To Begin from The Beginning
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2010-06-26 · 1:48:31 · 7,954 words
communism-socialismcapitalismideologyhegel-dialecticspsychoanalysisecology-climatedemocracyliberalism-political-correctnessphilosophy-generalhistorygeopolitics-wareconomicstechnology-ai-cyberspacefascism-populismrevolution-violence
Žižek argues that the left must begin entirely from scratch, abandoning continuity with both twentieth-century state socialism and Western social democracy, rather than defending remnants of the old order or waiting for an authentic workers' movement. He diagnoses the structural antagonisms of contemporary capitalism, the privatization of the commons (intellectual property, ecology, biogenetics, new apartheids), that make a communist re-invention practically urgent. The talk surveys the ideological functioning of post-ideological cynicism (interpassivity, commodity fetishism, canned laughter), the emerging authoritarian-capitalist model (Singapore/China/'Asian values'), and the Bologna reform as an attack on the public use of reason. Žižek concludes that capitalism itself will be forced to 're-socialize' and the only real choice is between a new authoritarian collectivism and a communist one.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 23
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
Žižek's injunction, borrowing Lenin via Beckett, that the left must return to an absolute zero point rather than defend or patch what prior socialist movements achieved.
Badiou's characterization of the post-socialist condition, quoted approvingly by Žižek: both communism and its liberal-capitalist replacement are evil, leaving no ground for nostalgia.
as “the communist hypothesis”
Badiou's formulation, adopted by Žižek, of communism as an eternal idea that has returned across history (Spartacus, Münzer, Luxemburg, Cultural Revolution) but each time failed, raising the question whether it is condemned to remain a spirit of rebellion.
One of Badiou's three modes of emancipatory failure, stressed by Žižek: winning over the enemy by adopting the enemy's own agenda (taking state power, parliamentary or party-state), so you win but lose in the very act of winning.
as “the sacrificial temptation of the void”
Badiou's term for the ultra-leftist resort to all-destructive terror when a movement, rightly fearing that solidifying the revolution into state power equals betrayal, cannot invent a genuinely alternative order.
as “the narcissism of the lost cause”
Žižek's phrase for the charge levelled at those who persist in the communist idea against all hope, which he then inverts by arguing the truly utopian position is believing capitalism can go on indefinitely.
as “an authentic act”
Žižek defines an authentic act as something that retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility, thereby changing the very coordinates of what is possible rather than merely intervening within an existing horizon.
Žižek's label (crediting Lee Kuan Yew and Singapore) for a dynamic capitalism that has definitively decoupled itself from any need for liberal democracy.
Marx's concept from the Grundrisse, invoked by Žižek to argue that knowledge and social cooperation are now the primary source of wealth, making the privatization of general intellect (intellectual property, Microsoft) the new form of exploitation.
as “privatization of the general intellect”
Žižek's extension of Marx: what Marx did not foresee was that the general intellect itself could be enclosed and rented out, as exemplified by Microsoft's monopoly, shifting exploitation from labor-time surplus to rent.
as “private use of reason”
Kant's term repurposed by Žižek to designate expert knowledge production that accepts problems as given by state and capital rather than critically reformulating them.
Following Hardt and Negri, Žižek identifies four domains of shared substance whose enclosure generates the key antagonisms of contemporary capitalism: external nature, intellectual/cultural products, biogenetic inheritance, and the social commons of slum-dwellers.
Žižek uses Althusser's concept to describe how capitalist modernity constituted subjects simultaneously as legal subjects through compulsory education and as patriots through the school system.
The Marxian/Hegelian split between the egotist utilitarian individual and the citoyen of universal interest; Žižek argues post-'68 capitalism dissolved this gap by making economic logic itself the hegemonic ideology.
Žižek ironically cites this 'famous formula' as the signature mechanism by which market logic penetrates domains (education, prisons, army) that were formerly insulated state functions.
Žižek invokes Althusser's concept to argue that despite post-ideological self-presentation, ISAs (especially education and law) remain fully operative; now, however, economy itself functions as the ideological model.
Implicit in Žižek's reading of commodity fetishism: the illusion is not in the mind but in the practice of social reality itself, what we do, not what we think.
as “commodity fetishism (Warenfetischismus)”
For Žižek, Marx's point is not that we mistake social relations for natural properties but that the illusion is enacted in practice, 'they do not know it but they are doing it', and this is precisely how ideology functions post-ideologically.
as “List der Vernunft (cunning of reason)”
Žižek invokes Hegel's concept by contrast with interpassivity: where cunning of reason is being active through others, interpassivity is being passive through others.
Robert Pfaller's concept embraced by Žižek: the structure whereby we outsource not our activity but our passivity to an other (e.g. the TV laugh track laughs for us), such that belief or enjoyment is delegated and functions even without the subject's conscious participation.
as “objective belief”
Žižek's description of the cynical ideological situation in which nobody consciously believes, yet belief functions socially, Santa Claus, democracy, the horseshoe, because the belief is embodied in practice, not in subjective conviction.
Žižek's term for the radical negativity that must precede any new egalitarian order, exemplified by the Jacobins, but also structurally present in Christianity ('I bring not peace but a sword') and democracy (the dissolution of social links in the voting moment).
Žižek's reading of democratic axiom: democracy's achievement is to turn the moment of crisis (empty throne) into the foundation of its order, terror of dissolution re-enacted as elections.
Stories he reaches for 11
A visitor finds a horseshoe above Bohr's door and asks: 'You're a scientist, do you believe in this?' Bohr: 'Of course not. But I was told it works even if you don't believe in it.' Žižek's paradigm case of democracy as objective belief.
“He said 'I don't believe in it, of course, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it.' That's democracy today.”
Žižek argues Gates' wealth has nothing to do with production costs or labor exploitation; Microsoft simply imposed itself as a universal standard, becoming the embodiment of general intellect, and charges rent for access to it.
“Gates' wealth is not the result of his success in producing good software for lower prices than his competitors... Microsoft simply imposed itself as an almost universal standard, a kind of direct embodiment of the general intellect.”
Žižek comes home exhausted, watches a sitcom (Cheers, Friends), does not laugh, yet feels emotionally relieved, because the TV set laughed for him. Illustrates how the other can be passive on your behalf.
“I come home late in the evening tired as a dog, I look at TV, I don't laugh, just 'eh', and at the end I feel released, relieved. Why? TV set has taken over the laughter, it did it for me.”
Žižek recounts that forty years ago Afghanistan was the most secular, religiously tolerant Islamic state; communists took power, the Soviets intervened, the US counter-intervened, and the country became fundamentalist, demonstrating that fundamentalism is a product of global capitalist dynamics, not cultural essence.
“Do you know that Afghanistan was the most enlightened of the Middle East Islamic states? ...As the result of this being caught in the global dynamics, Afghanistan became fundamentalist.”
A parent pretends to believe in Santa for the child; the child pretends to believe not to disappoint the parent. Nobody believes, yet Santa functions as a belief. Classic illustration of objective / interpassive belief.
“You say 'No, I'm not an idiot, of course not, I pretend to for my son.' Then I ask your son, he will say 'Oh, I'm not an idiot, of course it's not, but I pretend to believe not to disappoint my parents'.”
Žižek wanted to write an article defending Madoff, arguing that singling him out as villain (with an anti-Semitic tone) obscures that he simply embodied the logic of the financial system at its purest.
“Sorry, he just embodied at its purest the logic of the system. And it was almost for me anti-Semitic: ah, now we find him, a dirty Jew who cheated us all.”
Žižek cites the film Brazil as the first depiction of the new form of authority: not old-style terror but a farcical authoritarian structure personified by Berlusconi, 'Groucho Marx in power', a regime that doesn't directly terrorize but maintains all authoritarian structures.
“It will be something like Berlusconi is crucial... like Groucho Marx in power. A regime which doesn't directly terrorize you but all the authoritarian structure — it will be that.”
In Tibet you write a prayer on paper, put it in a wheel, spin it, and can think about sex, you pray objectively. Žižek uses this to introduce interpassivity: belief outsourced to an object or mechanism.
“You write your prayer on a paper, put it in, you turn it around, and then you can think about sex, whatever, but objectively you pray.”
Žižek recounts a meeting in China where an official showed him documents of a state-private program to 'progressively regulate the physical and psychic properties of the Chinese people' through biogenetics, illustrating that neither market nor state can decide such questions.
“The long-term goal is to all the Chinese people with, now I quote their program, 'the progressive regulation of the physical and psychic properties of the Chinese people.'”
Žižek cites Gramsci's observation that in moments of transition when the old is dying but the new has not yet formed itself, strange terrifying monsters and apparitions are born, applying it to the current political situation.
“In a moments of transition when the old is dying, but the new didn't yet form itself, strange terrifying monsters, apparitions are born.”
Žižek criticizes Obama's response to the Deepwater Horizon spill as the classic liberal move of finding an individual culprit ('I'll kick BP's ass') instead of addressing the systemic logic that made the disaster inevitable.
“This is the liberal way: you find a culprit. Sorry but with such a great catastrophe, the first thing to say is it's ridiculous even to talk about how somebody will recover the costs.”
Works invoked 7
Capital book
Cited for commodity fetishism ('Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es'), the theory of value, and the example of oil as non-source of value; Žižek defends it against dismissal as 'old naive Marx'.
Grundrisse book
Marx's text is cited for the passage on forms of wealth being 'out of all proportion to the direct labor time spent' and for the concept of general intellect; Žižek notes a grammatical regression to the singular whenever Marx discusses it.
Brazil film
Terry Gilliam's film cited as the first depiction of the new soft authoritarian form, Berlusconi-like, farcical, not directly terrorizing but maintaining all authoritarian structures.
Žižek says he 'really hates' it; argues it is too soft on the DDR because it requires an individual villain with private motives, missing the systemic character of Stasi surveillance.
Badiou's book developing three modes of emancipatory failure; Žižek engages with it extensively as the framework for diagnosing why communism has failed and what it would mean for it to succeed.
Worstward Ho book
Beckett's text is cited for 'Try again, fail again, fail better' as the literary counterpart to Lenin's political injunction to begin from the beginning.
Robert Pfaller's book introducing the concept of interpassivity; Žižek recommends the audience read it.
People invoked 29
Treated as the paradigmatic figure of the new authoritarian capitalism: uniquely combining global capitalism and populism, likened to 'Groucho Marx in power'; used to illustrate the emerging post-democratic political form.
Cited via Sloterdijk as the inventor of 'capitalism with Asian values'; Žižek neither praises nor condemns him personally but treats his model as a world-historical development demanding analysis.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Quoted at the opening on beginning again from the start; Žižek calls this Lenin at his 'Beckettian best' and uses it as the organizing motto for the talk.
Žižek wanted to write an article 'defending' Madoff on the grounds that he was made a scapegoat for embodying the systemic logic of finance at its purest; notes anti-Semitic overtones in how blame was assigned.
Thomas Müntzer positive
Listed as one of the historical incarnations of the communist hypothesis.
Louis Althusser positive
Ideological state apparatuses and interpellation are invoked to analyse the capitalist school system and the post-ideological functioning of ideology.
Francis Fukuyama negative
Žižek says it is easy to mock Fukuyama's end-of-history thesis, but then argues that most of the left is effectively Fukuyamaist, limiting ambition to humanizing capitalism.
Robert Pfaller positive
Žižek credits Pfaller with the concept of interpassivity and his book Die Illusionen der anderen, calling the idea 'wonderful' and urging the audience to read it.
Referenced (one deceased at the time) as the nationalist pole in Polish politics, illustrating the liberal-populist deadlock.
Antonio Negri positive
Cited with Hardt for the concept of the commons.
