so on and so on. I don't agree with this diagnosis, because I think that what Syriza obviously did not, was not, sorry, able to do was precisely to find a new form of government itself. I think the problem is not more links, connections with the base. The problem is: how should a new type of government function? They invented nothing there. What they did was just take over the state apparatus the way it was. Here, I think, left, leftists are often escaping the true problem. What do I mean by this? It’s very fashionable still among whatever remains of the radical left to criticize representative democracy as such. The idea is it just represents the people, but it’s an alienated bureaucratic structure and so on, and then we get this anarchist dream of transparent self-organization and engagement of the people themselves. We don't need representation, people should engage in local community in running their own affairs so that the social process becomes transparent. I oppose to this vision. And my program here, political, can also be resumed in a motto: we need more alienation. What do I mean by this? Imagine these anarchist communities, a small town, people organize themselves, they run their own things and so on and so on. But a critical thought should always, like, change the view and focus on: how many things have to function invisibly in the background so that you can have such small transparent community? Okay, we ourselves organize how we distribute water and electricity. Where do water and electricity come from? Somebody attacks us, who will protect us? And so on and so on. These small self-organized communities which function in a non-representative way, there always have to be in the background a strong social network, usually a state, which does work, which does the work. Whenever we are free or we feel free socially, we should always focus on the question of how many things have to function, like, invisibly in the background so that we can enjoy our freedom. And I think that this was the big problem of those countries which attempted to build socialism. Their problem was precisely bureaucracy. I think that the problem of state socialism was precisely that they lacked a true bureaucracy, a kind of efficient anonymous state bureaucracy. The left was always very good in organizing great enthusiastic personal movements, like recently: oh, one million people in Egypt on Tahrir Square, half a million people, Syntagma Square in Athens in Greece and so on. You know these pathetic moments when people are agitated, millions are on the street and so on. But I am more and more totally indifferent towards such ecstatic moments. What interests me is: what happens the day after? That is to say, I'm totally indifferent towards one million people on Tahrir Square. What interests me: how will ordinary people feel the change when things will return back to normal? Will there be any change there? And at this level again, it doesn't look too well for the left. Okay, now we reach a serious problem. If all I'm saying here is true, if the picture is so dark, why not as they say in English, why not call it a day and resign ourselves to modest reformism? Why shouldn't we simply say, okay, the leftist game is over, radical change doesn't work? I have a problem here which I think cannot be contained within the frame of global capitalism and its liberal democracy. So the only true question today is, I think: do we endorse the predominant acceptance of capitalism as a fact of nature, human nature, or does today's global capitalism contain antagonisms which are so strong that it will not be able to reproduce itself indefinitely? I think they all concern what in Marxist tradition is called "commons." The common foundation of our being which should not be privatized, subordinated to private interests. First, there are the commons of culture in the broadest sense—so-called immaterial capital, cognitive capital, means of communication, education, not to mention financial sphere and so on and so on. The only way capitalism is able to reproduce itself in these conditions is, I think, through a regression from profit to rent. That’s my old thesis. For example, how did Bill Gates become the richest person in the world? I claim you cannot explain his wealth through standard Marxist notion of exploitation. No, the workers he employs, they are usually not even specially exploited, if anything they are usually on average better paid than others. I think it's not profit, it’s rent. The very space of internet, digital space, which is our commons, through which we communicate daily, through which we interact, and we are paying him a rent for this. Here, I think, capitalism is encountering a limit. Many authors, like lately Paul Mason in his *The End of Capitalism*, I think convincingly demonstrated how digital revolution poses a threat to capitalism, because it changes radically our familiar notions of work, production, value and so on and so on. So a kind of a socialization is already going on of production: parallel currencies, digital cooperatives, self-managed online spaces, even Wikipedia and so on and so on. A whole sphere is emerging, a sphere of commons where we share information or even more, but in a way which is not—at least not fully—subordinated to the logic of the market. Capitalism less and less will be able to contain the so-called intellectual property. Intellectual property tends to function in a totally different way. With ordinary material property, if I use an object, others cannot use it so much. Through use, the object loses its value. Information functions in a totally different way: the more it is used, the wealthier it gets. Through use, its value, its value grows. Then we have, so this is one commons which I think poses a threat to today's global capitalism: intellectual commons, intellectual property. The other problem, of course, ecology: the commons of external nature which is threatened by pollution, exploitation from oil to forests and so on and so on. It's clear that there also some measures will have to be taken to save us from extinction which cannot follow the logic of a free market. Then, the third one: the commons of internal nature, biogenetic inheritance of humanity. Things are happening here—I will immediately briefly talk about them—which are incredible. The possibilities for machines to follow the processes of our brain, to transform us even, to control even our emotions and so on and so on. You know, communists were once dreaming about constructing a new man. But today, constructing a new man is becoming a reality more and more—not a communist reality, but a biogenetic technological reality. And again the question is, who will control this? Private companies shouldn't be left to control this, I think. But I also don't trust the state to control it. So how to do it? Then, last but not least, the commons of humanity itself, of our shared social and political space. The paradox of today's global capitalism is that the more it gets global at the level of circulation of commodities and money, the more new walls and apartheids are emerging, separating those who are in from those who are out. I think that a new world-class society is emerging where the distinction is, some are in, some are out. And this has an explosive potential. The problems we have now, at least in Europe with refugees, are just one of the manifestations of this tension where those who are out want to penetrate in. These problems are the problems of commons. In this basic sense, I am still a communist. What does this mean? Now, not to scare you, no, I am not an agent from the North, no. I will try to ground what I'm saying by a reference to someone who definitely is not a communist: the German philosopher, my friend, Peter Sloterdijk. A strong anti-communist liberal-conservative, if there ever was one. Sloterdijk provides an outline of what is to be done for us, an outline, a plan, which is best encapsulated by the title of the first two essays of his book. The title of the first chapter is "The Anthropocene," and the second chapter, "From the Domestication of Man to the Civilizing of Cultures." Now, you know, I hope, what Anthropocene means. It designates a new epoch in the life of our planet in which we humans cannot any longer rely on the earth as a reservoir ready to absorb the consequences of our productive activity. These side effects cannot any longer be reduced to the background of our collective activity. We have to accept that we live on what Sloterdijk calls, following some other authors, a "spaceship Earth." We are responsible, accountable for the conditions of our Earth. We have to accept that we are also just another animal species on a small planet. And we have to relate to our environment in a totally new way once we realize this. It’s a limited field and we cannot afford to ignore all these side effects. And this can be, and Sloterdijk admits it, the strongest argument against capitalism. Because the very model of ignoring this collateral damage is capitalism. What matters in capitalist reproduction is the self-enhancing circulation focused on profit. And the collateral damage done to our environment is not included into the costs of production, so it is in principle ignored. Even the attempts to take this collateral damage into account through taxation always misfire. There are incidentally some very radical projects, but I think they are too naive, to proclaim that even all—not only natural resources like gold, iron, coal—but that all nature around us should be treated as capital with a certain price. Like for example, we are breathing air and we should put a price tag on it. I think this is an absurd solution. So in order to establish a new mode of relating to our environment, a radical change is necessary. Sloterdijk calls this change the domestication of the wild animal culture. His idea is the following one: till now, each culture disciplined or educated its own members, people who compose it, and guaranteed some kind of peace among them. This peace was guaranteed by state power and so on. But in our history till now, the relationship between different cultures or different states was permanently under the shadow of potential war. As Hegel conceptualized it, the entire ethic of a state culminates in the highest act of heroism, the readiness to sacrifice one's own 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. But the true ethical moment is war, when each of us is mobilized for the higher cause. Usually in war you should forget about your private interests, your community itself is at risk. And that’s crucial for Sloterdijk: 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, of imposing universal solidarity and cooperation among all human communities. And of course, as long as you still have this ethics of heroism, of risking your life for your country as the highest ethical act, this is of course a very difficult thing to do. So now let me just recapitulate: what is Sloterdijk advocating? The measures he proposes as necessary for the survival of humanity—the overcoming of capitalist expansionism, wide international cooperation and solidarity, cooperation which should also be able to transform itself into an executive power ready to violate state sovereignty—are they not all measures destined to protect our natural and cultural commons? I think this minimum of communism one finds even in Sloterdijk. This is the shift we need today. Where, what new world are we approaching today? I will begin with the most obvious fact: the prospect of radical digitalization of our life, combined with scanning our brain or tracking our bodily processes with implants. This prospect opens up the realistic possibility of an external machine which will know ourselves—biologically, even psychically, our mind—much better than we know ourselves. These machines which control your life, it can be easily imagined, it’s up to a point already done: they register what we