Alain Badiou positive
Extensively cited throughout: the 'obscure disaster' of post-socialism, 'evil dancing on the ruins of evil', the three modes of emancipatory failure, the communist hypothesis, and the sacrificial temptation of the void. Žižek also reveals that 'Georges Peyrol' is a Badiou pseudonym.
Leon Trotsky positive
Cited for the phrase 'the Asian knout and the European stock market' (originally about the Russian Empire), repurposed by Žižek to describe today's China.
Samuel Beckett positive
Quoted from Worstward Ho ('Try again, fail again, fail better') as the literary echo of Lenin's political injunction to begin from the beginning.
Described as 'definitely not one of us but maybe not a complete idiot'; cited for the observation that monuments will be built to Lee Kuan Yew.
Paradigm example of wealth generated not by exploitation of labor but by privatizing and monopolizing general intellect (Microsoft as universal standard) and charging rent for access.
Søren Kierkegaard positive
Briefly mentioned as a reader Bohr shared, implicitly suggesting a connection between existential paradox and the horseshoe anecdote.
Niels Bohr positive
The horseshoe anecdote, 'it works even if you don't believe in it', is Žižek's paradigm example of objective belief and democracy; Žižek notes Bohr was also a reader of Kierkegaard.
Rosa Luxemburg positive
Listed as one of the recurring figures of the communist hypothesis (alongside Spartacus, Münzer, Chinese Cultural Revolution), each exemplifying the idea's return and failure.
Barack Obama negative
Žižek states Obama 'disappointed me' by responding to the BP oil spill with the liberal move of finding an individual culprit ('I'll kick BP's ass') rather than addressing systemic causes.
Quoted for the line 'Socialism is Aryan, communism is Jewish' to explain why Žižek prefers the term communism over socialism.
Antonio Gramsci positive
Cited for Il Nuovo Ordine (New Order) journal and the 'monsters of transition' remark; Žižek calls for reappropriating the 'New Order' signifier for communism.
Gáspár Miklós Tamás positive
Mentioned as 'our good friend Tamás' who will discuss the rearrangement of European political space the next morning; Žižek aligns with his analysis.
Used in the provocative example that strict Marxist theory would imply Venezuela is exploiting the US, to illustrate the need to revise Marx's theory of value regarding natural resources.
Karl Marx positive
Central reference throughout: commodity fetishism ('Sie wissen das nicht'), general intellect (Grundrisse), theory of value and natural resources. Žižek argues Marx must be critically extended to account for privatization of general intellect and resource rent.
Michael Hardt positive
Cited with Negri for the concept of 'the commons' as the shared substance of social being whose privatization generates contemporary capitalism's key antagonisms.
Sigmund Freud positive
Cited for the male-chauvinist quip about women (difficult to live with, impossible without), which Žižek repurposes for the state; invoked as an example of repurposing a joke for philosophical illustration.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Žižek calls himself a 'total Hegelian'; the Hegelian lesson that you must drop what was betrayed alongside the betrayals is central to the argument. The List der Vernunft and negativity are invoked.
Immanuel Kant positive
The public/private use of reason distinction (from 'What is Enlightenment?') is the key framework for analysing the Bologna reform as an attack on thinking.
Cited as a 'pure liberal' representing the pro-capitalism party pole in Poland, illustrating the liberal-nationalist deadlock.
What it argues
beginning from zero: the necessity of a clean break with twentieth-century communismthe privatization of the commons as the central antagonism of contemporary capitalismpost-ideological cynicism and the interpassive functioning of beliefcapitalism without democracy: the 'Asian values' authoritarian modelthe Bologna reform and the enclosure of the general intellectthree modes of emancipatory failure (Badiou)the real impossibility vs. the ideological impossibility of radical change
Dialectical moves 13
“When you drop the betrayals, the lesson of history is you should also drop what they betrayed.”
The authentic communist core that all twentieth-century movements allegedly betrayed is itself a fiction; the series of betrayals is all there is.
“It's difficult with the state, it can be more difficult without it.”
The ultra-left fantasy of bypassing the state altogether is no solution; the state is a necessary evil whose absence is worse.
“The impossible is not an a priori limitation but is precisely the domain of strong acts, of interventions which change the coordinates of a situation.”
What ideology labels 'impossible' (radical social change) is actually the site of genuine political action; the truly impossible is the perpetuation of current capitalism.
“An authentic act is something which retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility.”
A genuine political act does not operate within the existing horizon of the possible but transforms that very horizon after the fact.
“The left lost in its very victory: the direct enemy was defeated but replaced by an even more direct capitalist domination.”
The post-'68 cultural revolution against factory/school/family dismantled the old hierarchies only to open space for the total marketization of those same domains.
“Fetishism is not the obvious illusion concealing reality — the illusion is in social reality itself, in how we act.”
Ideology does not operate as false consciousness in the mind but as a practical illusion enacted in the material reality of social life.
“It's even better if you don't believe — nobody has to believe, belief still socially functions.”
Cynical distance from ideology is not a position outside it but is the very form in which contemporary ideology operates.
“We are all cynical, but we somehow believe it works without you believing in it — that's democracy today.”
Democracy functions as an objective belief: its legitimacy does not require subjective conviction but operates through the structure of the procedure itself.
“The most fearsome enemy of emancipatory politics is not repression by the established order but the interiority of nihilism and cruelty without limits that can accompany its void.”
The gravest danger to a revolution comes not from external defeat but from the internal drive to self-destructive purity when stabilization is impossible.
“Those who claim communism is utopian are wrong: the only true utopia today is the belief that things as they are can go on indefinitely.”
The charge of utopianism rebounds: it is the defenders of the status quo who are utopian, since current capitalism cannot reproduce itself.
“Democracy's greatest achievement is to turn the moment of its greatest crisis — the empty throne — into the very source of its strength.”
The terror of dissolved social bonds, which paralyzes authoritarian regimes, is re-enacted as elections and transformed into democratic legitimacy.
“If you apply strict Marxist theory, Chávez is exploiting the Americans — which shows you must change Marxism to conceptualize why he is not.”
Provocative reductio: standard Marxism cannot account for rent from natural resources, so its own categories must be revised.
“Capitalism will have to re-socialize itself to survive; to survive, capitalism will have to become socialist.”
The communist demand is not utopian externality but will be forced upon capitalism by its own antagonisms.
Claims 22
asserts
The left must make a complete break with twentieth-century communism and social democracy and return to an absolute zero point, not defend or patch what those movements achieved.the strategic situation of the contemporary left
asserts
When you strip away the betrayals that defined twentieth-century socialism, the Hegelian lesson is that you must also abandon what was supposedly betrayed — there is no authentic core waiting to be liberated.the myth of authentic working-class movement
asserts
The majority of today's left is effectively Fukuyamaist, accepting liberal-democratic capitalism as the least-bad system and limiting its ambition to making it more just or tolerant.the ideological horizon of the contemporary left
asserts
In the domain of lifestyle and technology everything is declared possible, while in the domain of social and economic relations even modest change is declared impossible — this asymmetric distribution of possibility is itself ideological.the ideological function of the category of the impossible
asserts
An authentic act is something that retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility, thereby changing the coordinates of what is possible rather than operating within them.the concept of the political act
asserts
Marx did not foresee the possibility of the privatization of general intellect itself, which is why the classical Marxist theory of exploitation no longer captures today's dominant form — rent extracted from controlling access to the general intellect.the limits of classical Marxism and the new form of exploitation
reframes
If one applies strict Marxist theory (natural resources are not a source of value), Chávez's Venezuela is exploiting the United States — which shows that Marxism itself must be revised to conceptualize rent from natural resources.Marxist theory of value and natural resource exploitation
asserts
The Bologna reform of higher education is an attack on the public use of reason, subordinating thought to expert problem-solving for state and capital and destroying the capacity to question the very form of problems.the Bologna process and the privatization of knowledge
rejects
The conflict between Western liberal multiculturalism and Islamic fundamentalism is internal to global capitalism's own dynamic and should be rejected as a frame rather than chosen between.the liberal-vs-fundamentalism opposition
asserts
Afghanistan's trajectory from secular, tolerant society to fundamentalist state demonstrates that fundamentalism is a product of being caught in global capitalist dynamics, not a cultural essence.the origins of Islamic fundamentalism
asserts
Post-ideological cynical society is not actually free of ideology; belief functions objectively through practice and social ritual even when no individual consciously holds it.the functioning of ideology in post-ideological conditions
asserts
Marx's theory of commodity fetishism shows that the illusion is not a subjective mistake about reality but is located in social practice itself — what we do, not what we think.commodity fetishism and ideological illusion
asserts
The post-'68 shift was that economic logic itself became the hegemonic ideology, leading to a situation where ideology functions in a non-ideological form (market rationality) while the state apparatuses remain fully operative.the transformation of ideology after 1968
asserts
Capitalism with Asian values (authoritarian, non-democratic) is more economically dynamic than Western liberal capitalism, and liberals who expect China to democratize are simply wrong.the relationship between capitalism and democracy
asserts
The need for direct non-economic authority is an inner necessity of contemporary capitalism because intellectual property rent cannot be enforced by market mechanisms alone.the structural link between rentier capitalism and authoritarianism
asserts
There are four antagonisms that make communism a practical urgency: ecological catastrophe, the privatization of intellectual commons, biogenetic developments, and new forms of apartheid (slums, walls).the conditions of possibility for communism today
reframes
The truly utopian position is not communism but the belief that things can go on as they are — the welfare state and current capitalism cannot reproduce themselves indefinitely.the charge that communism is utopian
asserts
Capitalism will be forced to re-socialize itself to survive the coming crises, and the only real choice is between an authoritarian collectivism (Asian-values model, Berlusconi-style) and a communist one.the long-term future of capitalism
asserts
Anti-communist critiques like The Lives of Others are actually too soft on DDR communism because they require an individual villain with private passions, missing the systemic evil in which surveillance would have occurred regardless.liberal ideological critique of communism
asserts
The left should not seek an ideological bargain ('we admit Stalinist crimes if you admit yours'); instead, communists should be the most uncompromising critics of what went wrong in the communist experience.the left's relationship to Stalinist crimes
asserts
Western political space is increasingly reorganized around a liberal pro-capitalism party and an anti-immigrant populist/neo-fascist party, a deadlock only the left can break by refusing the liberal blackmail of anti-fascist unity.the restructuring of European political space
asserts
Egalitarian terror is not a pathological outburst but can be stabilized into a new positive order — as demonstrated by Christianity (Pentecost) and democracy (elections as re-enacted dissolution of social bonds).the relationship between negativity, terror, and new social order
Quotes 15
“This is maybe Lenin at his Beckettian best, echoing the line from Beckett's Worstward Ho: 'Try again, fail again, fail better.'”Slavoj Žižek · Lenin + Beckett on persisting through failure
“When you drop the betrayals, the lesson of history is you should also drop that what they betrayed.”Slavoj Žižek · the Hegelian lesson of twentieth-century socialism
“This troubled situation in which we see evil dancing on the ruins of evil.”Slavoj Žižek · the post-socialist condition (Badiou)
“You can have two women at the same time, but you cannot change the economic laws a little bit even, no?”Slavoj Žižek · the asymmetric distribution of the possible and the impossible under ideology
“An authentic act is something which retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility.”Slavoj Žižek · the definition of a genuine political act
“Marx didn't envisage the possibility of the privatization of the general intellect itself.”Slavoj Žižek · the limit of classical Marxism in the age of intellectual property
“"Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es" — they don't know it, but they are doing it. What you don't know is the illusion you are following, you are practicing in your reality.”Slavoj Žižek · Marx on fetishism as practical illusion, not false consciousness
“I don't believe in it, of course, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it. That's democracy today.”Slavoj Žižek · objective / interpassive belief and democracy (Bohr horseshoe)
“Those who claim 'oh, you as a communist are utopian'. No, there is only one utopia, true utopia today. The utopia is that things the way they are can go on indefinitely.”Slavoj Žižek · the reversal: defenders of capitalism are the true utopians
“It will be something like Berlusconi is crucial... like Groucho Marx in power. A regime which doesn't directly terrorize you but all the authoritarian structure — it will be that.”Slavoj Žižek · the new soft authoritarian capitalism (Brazil / Berlusconi)
“The left lost in its very victory. The direct enemy was defeated, at least here, like we no longer have such a strong patriarchy, but replaced by a new form of even more direct capitalist domination.”Slavoj Žižek · the paradox of post-'68 cultural liberation
“When I read this, I get a Goebbels' reaction: I draw my gun. Lower costs, high efficiency.”Slavoj Žižek · visceral reaction to the market rationality formula applied to education
“He just embodied at its purest the logic of the system. And it was almost for me anti-Semitic: ah, now we find him, a dirty Jew who cheated us all.”Slavoj Žižek · Bernie Madoff as scapegoat for systemic financial logic
“Nowhere is the misery of today's left more palpable than in its principled defense of the social-democratic welfare state, as 'let's just fight to keep that and we are still in the game.'”Slavoj Žižek · the impoverishment of left-wing ambition
“Communism is to remain the eternal spirit of egalitarian rebellion, whose destiny is to fail in one of the three modes deployed by Badiou, to fail or to persist but in subtraction from the domain of state power.”Slavoj Žižek · the question of whether communism can be anything more than perpetual failure
Transcript 1 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Thank you very much. I will again, for the third time, repeat myself and others in order to begin at the beginning and to quote Lenin, who wrote in "Communists who have no illusions, who do not give way to despondency, and who preserve their strength and flexibility to begin from the beginning over and over again are not doomed." End of quote. This is maybe Lenin at his Beckettian, referring to Samuel Beckett, best, echoing the line from Beckett's Worstward Ho: "Try again, fail again, fail better." Lenin's conclusion, to begin from the beginning over and over again, makes it clear that he is not talking only of slowing down the progress, fortifying what is already achieved, but precisely of descending back to the starting point. One should begin from the beginning, but not from where one succeeded in ascending a mountain, that's the metaphor Lenin uses, in the previous efforts. And this exactly, I claim, is where we are today. After what Badiou called the obscure disaster of The definitive end of the epoch which began with the October Revolution. One should therefore reject the continuity with what left, being leftist, meant in the last two centuries. Although sublime moments like the Jacobin climax of the French Revolution, the October Revolution, and so on, will forever remain a key part of our memory, that story is over. Everything has to be re-thought, one should begin from the zero point. So, again, to begin from the beginning means we should enact a clear break from the 20th-century communist experience. One should also bear in mind that was not only the defeat of the communist state socialism, but also the defeat of the Western social democracy, which is now gradually disappearing. Nowhere, I think, is the misery of today's left more palpable than in its principled defense of the social-democratic welfare state, as let's just fight to keep that and we are still in the game. But the trickiest mode of the false fidelity to the 20th-century communism is, I think, the rejection of all really existing socialisms on behalf of some authentic working-class movement just around the corner waiting to explode. Back in Georges Peyrol, I'll tell you a secret, one of the pseudonyms of Alain Badiou, wrote Ways to Easily Recognize an Old Marxist. A wonderful critical portrait, ironic of course, of a traditional Marxist, certain that sooner or later, we just have to be patient and wait, an authentic revolutionary workers' movement will arise again, victoriously sweeping away the capitalist rule, as well as the corrupted official leftist parties, trade unions, and so on and so forth. I claim, what I already said in the debate this morning, that here it's maybe the most difficult decision to make. You know, when the whole epoch like 20th century is, from our perspective, from the perspective of many radical honest leftists, structured as a betrayal of some absent authentic core. We should have councils, immediate democracy, and so on, but all we have is a series of betrayal, social-democratic corruption, state socialist dictatorship. The difficult Hegelian, I'm a total Hegelian, lesson is that when you drop the betrayals, the lesson of history is you should also drop that what they betrayed. And I think again, as I already said, among others, this is for me the lesson of Chinese Cultural Revolution. Not only you cannot do it authentically within the state apparatus as state socialism, but you also cannot do it outside. If you permit me a male-chauvinist Witz, you know Freud somewhere quotes this male-chauvinist wisdom: with it's difficult to live with women, but it's even more difficult without them. Maybe this holds for the state, you know? It's difficult with the state, it can be more difficult without it. So where are we today? Badiou wonderfully characterized the post-socialist situation as, I quote him, "this troubled situation in which we see evil dancing on the ruins of evil." So again, there is no question of any nostalgia. The communist regimes were, to use this moralistic term, evil. The problem is that what replaced them is also evil, although in a different way. So referring to previous debates, I think, my god, one thing we should do unambiguously, clearly, when people tell us, as that stupid Daily Newspaper magazine article mentioned before, that we are lazy thinkers who don't possess historical memory, of course this is a lie. But sometimes I do detect this automatic reaction with some leftists, you know, when somebody tells us, "Oh, what about Stalinist crimes?" the reaction of "Wait a minute, but seen in a totality, don't mention only these, capitalists were also bad, killing people in Congo and so on." I totally agree with it. But I don't think that we should even dream of accepting this as a kind of, how should I put it, ideological bargain to ease our bad self—our bad conscience. You know like, "Okay, we admit a little bit of Stalinist crimes if you admit yours, so that we all feel better." No, I propose a totally crazy solution. If you look at so-called, I'm not afraid to call them, bourgeois critiques of Stalinism, I am again and again surprised how they don't do the job. From my own experience, my reaction after reading Montefiore, all of them, Robert Conquest, is that: my god, these guys live in their illusory world, they don't see how evil it was. Let me give you an example which concerns this city. A film which I really hate, Das Leben der Anderen. It's a ferociously anti-communist film. My god, sorry, but it's too—too good towards DDR. In what sense? You know the story, of course. A corrupted minister wants to screw the wife of a well-known writer, and to gain free access, he orders Stasi to control the guy, to discover something so that the obstacle will be out of the way. All my old DDR friends told me the same story: Wait a minute, this is crazy. Such an writer as the one portrayed in the film would have been under total control all the time, even if there is no minister who wants to screw your wife. That is to say, in a typical liberal way, the film—the situation the film portrays is a situation which can happen even in a Western liberal country. If you are in a powerful situation, of course you can under a pretext like chief of secret police—what—what was specific of the DDR, again up to a point specific, was that again, you see, even if there is no minister, the same thing would have—evil minister, the same thing would have happened. In a typical liberal ideological way, the film presupposes that behind every evil, there has to be an individual determined by his private passions: sexual lust, money, lust for power, and so on and so forth. So again, we shouldn't feel bad, we should say to bourgeois and so on: Sorry, you are too soft towards it. Only we communists will be able, I hope so, to produce the theory of what went wrong there. We should not feel any bad conscience here. So, how then to begin if we want to start communism in a new way? Maybe since a certain epoch is over, since it failed, we should begin with a brief reflection about failure. Badiou in his recent book on the communist hypothesis, I think, developed three ways for an emancipatory movement to fail. First, there is of course a direct defeat. You are simply crushed by the enemy forces. Then, there is a defeat in the victory itself. You win over the enemy, temporarily at least, by way of taking over the main power agenda of the enemy. The goal is to take state power, either in the parliamentary democratic way or in a direct identification of the party with the state. So again, you win but you lose in your very victory becoming like the enemy. On the top of these two versions, there is perhaps, goes on Badiou, the most authentic but also the most terrifying way to fail. Guided by the correct instinct that every solidification of the revolution into a new state power equals its betrayal, but unable to invent a truly alternative social order, the revolutionary movement engages in a desperate strategy of protecting its authentic purity by the so-called ultra-leftist resort to all-destructive terror. Badiou aptly calls this last version the sacrificial temptation of the void. Quote from Badiou: "If subjectivity is afraid not so much to fight but to win, it is because struggle exposes it... it is not because struggle, sorry, exposes it to a simple failure. No, the victory exposes it to the most fearsome form of failure: the awareness that one won in vain, that victory prepares repetition, restoration. That a revolution is never more than a between two states. It is from here that the sacrificial temptation of the void comes. The most fearsome enemy of the politics of emancipation is not the repression by the established order; it is the interiority of nihilism and the cruelty without limits which can accompany its void." End of quote. Now I ask, for me the key question, what does this mean? Is communism then simply impossible in the sense that it cannot be stabilized into a new order? Even Badiou presents the eternal idea of communism as something which returns again and again, from Spartacus, Thomas Münzer, Rosa Luxemburg up to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which means, don't forget, as something which fails again and again. Is then communism to remain the eternal spirit of egalitarian rebellion, whose destiny is to fail in one of the three modes deployed by Badiou, to fail or to persist but in subtraction from the domain of state power? The problem for me is the following one. It is easy today to make fun of Fukuyama's notion of the end of history. But the majority of us today is Fukuyamaist. Liberal-democratic capitalism is accepted as the finally found formula of the best possible society, at least of the least worse, least bad society, so that all one can do is to render it more just, tolerant, and so on, all the strategies deployed this morning by Starry Giri. You know when I was young, we were dreaming about socialism with a human face. I claim percent of today's left dreamed about socialist—sorry—about global capitalism with a human face. Now, so a simple but pertinent question arises here. My god, we should not be afraid to ask these questions. But if alternatives to liberal-democratic capitalism didn't work, if liberal-democratic capitalism obviously works at least better than all known alternatives, if it is the least bad form of society, why should we not simply resign to it in a mature way? Why insist on the communist idea against all hopes? Is such an insistence not an exemplary case of the narcissism of the lost cause? For me, in this attempt to dismiss communism as intrinsically impossible, the very term impossible should make us stop and think. Let's just reflect upon how this predicate impossible is used today. I claim it is used in two opposed, but both of them driven to the excess, to two opposed ways. On the one hand, in the domain of personal freedoms and scientific technology, the impossible is more and more possible, or so we are told. Nothing is impossible. We can enjoy sex in all its perverse versions, entire archives of music, TV series are available for downloading, going to space is available to everyone, of course if you have million dollars. There is the prospect of enhancing our physical, psychic abilities, we can maybe—we will be soon able to manipulate our basic properties through interventions into genome. Up to the techno-gnostic dream of achieving immortality by way of transforming our identity into a software which can be downloaded from one to another hardware. And things really here, almost everything becomes possible. Like let me tell you two experiences, not personal, from New York. I met some radical people from a radical sexual circle where they told me what they not dream about doing, what they are doing. The latest fashion there is that a surgeon, a chirurg, cuts your penis into two, it works and it's difficult to urinate, but you can have two women at the same time. Or with women, they already did it, that they prolong your clitoris into a penis, so you can f- yourself like—I mean, almost everything is possible. But—but, on the other hand, did you notice how as a strict double of this all possibility, how especially in the domain of social and economic relations, our era perceives itself more and more as the era of maturity in which humanity has finally abandoned the old millenarian utopian dreams and accepted the limitations of reality. Today, if anything, the moment you talk about politics, economy, and so on... No, no, they don't say anything if—is possible. You're always bombarded by you cannot. You cannot engage in large collective acts which necessarily end in totalitarian terror, you cannot cling to the old welfare state, it makes you non-competitive, leads to economic crisis, you cannot isolate yourself from the global market, and so on and so forth. I think this is maybe one of the keys to our situation. How again possibility and impossibility are distributed. You know, you can have two women at the same time, but you cannot change the economic laws a little bit even, no? It is crucial to distinguish clearly here between two impossibilities. The impossible real of a social antagonism and the impossibility on which the predominant ideological field focuses. Today, the ruling ideology endeavors to make us accept the impossibility of a radical change, in order to render invisible the impossible real of the antagonism which cuts across capitalist societies. This impossible is not an a priori limitation which should realistically be taken into account, but it is precisely the domain of strong acts, of interventions which change the coordinates of a situation. An act is more than an intervention into the domain of the possible based on strategic calculations. An act changes the very coordinates of what is possible, and thus, this is for me one of the nice philosophical definitions of an act: an authentic act is something which retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility. So what does this mean? Again, my eternal question. The problem is how to avoid the alternative of radical social explosions which end in defeat and which are unable to stabilize themselves in a new order. You know, Antonio Gramsci, who was often mentioned these days, I would like to recall something where I'm sympathetic to him. Some of you probably know, if you know Gramsci, that he was publishing his texts, before he was imprisoned in the early twenties, in a communist journal called Il Nuovo Ordine, the New Order. I find this fascinating because, as we all know, from the thirties onwards, this signifier was totally kidnapped by extreme right even. If you say today New Order, well, we immediately know where you stand. I claim maybe if there is a chance for communism to be more than this fleeting dream of emancipatory explosions, maybe we should reappropriate it. So again, why? I want to refer briefly mention another Gramsci's thought, which I think perfectly describes, much more than his time, our situation. You