eat, buy, read, watch, listen to, our moods, fears, satisfactions. And the machine which controls all this gets a much more accurate picture of ourselves—which, as we know from cognitive sciences, even doesn't exist as a consistent entity. Say, some of cognitivists, my friends in New York, made a wonderful brutally simple experiment. They scanned, observed—with their agreement of course—some couples who lived together and were deciding to get married or not. The couple thought they are passionately in love. But the machine who followed their life registered everything: their conflicts, dissatisfaction, inner tensions. You know, part of your brain is happy, at another level there is an obliterated trauma. They didn't say anything to the couple, just the machine blindly produced an advice. And then two, three years later, they checked it up. The machine was always right. If the couple after a year or two divorced, the machine knew it already. It’s quite a fascinating. And why not expand, extend this prospect even to political decisions? The machine will take note of all my past frustrations, it will register the inconsistency between my fleeting passions and my other opinions. So they also made this experiment. They observed a couple of voters and again registered all their activities, intellectual life, and then the voters only had to report how they voted. And the machine was right to predict where they voted stupidly against their own interests and so on. So I know at least of one example where such machine would have been of great use: two weeks ago in England with Brexit, you know. It’s clear that a machine would have known better than the British voters. So again, the idea is: it sounds crazy, but already today, with very limited amount of this machine, you can for the average person, you can seriously say, if you are honest: why shouldn't I let a machine to vote? The machine doesn't know what it’s doing, it’s just a mechanical algorithm. But it can make decisions which are much more adequate than those made by human individuals. Much more adequate not only with regard to external reality, but also and above all with regard to myself, to what I really not only need—the machines are not Stalinist, they are not telling you you may want one thing but here—the machine just registers all the inconsistencies of your subjectivity and makes a relatively rational choice. I refer here to a new book, *Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow*. And here is a quote from that book: Liberalism sanctifies the narrating self and allows it to vote in the polling stations, in the supermarket and in the marriage market. That’s the basic belief of liberalism. No, you can be manipulated, but it’s still you, your free self which is manipulated. So that through proper self-discipline, education, if you learn to be able to look deeply into your true self, you will be able to make the right choice. And again the idea is that we vote on the polling station, when we buy things we also vote in a way for this product against the other and so on, in marriage we vote for one woman woman against the other. Now, here I follow Harari: For centuries this made good sense, because though the narrating self believed in all kinds of fictions and fantasies, no alternative system knew me better. Yet once we have a system that really does know me better, it will be foolhardy to leave authority in the hands of my narrating self. Liberal habits such as democratic elections will become obsolete, because Google will be able to represent even my own political opinions better than myself. End of quote. It is not what the computer which registers my activity—it’s not that the computer is omnipotent, infallible. No, cognitive sciences don't claim this. They say of course computer can also make mistakes, it’s imperfect. But it’s simply that on average the decisions of a machine which follows all my activity, its decisions work substantially better than the decisions of my mind. Up to the exploding so-called algorithmic trading on stock markets. Did you find it? I found wonderful news under the title "The Rage on Wall Street," because now I admire them: two young computer programmers posted freely, you can download it on the web, an algorithm, program, which tells you which stocks to buy, how to invest your money. And it was experimentally demonstrated that the decisions of this algorithm, which you can download for free, are much better for you financially than an average expensive advisor, stock advisor and so on. So one thing is clear: the liberal true self, the free agent which enacts what I really want, simply doesn't exist. And fully endorsing this inexistence means abandoning the basic individualist premise of liberal democracy. So now problems emerge. This is a vision which may be nightmarish, which may be attractive, and I think basically it is true, we are already living it. So should we simply surrender to the machines? I think that there are at least a couple of complications here. First, another quote from Harari. In the past, that’s the first problem, censorship worked by blocking the flow of information. In the twenty-first century, censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. In ancient times, having power meant having access to data. Today, having power means knowing what to ignore. So I think this is a very deep insight: that the true act of intelligence is not to know all the complexity and so on, but to know the right way to simplify. Okay, there is a whole mess of data, what's the key feature? What’s to pick out? Simplification is the resource, and incidentally I am not bluffing here. I have very weird friends, one of them works like crazy with apes in some mysterious animal behavior institute. But he told me again, confirmed this, that it’s not that humans are more complex than apes. No, mechanically remembering things and so on, they can be better. The priority of human mind is simplification, not complexity. So this is the first problem: can we make the machines to not only to simplify but to elaborate the correct algorithm of simplification? Or is it still our decision to give them this general direction? The second point is: it’s easy to say our mind is inconsistent, different stories and so on. But are there machines also not inconsistent? I think it can be proven, many good scientist of computers demonstrated how computers can also be inconsistent and usually what happens when machine gets into an inconsistency, logical, it can be much more destructive than when a human being. Then we have the next problem: so what will happen with this advance of machines which will know us better than we know ourselves? There are two options. First one is: simply blind machines will take over, and we will just be elements, living beings like puppets of the machines, regulated by them. The second tendency is so-called singularity. You know, people like Ray Kurzweil and so on, the idea is that through the interaction of man and machine, a new collective form of post-human awareness will emerge, which will no longer be the individual human awareness. So I cannot decide between "will it be a new post-human awareness, a gigantic self-aware mind, or just blind machines?" Where I am really a pessimist is in this: I think that the, what will probably happen is both at the same time. That is to say, there will be a new machine which will control us, but there will be among humans a narrow caste which will maintain at least some kind of control over the machines themselves. So that, in other words, biotechnology and computer algorithms will join their powers in producing bodies, brains, minds, with the gap exploding between those who know how to engineer bodies and brains and those who do not. Those who ride the train of progress will acquire divine abilities of creation, destruction, while those left behind will face extinction. So I think it is a serious prospect and not a matter of centuries, but even decades, that we will get a new ruling class, a new class division much stronger than the old class division of which Marx is speaking. The ruling class will be literally a new species, with even biologically other characteristics and so on and so on. Humanity will be split into different classes biologically also. I don't want to be to give you here a clear answer. I’m not a pessimist, I’m not an optimist, I’m a Maoist. What do I mean by this? You know I’m aware of all the horrors that went on in Maoist China, Hunger, Leap Forward. But I always irresistibly liked that President Mao’s famous saying: "There is great disorder under heaven, so the situation is excellent," you know. Precisely when the situation is as open as it is today, new options, we don't know what it will be—new freedom, new possibilities for man, new subordination, new domination, new suffering—we should not be afraid of these open situations. They always open up a new chance. But I will, to conclude, just emphasize what we should definitely not do. I think one thing we should not do is to translate this, what Sloterdijk spoke about, the new unity that is needed, cooperation of humanity, into some type of cheap humanism. You know, like, oh, we should understand foreigners, all humanity one big brotherhood and so on and so on. There, if there is a stupidity, the greatest, one of the greatest stupidities that I ever encountered. Okay, I will give you a provocative example of your own country. You were for a long time under terrifying occupation by Japan. For many of you it was very dramatic, traumatic. I know all the stories about, you know, thousands of women that they sequestered, kidnapped and used them as prostitutes and so on. So are you ready to say: we shouldn't blame those Japanese who kidnapped our women too fast, maybe we were not ready to listen to their side of the story and so on? No. I become, I remain totally naive here. There are people with whom it holds that the more you know their story, the more horrible they are. I think that I’m totally opposed to the underlying idea of the inner truth. You are doing something horrible, but maybe it just appears to be horrible, if I learn your inner story I will be able to understand it. But I don't think that this is the way our actions are structured. I think it’s the opposite. And we, we invent our stories to escape from the horror of what we are doing. And I always, that’s why I always—it’s a very depressing job—I always try to follow the stories, ideological stories, which those who were doing horrible things were telling to themselves to justify what they were doing. And they can be beautiful myths, beautiful stories, but they are a lie. Again, that's why I'm opposed to this idea: the truth is inside you. No, the truth is outside. Another point that I want to make is that, of course this general process that we are witnessing today of brutal universalization through science, machines controlling us and so on and so on, the standard reaction to it is escape into some cultural identity. To claim: capitalism is global, anonymous, so the way to resist it is local cultures. We should not allow international capital to steal this from us. I claim the exact opposite. Capitalism always perfectly coexisted with local cultures. Global capitalism is, and especially colonialism is, immanently multiculturalist. That’s how today's racism works, I claim. It’s not we should open ourselves to others, yes that’s good, I have nothing against it, but beware especially of the false celebration of the other. I have some Indian friends among Indians—now they are politically correct called Native Americans—who are absolutely disgusted by this. You know, the usual white liberal image is: we white people just exploit nature, ruin forests, rivers and so on, while even when they hunt for animals, Native Americans, Indians do it other ways. For them it’s a sacred process, before they mine a mountain they ask a mountain for permission, they apologize to the mountain at the end and so