know, it goes something like in a moments of transition when the old is dying, but the new didn't yet form itself, strange terrifying monsters, apparitions are born. I think this is our situation. In what sense? Peter Sloterdijk, definitely not one of us but maybe not a complete idiot, Sloterdijk remarked that if there is a person to whom they will build monuments years from now in the future, it will be Lee Kuan Yew, the Singapore leader who invented and realized the so-called capitalism with Asian values. The virus of this capitalism is slowly but surely spreading around the globe. And I think this change has a world-historical meaning. Till now, let's be frank, there was one good argument for capitalism. It seemed inextricably linked with democracy. And whatever we thinks about the limitations of democracy, this was something. You know, you had years of dictatorship, South Korea, Chile, but at the end, the system did generate a kind of a push towards democracy. And I think this is perhaps what is so unsettling about today's China. The suspicion that the vicious combination of the Asian knout and the European stock market, this is Trotsky's characterization of the Russian Empire, will prove itself to be economically more efficient than our liberal capitalism. I effectively think that those liberals who think oh, give the Chinese another years, there will be a new Tiananmen and they will be in democracy, they're simply wrong. What we have today is a capitalism much more dynamic and efficient than our Western capitalism but definitely with no need for democracy. It's not only China, it's Singapore, and so on and so forth. So why this re-emergence of direct non-democratic authority? Above and beyond all cultural differences, of course we should drop this stupid racist idea oh, the Eastern idiots in whose nature is authoritarian regime, there is, I think, an inner necessity for this resurgence of direct authority. The protest focused against its struggle against what was perceived as the three pillars of capitalism: factory, school, family. As the result, each domain was submitted to post-industrial transformation. Factory work is more and more outsourced or, in the developed world, reorganized along the post-Fordist non-hierarchic interactive team work. You know as they say, everything is autopoietic, there is no master, no servant and so on. Permanent flexible privatized education is more and more replacing universal public education. Multiple forms of flexible sexual arrangements are replacing the traditional family. But are we any better? The left lost in its very victory. The direct enemy was defeated, at least here, like we no longer have strong such a strong patriarchy and so on, but replaced by a new form of even more direct capitalist domination. In postmodern capitalism, market is invading new spheres which were hitherto considered the privileged domain of the state, from education to prison and security. Now, to grasp these new forms of privatization, one should, I think, critically transform Marxist conceptual apparatus. When due to the crucial role of what Marx called general intellect, knowledge and social cooperation, when due to the crucial role of general intellect in the creation of wealth, forms of wealth are more and more, as I quote Marx from Grundrisse, "out of all proportion to the direct labor time spent on their production," end of quote, the result is not as Marx expected, the self-dissolution of capitalism, but the gradual relative transformation of profit generated by the exploitation of labor force into rent appropriated by those who privatized the general intellect. That is to say, because of his neglect of the social dimension of general intellect, that's another analysis, but it's typical how whenever Marx talks about general intellect, he all of a sudden, grammatically even, regresses to singular. It's der Mensch, der Arbeiter, suddenly society disappears. Marx didn't envisage, I claim, the possibility of the privatization of the general intellect itself. And this, I think, is what is at the core of today's struggle for intellectual property. Within this frame, exploitation in the classical Marxist sense is no longer possible. Which is why it has to be enforced more and more by direct legal measures. That is to say, by a non-economic force. And here direct authority is needed. It is needed, for example, to impose the totally arbitrary legal conditions for extracting rent, conditions which are no longer spontaneously generated by market. For example, how did Bill Gates become, he is no longer, the richest man in the world? His wealth have, I claim, nothing to do with the production costs of what Microsoft is selling. One can even argue that Microsoft is paying its workers a relatively high salary. So again, Gates', Bill Gates' wealth is not the result of his success in producing good software for lower prices than his competitors, or in higher exploitation of his hired intellectual workers. Microsoft, through different strategies, simply imposed itself as an almost universal standard, almost monopolizing the field, a kind of direct embodiment of the general intellect. Bill Gates became the richest man in a couple of decades through appropriating the rent for allowing millions of intellectual workers to participate in the form of the general intellect that he privatized and controls. So again, we are paying here what? To participate in the general intellect, to be able to communicate with each other. The same goes up to a point for natural resources. Their exploitation is one of the great sources of rent today, accompanied by the permanent struggle for who will get this rent: the third-world people or Western corporations. To provoke my leftist friends, I try, I always try to emphasize, to provoke them, how if you apply strictly the standard Marxist theory to today's relations between Venezuela and United States, sorry to tell you, Chávez is exploiting the Americans. Because Marx is very emphatic in Capital that natural resources are not a source of value. And you know what he gives as an example? Oil, of course. So of course I'm not claiming this, that Chávez is exploiting Americans. What I am claiming is that if you want to conceptualize in what sense he is not exploiting them, you should change Marxism a little bit. In—so in this situation, our struggle should focus on those aspects which pose a threat to general intellect, to this transnational open space, to what ultimately Kant already called the public use of reason. Today, I will designate to you so that you will not tell what should we do since there is no revolutionary party, we have one pretty important struggle in Europe. The struggle against the ongoing Bologna reform of higher education, which is I claim one big concerted attack on the public use of reason. The underlying idea of this reform, and all the scandals we know like the—the abolition of the Middlesex philosophy department and so on, this is all part of this process. The idea of this reform is to the urge to subordinate high education to, as they put it, "the needs of society," to make it useful for the solution of concrete problems. So, the aim is to produce expert opinions which will resolve problems posed by social agents. What disappears here is simply thinking, in any authentic sense. Because I claim what thinking means, thinking doesn't only offer solutions to problems posed by society, which of course means state and capital, but to reflect on the very form of these problems, to reformulate them, to discern a problem in the very way we perceive a problem. The reduction of high education to the task of producing socially useful expert knowledge is the paradigmatic form of, again, what Kant called private use of reason in today's global capitalism. For example, the ruling ideology perceives a problem: poor idiotic Islamic and other nations are fundamentalists, and the struggle is between our Western enlightenment and how to win over our multicultural tolerance over against—against so-called fundamentalism. I agree, I don't like fundamentalist. I'm not one of those stupid leftists who think the enemy of my enemy is my friend, so hoo-hoo Al-Qaeda ultimately bombing United States and so on. But I'm saying something emphatically. The struggle between liberal-capitalist multiculturalism and—and—and so-called fundamentalism is a part of the inherent dynamic of global capitalism. As such, we should reject it. It's a—again, a disorientic notion, as my German friends would have put it. It's crucial to emphasize here no, we should change the very terms of the debate. Not, you know, if we use reason privately, then you get easily money from all state foundations on how to enlighten the stupid Arabs, how to—and so on, how to make the women refuse to be their—their—refuse their—how to—clitoridectomy and so on and so forth. No, the true question to be asked is—is why does global capitalist dynamic itself generate fundamentalism? To convince you that I am not talking stupid extreme leftist crap, let me make you an example which should make anything clear to you. Afghanistan. Sorry, but I am old enough to remember how forty years ago, Afghanistan, which is today, if you read the media, the very embodiment of crazy fundamentalism... Do you know that Afghanistan was the most enlightened of the Middle East Islamic states? It had a secular Western technocratic king, it had a very strong local communist party, it had extreme—I know it from that time, not now retroactively, extreme religious tolerance in Herat, the third city. Do you know that they had a custom that—there were three religions there, Islam, some Christians—no, or some Hindus, I don't know—and whatever, and the Buddhists—they had a habit of visiting each other's and so on and what happened then? Communists took power in order to save them, Soviet Union intervened in order to screw them, United States intervened and, as the result of this being caught in the global dynamics, Afghanistan became fundamentalist. It's not that they are stupid people sticking to their traditions. No, their tradition is to be, sorry to tell you, their tradition is to be almost secular, open, modern. That's the question. This is what you will not get with private use of reason. So again, it is crucial to link the ongoing push towards this streamlining the high education to the process of enclosing the commons of intellectual products, of privatizing general intellect. The capitalist modernity imposed the twin hegemony of legal ideology and education, state school system. Subjects were interpellated as patriotic free citizens, subjects of the legal order, while individuals were formed into legal subjects through the compulsory universal education. The gap was thus maintained between bourgeois and citizen, between the egotist utilitarian individual and the citoyen dedicated to universal interest of the state. And insofar as in the spontaneous ideology, ideology is limited to the universal sphere of citizenship, as they put it, "privately I just follow my interests, publicly when I fight for my state in politics, I'm in ideology," the very gap between ideology and non-ideology was thus transposed into ideology. What happened nonetheless after '68, I claim, in post-'68 capitalism, is that economy itself, the logic of market and competition, is imposing itself as the hegemonic ideology. For example, as I just mentioned in education, we are witnessing the gradual dismantling of the classic bourgeois school ideological state apparatus. The school system is less and less the compulsory network, elevated above market, organized directly by state, bearer of enlightened values, liberté, egalité, fraternité. On behalf of the sacred formula of "lower costs, high efficiency." When I read this, I—I get a Goebbels' reaction: I draw my gun. It is progressively penetrated by different forms of—the famous formula is PPP: Public-Private Partnership. Then in the very organization and legitimization of power, the electoral system is more and more conceived on the model of market competition. Elections are a commercial exchange where voters buy the option which offers to do the most—in the most efficient way the job of maintaining social order, and so on and so forth. On behalf of the same formula, lower costs, higher efficiency, even some functions which should be, I think at least, the exclusive domain of the state, like running prisons, are more and more privatized. Not only prisons, but like the army is no longer based on universal conscription, but composed of hired mercenaries. As the example of Berlusconi makes it clear in Italy, even the state bureaucracy is no longer perceived as a kind of Hegelian universal—universal class. So, quite logically, insofar as economy is considered the sphere of non-ideology, this brave new world of global commodification considers itself post-ideological. But I claim of course the ideological state apparatuses are here more than ever. However, insofar as ideology is located into subjects in contrast to utilitarian individuals, this hegemony of the economic sphere appears as the absence of ideology. What this means is not that ideology simply directly reflects economy. We, I claim, fully remain within ideological state apparatuses. Economy functions here as an ideological model, in contrast to real economic life, which definitely does not follow the idealized liberal market models. So again, this is another crucial thing. We should never forget what—when we attack market, that what we are attacking is an ideology. It's not at all what great powers, United States are doing. They are as protectionist as they want, they have stronger and stronger state interventions, and so on and so forth. So again... it's not too much that I have, so... I perceive you as that domina who whips me and please don't yet start yet, yes. So, what kind of shift in the function of ideology does this self-erasure of ideology imply? How does ideology function in a non-ideological way? I'm sorry if some of you will know this line of thought, but it's crucial, so I will nonetheless repeat it. Here, I think one should fully assert with all my criticism of Marx, the actuality of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, Warenfetischismus. You know, it's fashionable to say oh, that's the old naive Marx. No, read it closely, but with naive openness. What is Marx saying there? Something extremely interesting. He says fetishism is not the obvious illusion concealing reality. Marx is not saying, for example, money is in reality just a social object, part of social interaction, but we mysteriously perceive money as a magic object with a property whatever. No, as Marx makes it clear if you read him closely, he says money is just a condensation of social relations. And we know it. Most of us. I mean if you ask a typical bourgeois subject, he will not say oh, money is my fetish it's... no, he will say money is just a piece of paper giving you the right to the social product. So where is fetishism? In social reality itself. Fetishism is in how—what we are, in how we act. And that's something that I still find fascinating. When Marx says, you know his famous formula from Capital, "Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es"—they don't know it, but they are doing it. He is not saying the enlightenment stupidity, you know, ha-ha, you are doing one thing, but you don't know what you are doing, you are thinking another thing. No, Marx is saying what you don't know is the illusion you are following, you are practicing in your reality. So we have a wonderful distinction between your subjective opinion, the way things appear to you, and how should I put it, the way things really appear to you, embodied in reality. And this, I think, is the key more than ever to today's ideology. The key term here was invented by—proposed by my Austrian friend Robert Pfaller. I hope you know it, you should read his book, Die Illusionen der anderen, the term of interpassivity. It's a wonderful idea of how it's not only this Hegelian List der Vernunft where we are active through others. We can also be passive through others in the sense that what we transpose onto others is our passivity itself. Passive reactions and so on. You know, it's no longer this idea I sit back, others do the work with me, but I work crazy all the time, others can be passive for me. For example, traditional example, my preferred one, you know in Tibet, these prayer wheels, no? You write your prayer on a paper, put it in, you turn it around, and then you can think about sex, whatever, but objectively you pray. Now you will say ha-ha, primitive society. Sorry to tell you, in our societies, we are exactly the same. Let me mention what I always mention, canned laughter. You know the stupid TV series, Cheers, Friends, where the laughter is part of the soundtrack. Can you imagine the paradox of it? I come home late in the evening tired as a dog, I look at TV, I don't laugh, just "eh", and at the end I feel released, relieved. Why? TV set has taken over the laughter, it did it for me. And what I claim is that belief can function in an exactly same way. Our society is penetrated by objective beliefs. Nobody believes but belief functions. You know this classical example: you have a—a son, it's Sunday afternoon, you want—and oh, sorry, it's Christmas time and I ask you "Do you believe in Santa Claus?". You say "No, I'm not an idiot, of course not, I pretend to for my son." Then I ask your son, he will say "Oh, I'm not an idiot, of course it's not, but I pretend to believe not to disappoint my parents" and so on and so forth. But it doesn't matter, it functions as a belief. And I claim, now I will stop here, I developed this in my book, but I think this is crucial, that this is how in our—this is for me cynical functioning of ideology in post-ideological world. Nobody has to believe, it's even better if you don't believe, but belief still socially functions. Sorry to repeat another joke which is even better known, but it exemplifies so perfectly what I want to say, this old—I know you know it, I'm sorry—Niels Bohr anecdote. You know, when he was visited by a friend in a countryside house and the friend saw there a horseshoe, this superstitious item which allegedly keeps the evil spirits out of the house. And the friend asked Niels—Niels Bohr of Copenhagen, no, "But you are a scientist, why do you have this superstitious object there? Do you believe in it?" The friend answered—no, sorry, Niels Bohr answered, "Of course I don't believe in it, I'm not stupid, I'm a scientist." Then "But why do you have it there?" Niels Bohr gave a perfect answer, no wonder he was a reader of Kierkegaard also. He said "I don't believe in it, of course, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it." That's democracy today. We are all cynical, but we somehow believe it works without you believing in it. Now let's go, it's soon, I'll be—let's make the next step. What—what kind of political space does this post-ideological cynical universe imply? Here I get really worried. As you will probably hear from our good friend Tamás tomorrow morning, in Western and Eastern Europe, there are signs of a long-term rearrangement of the political space. Till recently, our political space was dominated by two main parties which addressed the entire electoral body: a right-of-center party, Christian Democrats, liberal conservative people, whatever People's Party, and the left-of-center party, socialist, social-democratic, progressive liberal, whatever you want, with smaller parties addressing a more narrow electorate, ecologists and so on. Now, I claim, there is progressively emerging one party which stands for capitalism as such, usually with relative tolerance towards abortion, gay rights, religious and ethnic minorities, and so on. And opposed to this party is a stronger and stronger anti-immigrant populist party, which on its fringes is accompanied, sometimes even merged with direct racist neo-fascist groups. There are clear cases here. For example, from what I know in Poland, now ex-socialist communist disappeared, you have Donald Tusk, a pure liberal, and then you have the Tweedledee and Tweedledum—okay, one of them is dead now, it's only Tweedledee, okay—the Kaczyński brothers, nationalists. And Berlusconi in Italy did something unique: he simply united the two. He is global capitalism and at the same time populism. Again here we use, we need private use—sorry, public use of reason to to see that this is a deadlock. Only the left will be able to break this deadlock. If our political space will remain to be determined by this opposition, and then liberals can endlessly blackmail us, you know: "Okay, we have small differences, but my god, against those who are against abortions, against gay marriage, we should be all together," and so on and so forth. We are lost if we if we subscribe to this deadlock. So again, how how can we break up this? Are we nonetheless condemned to this? It is here that I have just two, three pages, so... no, I have bad conscience. It is here that I think, I know I will create myself many friends—many enemies here, that the originality of the Western thought enters. The West—I'm Eurocentrist, I admit it—in its three great historical ruptures. The wager of Western thought is that radical negativity, whose first and immediate political expression is egalitarian terror, is not condemned to remain a short ecstatic outburst after which things have to return to normal run. On the contrary, radical negativity, this undermining of every traditional hierarchic order, can articulate itself into a new positive order in which it acquires the stability of a new form of life. This is for me the meaning, and I'm a total atheist, of course, of the Holy Spirit in Christianity. Faith can not only be expressed in, but exists as the collective of believers. This faith is in itself based on terror. Now you'll ask me "but where is revolutionary terror there?". It is, remember Christ's words which are crucial for me: "I bring sword, I bring fire, not peace. If you don't hate your mother, your father, you are not my follower." This is the true meaning of Christian love your neighbor. If you don't act, I love my neighbor but I hate basically all neighbors insofar as they are father, mother and so on, you are not a Christian. So again, it failed, but the original idea of Christianity was an egalitarian social link which cancels the hierarchic order. Now this may surprise you, but another example of such an egalitarian link based on terror is democracy itself. The democratic axiom is that the place of power is empty. There is no one who is directly qualified for this post, either by tradition, charisma, or by his or her expert and leadership properties. This is why before democracy can enter the state, terror has to do its work. Forever dissociating the place of power from any natural or directly qualified pretender. The gap between—sorry—the achievement of democracy is to turn what is in traditional authoritarian power structure the moment of its greatest crisis, the moment of transition when for a moment the throne is empty, this moment always causes panic in authoritarian regimes, into the very resort of its strength. Democratic elections are the moment of passing through the zero point when the complex network of social links is dissolved into the purely quantitative multiplicity of voting individuals. So the moment of terror, of the dissolution of all hierarchic links is thus re-enacted and transformed into the foundation of a new order. But today when we know the limitation of the formal democratic procedure, the question is: can we imagine a step further in this direction, of the reversal of egalitarian negativity into a new order? So again, it is not enough to remain faithful to the idea of communism. One has to locate in historical reality antagonisms which make this idea a practical urgency. So again, the only true question today is: do we endorse the predominant naturalization of capitalism, or does today's global capitalism contain strong enough antagonisms which prevent its indefinite reproduction? There are, I claim, at least four such antagonisms: the looming threat of ecological catastrophe, the inappropriateness of private property for the so-called intellectual products, the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments, especially in biogenetics and last but not least, new forms of apartheid, new walls, new slums. These forms all point towards what Hardt and Negri call commons, the shared substance of our social being, whose privatization is a violent act which should be also resisted if necessary with violent means. The commons of culture, the immediately socialized forms of cognitive capital, this is what intellectual property is about; the commons of external nature, threatened by pollution and exploitation; the commons of inner, our inner nature, the biogenetic inheritance of humanity. What all these struggles share is the awareness of the destructive potentials, up to the self-annihilation of humanity itself, if the capitalist logic of enclosing these commons is allowed a free run. Let me give you an example. The main—the main lesson to be learned from the threat of ecological catastrophe is that humankind should get ready to live in a much more, I hate this fashionable world but here it's meant literally, nomadic way. Local or global changes in environment will probably impose the need for unheard of large-scale social transformations. Let us say that a gigantic volcanic eruption will make the whole of island Iceland, sorry, the state, uninhabitable. Where will the people of Iceland move? Under what conditions? Furthermore, what if the northern Siberia will become more inhabitable and appropriate for agriculture, as some people claim that you will have all that frozen forest civilized, while large sub-Saharan regions will become too dry for a population to live there? How will the exchange of population be organized? When similar things happened in the past, social changes occurred in a wild spontaneous way, with violence and destruction. Such a prospect is impossible, self-destructive in today's condition with arms of mass destruction available soon to all nations. One thing is clear: national sovereignty will have to be radically redefined. New levels of global cooperation invented. And what about the immense changes in economy and consumption due to new weather patterns, shortages of water and so on? Through what process of decision will the required changement be decided and executed? So I claim, I don't have time to develop it, read my last book if you are more interested in it, that all these problems that we are confronting are basically the problems of the commons. And I'm not in a panic but nonetheless a little bit apocalyptic. In all these domains we are approaching a kind of slowly a kind of a zero point. Listen, I was three weeks ago in China. I spoke with the guy there, one of the bosses of their Academy of Sciences and he told me openly, he showed me the documents, that the Chinese state program, it's a big co-production between state and private capital is to not only developed biogenetic technology but to apply it to where basically they told me the long-term goal is to all the Chinese people with, now I quote their program, "the progressive regulation of the of the physical and psychic properties of the Chinese people." Now, the prospect is immense. I'm asking who will decide, how? It's absolutely clear that neither market nor the state will do it. Even look at the United States today. I'm—yeah, got your subtle body language, yeah. Look at the United States, you know where Obama whom I support disappointed me. How did he react to this immense catastrophe? We don't even know the the consequences of that oil spilling there. By playing the old state-regulating legal role: "I will kick in the ass the British Petroleum," and so on. You know, this is the liberal way: you find a culprit. Sorry but with such a great catastrophe, the first thing to say is it's ridiculous even to talk about how somebody will recover the costs. You cannot. Point two: it's not only—I defend—I pre—for some time wanted to write a text in defense of British Petroleum. Claiming that do you know that they are all using the same the same machines and so on? It's pure chance by mistake that it happened there. Again we need here collective acts; neither the market nor the state will do it. Of course, and now... of course what the—now here lies nonetheless the true danger. I am not saying that—"Sorry?" "It's not true what you're saying, because BP completely disregarded all security measures." I know, I know all the data, my god. I know all the data, because a friend of a friend of mine works for some American agency. They did first—first he told me that they looked into other companies and found it yeah, yeah, yeah, but you know what I mean. They don't now put all—you know, of course they are maybe the worst, but it's the logic of the system which compelled them to be this. You know, it's like I wanted to write another crazy article. He is guilty that I am longer, yeah. You know that guy, that crook who stole billion? I wanted to write in defense of what was his name? Bernard, Bernie Madoff. Yeah, the way they put the even with an anti-Semitic tone, to put blame on him. Sorry, he just embodied at its purest the logic of the system. And it was almost for me anti-Semitic: ah, now we find him, a dirty Jew who cheated us all. But nonetheless let me just finish. The—I think that capitalism will be forced, that—this will be the result of this last financial crisis, to deal with these three sets of problems, to somehow organize itself. And I claim, that's my conclusion, the choice will be communism or socialism. To survive, capitalism will have to become socialist. The reason I don't like the term socialism is that well, already the well-known Otto Weininger wrote: "Socialism is Aryan, communism is Jewish", no? That is to say, socialism always has this principle of, potentially of organic unity, cooperation and so on and so forth. So this is my answer to liberals who fear "you as a communist want some dictatorship and so on". No, what I'm saying is—those who claim "oh, you as a communist are utopian". No, there is only one utopia, true utopia today. The utopia is that the thing the things the way they are, our precious welfare state can go on indefinitely. I claim that, and I'm not talking about years. I'm cynical like you: if you tell me in years we will have trouble, I will say f- off, like I will be dead, I don't care. I'm talking about years. Maximum. Where all these problems will explode and this will be the real harsh choice. Either a kind of—either we will all have some kind of, it's already starting in Italy and so on, some kind of Asian values capitalism. Of course it will be Westernized but basically the same. A kind of a newly segregated state with—you know, it will not be the old authoritarianism. It will be something like Berlusconi is crucial, I think, or did you see that wonderful film, years old, Terry Gilliam, Brazil? He got it for the first time that new forms of authorities will be what is Berlusconi, like Groucho Marx in power. You know, a regime which doesn't directly terrorize you but all the authoritarian structure—it will be that. And capitalism will have to re-socialize itself in a new authoritarian way. Or we do it in a communist way. Thank you very much.