on. So I have an Indian-American friend who wrote, professor at university in Missoula, Montana, a wonderful short text demonstrating that Native Americans killed more buffalos and ruined more nature than all white men together. And he means this as a defense, in the sense that, please don't follow the worst kind of racism which is the false respect for the other. Allow us at least to be as evil as you, if not worse. It’s incredible to what extent this is the latest form of racism of white people. And I think we find the same with refugees now flooding into Europe. Whenever they do something which clashes with our culture—I don't know, different way of treating women and so on—we always hear the story of: no, it's just, it's just we don't understand them, this is part of their culture, but we should be open to them, we are to be blamed for if they do some horrible things it’s because of our colonialism and so on and so on. We are simply not taking them seriously as moral agents. So again, if we want a new global awareness, we should escape like hell from this false humanitarian universalism: understand the other, we are all one big humanity and so on and so on. I'm almost tempted to say that in order to get a true authentic cooperation, we need more discretion. For me, true anti-racism is not: I try to understand you all. Second thing: I think we should become aware of the conflicts of, or limits of, democracy. In what sense? It is again Harari who in his book has a nice page on it. A quote: People feel bound by democratic elections only when they share a basic bond with most other voters. If the experience of other voters is alien to me, and if I believe they don't understand my feelings and don't care about my vital interests, then even if I am outvoted, I have absolutely no reason to accept the verdict. So if we want really to engage in some worldwide decisions, unfortunately democratic vote it’s not the way to do it. There should be some much more complex negotiations, whatever, but democracy is, as a rule, I claim, limited to a certain community which is already bound by shared values and so on and so on. The last thing what I find problematic in this, how do you call it, in this return to national sovereignty, resisting global capitalism, is that usually—and this is my concluding comment about Brexit—the reason I was opposed to Brexit is that if you look closely at it, you will see that what those who advocated Brexit really wanted is more opening of United Kingdom to global market. The logic of Brexit were not: global market is overrunning us to protect our identity, we need sovereign state which will build a stronger health care or whatever welfare state and so on. It was the opposite. It’s very instructive to look at the conflicts, the main conflicts between United Kingdom and European Union in the last twenty, thirty years. In all these conflicts I was mostly on the side of European Union. For example, fifteen years ago, European Union wanted to impose on all Europe a certain minimum workers' standards: obligatory health care, obligatory minimum of holiday per year, maximum of work hours per week. United Kingdom government protested, claiming it will limit their competitiveness. Or, European Union wanted to prohibit buying oil, petrol, which was produced by fracking—you know, that brutal intervention into the earth. And again, United Kingdom protested it. So the paradox is that it's not that they really wanted sovereignty. Their capitalist class was mostly, in spite of different appearances, for Brexit because they wanted to open themselves even more radically, I claim, to the, to the world market. And last but not least, the saddest moment: it was absolutely clear that the main reason probably for Brexit was, not publicly admitted but de facto, a racist one: the fear of refugees. The idea was once we get Brexit, we no longer can be forced to accept refugees, it’s the problem of Europe. So again, here I’m even tempted to doubt at least the democracy that we have. It’s so crazy that many leftists who want to be open towards refugees—oh, a shame, Europe is building walls, not accepting refugees—at the same time they complain against democracy. If you are talking, if democracy means simply the will of the majority, then are you aware that if in each European country referendums were to be held "should we accept refugees or not," in Germany this was the most intelligent, intelligent, not very intelligent, but interesting argument of right-wingers against Angela Merkel. The argument was, she invited over million foreigners to come to Germany. Who legitimated her? Why didn't she consult the people? So I think Angela Merkel was right. That sometimes a political leader has to risk and make a decision against the will of the majority, hoping that in the long term, with the success of this risky decision, it will be retroactively accepted. A true leader does not simply follow the opinion of the people. So again, I didn't give you a simple answer. All I did, I am well aware, is that I proposed, made you visible how following all these problems—refugees, ecology, up and down, digitalization of our lives—a new beginning is needed. And I am afraid what will happen if there will not be a political will to impose, we really need what that stupid word says which is totally misused: a New World Order. Because without a New World Order we are approaching a very dangerous disorder. We will have to act against history. You know, old Marxists have this belief history is moving towards communism, and we communists know where the history is moving and can act accordingly. No, we know where the history is moving: in the long term towards catastrophe. So we have to precisely act, how do you call it, against the grain, against the spontaneous tendency. And again, it’s a very perplexed situation. So again, I don't have a solution. I just want to confuse you so that maybe you will begin to think outside these standard coordinates. Thank you very much.