Thank you very much. I will again, for the third time, repeat myself and others in order to begin at the beginning and to quote Lenin, who wrote in "Communists who have no illusions, who do not give way to despondency, and who preserve their strength and flexibility to begin from the beginning over and over again are not doomed." End of quote. This is maybe Lenin at his Beckettian, referring to Samuel Beckett, best, echoing the line from Beckett's Worstward Ho: "Try again, fail again, fail better." Lenin's conclusion, to begin from the beginning over and over again, makes it clear that he is not talking only of slowing down the progress, fortifying what is already achieved, but precisely of descending back to the starting point. One should begin from the beginning, but not from where one succeeded in ascending a mountain, that's the metaphor Lenin uses, in the previous efforts. And this exactly, I claim, is where we are today. After what Badiou called the obscure disaster of The definitive end of the epoch which began with the October Revolution. One should therefore reject the continuity with what left, being leftist, meant in the last two centuries. Although sublime moments like the Jacobin climax of the French Revolution, the October Revolution, and so on, will forever remain a key part of our memory, that story is over. Everything has to be re-thought, one should begin from the zero point. So, again, to begin from the beginning means we should enact a clear break from the 20th-century communist experience. One should also bear in mind that was not only the defeat of the communist state socialism, but also the defeat of the Western social democracy, which is now gradually disappearing. Nowhere, I think, is the misery of today's left more palpable than in its principled defense of the social-democratic welfare state, as let's just fight to keep that and we are still in the game. But the trickiest mode of the false fidelity to the 20th-century communism is, I think, the rejection of all really existing socialisms on behalf of some authentic working-class movement just around the corner waiting to explode. Back in Georges Peyrol, I'll tell you a secret, one of the pseudonyms of Alain Badiou, wrote Ways to Easily Recognize an Old Marxist. A wonderful critical portrait, ironic of course, of a traditional Marxist, certain that sooner or later, we just have to be patient and wait, an authentic revolutionary workers' movement will arise again, victoriously sweeping away the capitalist rule, as well as the corrupted official leftist parties, trade unions, and so on and so forth. I claim, what I already said in the debate this morning, that here it's maybe the most difficult decision to make. You know, when the whole epoch like 20th century is, from our perspective, from the perspective of many radical honest leftists, structured as a betrayal of some absent authentic core. We should have councils, immediate democracy, and so on, but all we have is a series of betrayal, social-democratic corruption, state socialist dictatorship. The difficult Hegelian, I'm a total Hegelian, lesson is that when you drop the betrayals, the lesson of history is you should also drop that what they betrayed. And I think again, as I already said, among others, this is for me the lesson of Chinese Cultural Revolution. Not only you cannot do it authentically within the state apparatus as state socialism, but you also cannot do it outside. If you permit me a male-chauvinist Witz, you know Freud somewhere quotes this male-chauvinist wisdom: with it's difficult to live with women, but it's even more difficult without them. Maybe this holds for the state, you know? It's difficult with the state, it can be more difficult without it. So where are we today? Badiou wonderfully characterized the post-socialist situation as, I quote him, "this troubled situation in which we see evil dancing on the ruins of evil." So again, there is no question of any nostalgia. The communist regimes were, to use this moralistic term, evil. The problem is that what replaced them is also evil, although in a different way. So referring to previous debates, I think, my god, one thing we should do unambiguously, clearly, when people tell us, as that stupid Daily Newspaper magazine article mentioned before, that we are lazy thinkers who don't possess historical memory, of course this is a lie. But sometimes I do detect this automatic reaction with some leftists, you know, when somebody tells us, "Oh, what about Stalinist crimes?" the reaction of "Wait a minute, but seen in a totality, don't mention only these, capitalists were also bad, killing people in Congo and so on." I totally agree with it. But I don't think that we should even dream of accepting this as a kind of, how should I put it, ideological bargain to ease our bad self—our bad conscience. You know like, "Okay, we admit a little bit of Stalinist crimes if you admit yours, so that we all feel better." No, I propose a totally crazy solution. If you look at so-called, I'm not afraid to call them, bourgeois critiques of Stalinism, I am again and again surprised how they don't do the job. From my own experience, my reaction after reading Montefiore, all of them, Robert Conquest, is that: my god, these guys live in their illusory world, they don't see how evil it was. Let me give you an example which concerns this city. A film which I really hate, Das Leben der Anderen. It's a ferociously anti-communist film. My god, sorry, but it's too—too good towards DDR. In what sense? You know the story, of course. A corrupted minister wants to screw the wife of a well-known writer, and to gain free access, he orders Stasi to control the guy, to discover something so that the obstacle will be out of the way. All my old DDR friends told me the same story: Wait a minute, this is crazy. Such an writer as the one portrayed in the film would have been under total control all the time, even if there is no minister who wants to screw your wife. That is to say, in a typical liberal way, the film—the situation the film portrays is a situation which can happen even in a Western liberal country. If you are in a powerful situation, of course you can under a pretext like chief of secret police—what—what was specific of the DDR, again up to a point specific, was that again, you see, even if there is no minister, the same thing would have—evil minister, the same thing would have happened. In a typical liberal ideological way, the film presupposes that behind every evil, there has to be an individual determined by his private passions: sexual lust, money, lust for power, and so on and so forth. So again, we shouldn't feel bad, we should say to bourgeois and so on: Sorry, you are too soft towards it. Only we communists will be able, I hope so, to produce the theory of what went wrong there. We should not feel any bad conscience here. So, how then to begin if we want to start communism in a new way? Maybe since a certain epoch is over, since it failed, we should begin with a brief reflection about failure. Badiou in his recent book on the communist hypothesis, I think, developed three ways for an emancipatory movement to fail. First, there is of course a direct defeat. You are simply crushed by the enemy forces. Then, there is a defeat in the victory itself. You win over the enemy, temporarily at least, by way of taking over the main power agenda of the enemy. The goal is to take state power, either in the parliamentary democratic way or in a direct identification of the party with the state. So again, you win but you lose in your very victory becoming like the enemy. On the top of these two versions, there is perhaps, goes on Badiou, the most authentic but also the most terrifying way to fail. Guided by the correct instinct that every solidification of the revolution into a new state power equals its betrayal, but unable to invent a truly alternative social order, the revolutionary movement engages in a desperate strategy of protecting its authentic purity by the so-called ultra-leftist resort to all-destructive terror. Badiou aptly calls this last version the sacrificial temptation of the void. Quote from Badiou: "If subjectivity is afraid not so much to fight but to win, it is because struggle exposes it... it is not because struggle, sorry, exposes it to a simple failure. No, the victory exposes it to the most fearsome form of failure: the awareness that one won in vain, that victory prepares repetition, restoration. That a revolution is never more than a between two states. It is from here that the sacrificial temptation of the void comes. The most fearsome enemy of the politics of emancipation is not the repression by the established order; it is the interiority of nihilism and the cruelty without limits which can accompany its void." End of quote. Now I ask, for me the key question, what does this mean? Is communism then simply impossible in the sense that it cannot be stabilized into a new order? Even Badiou presents the eternal idea of communism as something which returns again and again, from Spartacus, Thomas Münzer, Rosa Luxemburg up to the Chinese Cultural Revolution, which means, don't forget, as something which fails again and again. Is then communism to remain the eternal spirit of egalitarian rebellion, whose destiny is to fail in one of the three modes deployed by Badiou, to fail or to persist but in subtraction from the domain of state power? The problem for me is the following one. It is easy today to make fun of Fukuyama's notion of the end of history. But the majority of us today is Fukuyamaist. Liberal-democratic capitalism is accepted as the finally found formula of the best possible society, at least of the least worse, least bad society, so that all one can do is to render it more just, tolerant, and so on, all the strategies deployed this morning by Starry Giri. You know when I was young, we were dreaming about socialism with a human face. I claim percent of today's left dreamed about socialist—sorry—about global capitalism with a human face. Now, so a simple but pertinent question arises here. My god, we should not be afraid to ask these questions. But if alternatives to liberal-democratic capitalism didn't work, if liberal-democratic capitalism obviously works at least better than all known alternatives, if it is the least bad form of society, why should we not simply resign to it in a mature way? Why insist on the communist idea against all hopes? Is such an insistence not an exemplary case of the narcissism of the lost cause? For me, in this attempt to dismiss communism as intrinsically impossible, the very term impossible should make us stop and think. Let's just reflect upon how this predicate impossible is used today. I claim it is used in two opposed, but both of them driven to the excess, to two opposed ways. On the one hand, in the domain of personal freedoms and scientific technology, the impossible is more and more possible, or so we are told. Nothing is impossible. We can enjoy sex in all its perverse versions, entire archives of music, TV series are available for downloading, going to space is available to everyone, of course if you have million dollars. There is the prospect of enhancing our physical, psychic abilities, we can maybe—we will be soon able to manipulate our basic properties through interventions into genome. Up to the techno-gnostic dream of achieving immortality by way of transforming our identity into a software which can be downloaded from one to another hardware. And things really here, almost everything becomes possible. Like let me tell you two experiences, not personal, from New York. I met some radical people from a radical sexual circle where they told me what they not dream about doing, what they are doing. The latest fashion there is that a surgeon, a chirurg, cuts your penis into two, it works and it's difficult to urinate, but you can have two women at the same time. Or with women, they already did it, that they prolong your clitoris into a penis, so you can f- yourself like—I mean, almost everything is possible. But—but, on the other hand, did you notice how as a strict double of this all possibility, how especially in the domain of social and economic relations, our era perceives itself more and more as the era of maturity in which humanity has finally abandoned the old millenarian utopian dreams and accepted the limitations of reality. Today, if anything, the moment you talk about politics, economy, and so on... No, no, they don't say anything if—is possible. You're always bombarded by you cannot. You cannot engage in large collective acts which necessarily end in totalitarian terror, you cannot cling to the old welfare state, it makes you non-competitive, leads to economic crisis, you cannot isolate yourself from the global market, and so on and so forth. I think this is maybe one of the keys to our situation. How again possibility and impossibility are distributed. You know, you can have two women at the same time, but you cannot change the economic laws a little bit even, no? It is crucial to distinguish clearly here between two impossibilities. The impossible real of a social antagonism and the impossibility on which the predominant ideological field focuses. Today, the ruling ideology endeavors to make us accept the impossibility of a radical change, in order to render invisible the impossible real of the antagonism which cuts across capitalist societies. This impossible is not an a priori limitation which should realistically be taken into account, but it is precisely the domain of strong acts, of interventions which change the coordinates of a situation. An act is more than an intervention into the domain of the possible based on strategic calculations. An act changes the very coordinates of what is possible, and thus, this is for me one of the nice philosophical definitions of an act: an authentic act is something which retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility. So what does this mean? Again, my eternal question. The problem is how to avoid the alternative of radical social explosions which end in defeat and which are unable to stabilize themselves in a new order. You know, Antonio Gramsci, who was often mentioned these days, I would like to recall something where I'm sympathetic to him. Some of you probably know, if you know Gramsci, that he was publishing his texts, before he was imprisoned in the early twenties, in a communist journal called Il Nuovo Ordine, the New Order. I find this fascinating because, as we all know, from the thirties onwards, this signifier was totally kidnapped by extreme right even. If you say today New Order, well, we immediately know where you stand. I claim maybe if there is a chance for communism to be more than this fleeting dream of emancipatory explosions, maybe we should reappropriate it. So again, why? I want to refer briefly mention another Gramsci's thought, which I think perfectly describes, much more than his time, our situation. You know, it goes something like in a moments of transition when the old is dying, but the new didn't yet form itself, strange terrifying monsters, apparitions are born. I think this is our situation. In what sense? Peter Sloterdijk, definitely not one of us but maybe not a complete idiot, Sloterdijk remarked that if there is a person to whom they will build monuments years from now in the future, it will be Lee Kuan Yew, the Singapore leader who invented and realized the so-called capitalism with Asian values. The virus of this capitalism is slowly but surely spreading around the globe. And I think this change has a world-historical meaning. Till now, let's be frank, there was one good argument for capitalism. It seemed inextricably linked with democracy. And whatever we thinks about the limitations of democracy, this was something. You know, you had years of dictatorship, South Korea, Chile, but at the end, the system did generate a kind of a push towards democracy. And I think this is perhaps what is so unsettling about today's China. The suspicion that the vicious combination of the Asian knout and the European stock market, this is Trotsky's characterization of the Russian Empire, will prove itself to be economically more efficient than our liberal capitalism. I effectively think that those liberals who think oh, give the Chinese another years, there will be a new Tiananmen and they will be in democracy, they're simply wrong. What we have today is a capitalism much more dynamic and efficient than our Western capitalism but definitely with no need for democracy. It's not only China, it's Singapore, and so on and so forth. So why this re-emergence of direct non-democratic authority? Above and beyond all cultural differences, of course we should drop this stupid racist idea oh, the Eastern idiots in whose nature is authoritarian regime, there is, I think, an inner necessity for this resurgence of direct authority. The protest focused against its struggle against what was perceived as the three pillars of capitalism: factory, school, family. As the result, each domain was submitted to post-industrial transformation. Factory work is more and more outsourced or, in the developed world, reorganized along the post-Fordist non-hierarchic interactive team work. You know as they say, everything is autopoietic, there is no master, no servant and so on. Permanent flexible privatized education is more and more replacing universal public education. Multiple forms of flexible sexual arrangements are replacing the traditional family. But are we any better? The left lost in its very victory. The direct enemy was defeated, at least here, like we no longer have strong such a strong patriarchy and so on, but replaced by a new form of even more direct capitalist domination. In postmodern capitalism, market is invading new spheres which were hitherto considered the privileged domain of the state, from education to prison and security. Now, to grasp these new forms of privatization, one should, I think, critically transform Marxist conceptual apparatus. When due to the crucial role of what Marx called general intellect, knowledge and social cooperation, when due to the crucial role of general intellect in the creation of wealth, forms of wealth are more and more, as I quote Marx from Grundrisse, "out of all proportion to the direct labor time spent on their production," end of quote, the result is not as Marx expected, the self-dissolution of capitalism, but the gradual relative transformation of profit generated by the exploitation of labor force into rent appropriated by those who privatized the general intellect. That is to say, because of his neglect of the social dimension of general intellect, that's another analysis, but it's typical how whenever Marx talks about general intellect, he all of a sudden, grammatically even, regresses to singular. It's der Mensch, der Arbeiter, suddenly society disappears. Marx didn't envisage, I claim, the possibility of the privatization of the general intellect itself. And this, I think, is what is at the core of today's struggle for intellectual property. Within this frame, exploitation in the classical Marxist sense is no longer possible. Which is why it has to be enforced more and more by direct legal measures. That is to say, by a non-economic force. And here direct authority is needed. It is needed, for example, to impose the totally arbitrary legal conditions for extracting rent, conditions which are no longer spontaneously generated by market. For example, how did Bill Gates become, he is no longer, the richest man in the world? His wealth have, I claim, nothing to do with the production costs of what Microsoft is selling. One can even argue that Microsoft is paying its workers a relatively high salary. So again, Gates', Bill Gates' wealth is not the result of his success in producing good software for lower prices than his competitors, or in higher exploitation of his hired intellectual workers. Microsoft, through different strategies, simply imposed itself as an almost universal standard, almost monopolizing the field, a kind of direct embodiment of the general intellect. Bill Gates became the richest man in a couple of decades through appropriating the rent for allowing millions of intellectual workers to participate in the form of the general intellect that he privatized and controls. So again, we are paying here what? To participate in the general intellect, to be able to communicate with each other. The same goes up to a point for natural resources. Their exploitation is one of the great sources of rent today, accompanied by the permanent struggle for who will get this rent: the third-world people or Western corporations. To provoke my leftist friends, I try, I always try to emphasize, to provoke them, how if you apply strictly the standard Marxist theory to today's relations between Venezuela and United States, sorry to tell you, Chávez is exploiting the Americans. Because Marx is very emphatic in Capital that natural resources are not a source of value. And you know what he gives as an example? Oil, of course. So of course I'm not claiming this, that Chávez is exploiting Americans. What I am claiming is that if you want to conceptualize in what sense he is not exploiting them, you should change Marxism a little bit. In—so in this situation, our struggle should focus on those aspects which pose a threat to general intellect, to this transnational open space, to what ultimately Kant already called the public use of reason. Today, I will designate to you so that you will not tell what should we do since there is no revolutionary party, we have one pretty important struggle in Europe. The struggle against the ongoing Bologna reform of higher education, which is I claim one big concerted attack on the public use of reason. The underlying idea of this reform, and all the scandals we know like the—the abolition of the Middlesex philosophy department and so on, this is all part of this process. The idea of this reform is to the urge to subordinate high education to, as they put it, "the needs of society," to make it useful for the solution of concrete problems. So, the aim is to produce expert opinions which will resolve problems posed by social agents. What disappears here is simply thinking, in any authentic sense. Because I claim what thinking means, thinking doesn't only offer solutions to problems posed by society, which of course means state and capital, but to reflect on the very form of these problems, to reformulate them, to discern a problem in the very way we perceive a problem. The reduction of high education to the task of producing socially useful expert knowledge is the paradigmatic form of, again, what Kant called private use of reason in today's global capitalism. For example, the ruling ideology perceives a problem: poor idiotic Islamic and other nations are fundamentalists, and the struggle is between our Western enlightenment and how to win over our multicultural tolerance over against—against so-called fundamentalism. I agree, I don't like fundamentalist. I'm not one of those stupid leftists who think the enemy of my enemy is my friend, so hoo-hoo Al-Qaeda ultimately bombing United States and so on. But I'm saying something emphatically. The struggle between liberal-capitalist multiculturalism and—and—and so-called fundamentalism is a part of the inherent dynamic of global capitalism. As such, we should reject it. It's a—again, a disorientic notion, as my German friends would have put it. It's crucial to emphasize here no, we should change the very terms of the debate. Not, you know, if we use reason privately, then you get easily money from all state foundations on how to enlighten the stupid Arabs, how to—and so on, how to make the women refuse to be their—their—refuse their—how to—clitoridectomy and so on and so forth. No, the true question to be asked is—is why does global capitalist dynamic itself generate fundamentalism? To convince you that I am not talking stupid extreme leftist crap, let me make you an example which should make anything clear to you. Afghanistan. Sorry, but I am old enough to remember how forty years ago, Afghanistan, which is today, if you read the media, the very embodiment of crazy fundamentalism... Do you know that Afghanistan was the most enlightened of the Middle East Islamic states? It had a secular Western technocratic king, it had a very strong local communist party, it had extreme—I know it from that time, not now retroactively, extreme religious tolerance in Herat, the third city. Do you know that they had a custom that—there were three religions there, Islam, some Christians—no, or some Hindus, I don't know—and whatever, and the Buddhists—they had a habit of visiting each other's and so on and what happened then? Communists took power in order to save them, Soviet Union intervened in order to screw them, United States intervened and, as the result of this being caught in the global dynamics, Afghanistan became fundamentalist. It's not that they are stupid people sticking to their traditions. No, their tradition is to be, sorry to tell you, their tradition is to be almost secular, open, modern. That's the question. This is what you will not get with private use of reason. So again, it is crucial to link the ongoing push towards this streamlining the high education to the process of enclosing the commons of intellectual products, of privatizing general intellect. The capitalist modernity imposed the twin hegemony of legal ideology and education, state school system. Subjects were interpellated as patriotic free citizens, subjects of the legal order, while individuals were formed into legal subjects through the compulsory universal education. The gap was thus maintained between bourgeois and citizen, between the egotist utilitarian individual and the citoyen dedicated to universal interest of the state. And insofar as in the spontaneous ideology, ideology is limited to the universal sphere of citizenship, as they put it, "privately I just follow my interests, publicly when I fight for my state in politics, I'm in ideology," the very gap between ideology and non-ideology was thus transposed into ideology. What happened nonetheless after '68, I claim, in post-'68 capitalism, is that economy itself, the logic of market and competition, is imposing itself as the hegemonic ideology. For example, as I just mentioned in education, we are witnessing the gradual dismantling of the classic bourgeois school ideological state apparatus. The school system is less and less the compulsory network, elevated above market, organized directly by state, bearer of enlightened values, liberté, egalité, fraternité. On behalf of the sacred formula of "lower costs, high efficiency." When I read this, I—I get a Goebbels' reaction: I draw my gun. It is progressively penetrated by different forms of—the famous formula is PPP: Public-Private Partnership. Then in the very organization and legitimization of power, the electoral system is more and more conceived on the model of market competition. Elections are a commercial exchange where voters buy the option which offers to do the most—in the most efficient way the job of maintaining social order, and so on and so forth. On behalf of the same formula, lower costs, higher efficiency, even some functions which should be, I think at least, the exclusive domain of the state, like running prisons, are more and more privatized. Not only prisons, but like the army is no longer based on universal conscription, but composed of hired mercenaries. As the example of Berlusconi makes it clear in Italy, even the state bureaucracy is no longer perceived as a kind of Hegelian universal—universal class. So, quite logically, insofar as economy is considered the sphere of non-ideology, this brave new world of global commodification considers itself post-ideological. But I claim of course the ideological state apparatuses are here more than ever. However, insofar as ideology is located into subjects in contrast to utilitarian individuals, this hegemony of the economic sphere appears as the absence of ideology. What this means is not that ideology simply directly reflects economy. We, I claim, fully remain within ideological state apparatuses. Economy functions here as an ideological model, in contrast to real economic life, which definitely does not follow the idealized liberal market models. So again, this is another crucial thing. We should never forget what—when we attack market, that what we are attacking is an ideology. It's not at all what great powers, United States are doing. They are as protectionist as they want, they have stronger and stronger state interventions, and so on and so forth. So again... it's not too much that I have, so... I perceive you as that domina who whips me and please don't yet start yet, yes. So, what kind of shift in the function of ideology does this self-erasure of ideology imply? How does ideology function in a non-ideological way? I'm sorry if some of you will know this line of thought, but it's crucial, so I will nonetheless repeat it. Here, I think one should fully assert with all my criticism of Marx, the actuality of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism, Warenfetischismus. You know, it's fashionable to say oh, that's the old naive Marx. No, read it closely, but with naive openness. What is Marx saying there? Something extremely interesting. He says fetishism is not the obvious illusion concealing reality. Marx is not saying, for example, money is in reality just a social object, part of social interaction, but we mysteriously perceive money as a magic object with a property whatever. No, as Marx makes it clear if you read him closely, he says money is just a condensation of social relations. And we know it. Most of us. I mean if you ask a typical bourgeois subject, he will not say oh, money is my fetish it's... no, he will say money is just a piece of paper giving you the right to the social product. So where is fetishism? In social reality itself. Fetishism is in how—what we are, in how we act. And that's something that I still find fascinating. When Marx says, you know his famous formula from Capital, "Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es"—they don't know it, but they are doing it. He is not saying the enlightenment stupidity, you know, ha-ha, you are doing one thing, but you don't know what you are doing, you are thinking another thing. No, Marx is saying what you don't know is the illusion you are following, you are practicing in your reality. So we have a wonderful distinction between your subjective opinion, the way things appear to you, and how should I put it, the way things really appear to you, embodied in reality. And this, I think, is the key more than ever to today's ideology. The key term here was invented by—proposed by my Austrian friend Robert Pfaller. I hope you know it, you should read his book, Die Illusionen der anderen, the term of interpassivity. It's a wonderful idea of how it's not only this Hegelian List der Vernunft where we are active through others. We can also be passive through others in the sense that what we transpose onto others is our passivity itself. Passive reactions and so on. You know, it's no longer this idea I sit back, others do the work with me, but I work crazy all the time, others can be passive for me. For example, traditional example, my preferred one, you know in Tibet, these prayer wheels, no? You write your prayer on a paper, put it in, you turn it around, and then you can think about sex, whatever, but objectively you pray. Now you will say ha-ha, primitive society. Sorry to tell you, in our societies, we are exactly the same. Let me mention what I always mention, canned laughter. You know the stupid TV series, Cheers, Friends, where the laughter is part of the soundtrack. Can you imagine the paradox of it? I come home late in the evening tired as a dog, I look at TV, I don't laugh, just "eh", and at the end I feel released, relieved. Why? TV set has taken over the laughter, it did it for me. And what I claim is that belief can function in an exactly same way. Our society is penetrated by objective beliefs. Nobody believes but belief functions. You know this classical example: you have a—a son, it's Sunday afternoon, you want—and oh, sorry, it's Christmas time and I ask you "Do you believe in Santa Claus?". You say "No, I'm not an idiot, of course not, I pretend to for my son." Then I ask your son, he will say "Oh, I'm not an idiot, of course it's not, but I pretend to believe not to disappoint my parents" and so on and so forth. But it doesn't matter, it functions as a belief. And I claim, now I will stop here, I developed this in my book, but I think this is crucial, that this is how in our—this is for me cynical functioning of ideology in post-ideological world. Nobody has to believe, it's even better if you don't believe, but belief still socially functions. Sorry to repeat another joke which is even better known, but it exemplifies so perfectly what I want to say, this old—I know you know it, I'm sorry—Niels Bohr anecdote. You know, when he was visited by a friend in a countryside house and the friend saw there a horseshoe, this superstitious item which allegedly keeps the evil spirits out of the house. And the friend asked Niels—Niels Bohr of Copenhagen, no, "But you are a scientist, why do you have this superstitious object there? Do you believe in it?" The friend answered—no, sorry, Niels Bohr answered, "Of course I don't believe in it, I'm not stupid, I'm a scientist." Then "But why do you have it there?" Niels Bohr gave a perfect answer, no wonder he was a reader of Kierkegaard also. He said "I don't believe in it, of course, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it." That's democracy today. We are all cynical, but we somehow believe it works without you believing in it. Now let's go, it's soon, I'll be—let's make the next step. What—what kind of political space does this post-ideological cynical universe imply? Here I get really worried. As you will probably hear from our good friend Tamás tomorrow morning, in Western and Eastern Europe, there are signs of a long-term rearrangement of the political space. Till recently, our political space was dominated by two main parties which addressed the entire electoral body: a right-of-center party, Christian Democrats, liberal conservative people, whatever People's Party, and the left-of-center party, socialist, social-democratic, progressive liberal, whatever you want, with smaller parties addressing a more narrow electorate, ecologists and so on. Now, I claim, there is progressively emerging one party which stands for capitalism as such, usually with relative tolerance towards abortion, gay rights, religious and ethnic minorities, and so on. And opposed to this party is a stronger and stronger anti-immigrant populist party, which on its fringes is accompanied, sometimes even merged with direct racist neo-fascist groups. There are clear cases here. For example, from what I know in Poland, now ex-socialist communist disappeared, you have Donald Tusk, a pure liberal, and then you have the Tweedledee and Tweedledum—okay, one of them is dead now, it's only Tweedledee, okay—the Kaczyński brothers, nationalists. And Berlusconi in Italy did something unique: he simply united the two. He is global capitalism and at the same time populism. Again here we use, we need private use—sorry, public use of reason to to see that this is a deadlock. Only the left will be able to break this deadlock. If our political space will remain to be determined by this opposition, and then liberals can endlessly blackmail us, you know: "Okay, we have small differences, but my god, against those who are against abortions, against gay marriage, we should be all together," and so on and so forth. We are lost if we if we subscribe to this deadlock. So again, how how can we break up this? Are we nonetheless condemned to this? It is here that I have just two, three pages, so... no, I have bad conscience. It is here that I think, I know I will create myself many friends—many enemies here, that the originality of the Western thought enters. The West—I'm Eurocentrist, I admit it—in its three great historical ruptures. The wager of Western thought is that radical negativity, whose first and immediate political expression is egalitarian terror, is not condemned to remain a short ecstatic outburst after which things have to return to normal run. On the contrary, radical negativity, this undermining of every traditional hierarchic order, can articulate itself into a new positive order in which it acquires the stability of a new form of life. This is for me the meaning, and I'm a total atheist, of course, of the Holy Spirit in Christianity. Faith can not only be expressed in, but exists as the collective of believers. This faith is in itself based on terror. Now you'll ask me "but where is revolutionary terror there?". It is, remember Christ's words which are crucial for me: "I bring sword, I bring fire, not peace. If you don't hate your mother, your father, you are not my follower." This is the true meaning of Christian love your neighbor. If you don't act, I love my neighbor but I hate basically all neighbors insofar as they are father, mother and so on, you are not a Christian. So again, it failed, but the original idea of Christianity was an egalitarian social link which cancels the hierarchic order. Now this may surprise you, but another example of such an egalitarian link based on terror is democracy itself. The democratic axiom is that the place of power is empty. There is no one who is directly qualified for this post, either by tradition, charisma, or by his or her expert and leadership properties. This is why before democracy can enter the state, terror has to do its work. Forever dissociating the place of power from any natural or directly qualified pretender. The gap between—sorry—the achievement of democracy is to turn what is in traditional authoritarian power structure the moment of its greatest crisis, the moment of transition when for a moment the throne is empty, this moment always causes panic in authoritarian regimes, into the very resort of its strength. Democratic elections are the moment of passing through the zero point when the complex network of social links is dissolved into the purely quantitative multiplicity of voting individuals. So the moment of terror, of the dissolution of all hierarchic links is thus re-enacted and transformed into the foundation of a new order. But today when we know the limitation of the formal democratic procedure, the question is: can we imagine a step further in this direction, of the reversal of egalitarian negativity into a new order? So again, it is not enough to remain faithful to the idea of communism. One has to locate in historical reality antagonisms which make this idea a practical urgency. So again, the only true question today is: do we endorse the predominant naturalization of capitalism, or does today's global capitalism contain strong enough antagonisms which prevent its indefinite reproduction? There are, I claim, at least four such antagonisms: the looming threat of ecological catastrophe, the inappropriateness of private property for the so-called intellectual products, the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments, especially in biogenetics and last but not least, new forms of apartheid, new walls, new slums. These forms all point towards what Hardt and Negri call commons, the shared substance of our social being, whose privatization is a violent act which should be also resisted if necessary with violent means. The commons of culture, the immediately socialized forms of cognitive capital, this is what intellectual property is about; the commons of external nature, threatened by pollution and exploitation; the commons of inner, our inner nature, the biogenetic inheritance of humanity. What all these struggles share is the awareness of the destructive potentials, up to the self-annihilation of humanity itself, if the capitalist logic of enclosing these commons is allowed a free run. Let me give you an example. The main—the main lesson to be learned from the threat of ecological catastrophe is that humankind should get ready to live in a much more, I hate this fashionable world but here it's meant literally, nomadic way. Local or global changes in environment will probably impose the need for unheard of large-scale social transformations. Let us say that a gigantic volcanic eruption will make the whole of island Iceland, sorry, the state, uninhabitable. Where will the people of Iceland move? Under what conditions? Furthermore, what if the northern Siberia will become more inhabitable and appropriate for agriculture, as some people claim that you will have all that frozen forest civilized, while large sub-Saharan regions will become too dry for a population to live there? How will the exchange of population be organized? When similar things happened in the past, social changes occurred in a wild spontaneous way, with violence and destruction. Such a prospect is impossible, self-destructive in today's condition with arms of mass destruction available soon to all nations. One thing is clear: national sovereignty will have to be radically redefined. New levels of global cooperation invented. And what about the immense changes in economy and consumption due to new weather patterns, shortages of water and so on? Through what process of decision will the required changement be decided and executed? So I claim, I don't have time to develop it, read my last book if you are more interested in it, that all these problems that we are confronting are basically the problems of the commons. And I'm not in a panic but nonetheless a little bit apocalyptic. In all these domains we are approaching a kind of slowly a kind of a zero point. Listen, I was three weeks ago in China. I spoke with the guy there, one of the bosses of their Academy of Sciences and he told me openly, he showed me the documents, that the Chinese state program, it's a big co-production between state and private capital is to not only developed biogenetic technology but to apply it to where basically they told me the long-term goal is to all the Chinese people with, now I quote their program, "the progressive regulation of the of the physical and psychic properties of the Chinese people." Now, the prospect is immense. I'm asking who will decide, how? It's absolutely clear that neither market nor the state will do it. Even look at the United States today. I'm—yeah, got your subtle body language, yeah. Look at the United States, you know where Obama whom I support disappointed me. How did he react to this immense catastrophe? We don't even know the the consequences of that oil spilling there. By playing the old state-regulating legal role: "I will kick in the ass the British Petroleum," and so on. You know, this is the liberal way: you find a culprit. Sorry but with such a great catastrophe, the first thing to say is it's ridiculous even to talk about how somebody will recover the costs. You cannot. Point two: it's not only—I defend—I pre—for some time wanted to write a text in defense of British Petroleum. Claiming that do you know that they are all using the same the same machines and so on? It's pure chance by mistake that it happened there. Again we need here collective acts; neither the market nor the state will do it. Of course, and now... of course what the—now here lies nonetheless the true danger. I am not saying that—"Sorry?" "It's not true what you're saying, because BP completely disregarded all security measures." I know, I know all the data, my god. I know all the data, because a friend of a friend of mine works for some American agency. They did first—first he told me that they looked into other companies and found it yeah, yeah, yeah, but you know what I mean. They don't now put all—you know, of course they are maybe the worst, but it's the logic of the system which compelled them to be this. You know, it's like I wanted to write another crazy article. He is guilty that I am longer, yeah. You know that guy, that crook who stole billion? I wanted to write in defense of what was his name? Bernard, Bernie Madoff. Yeah, the way they put the even with an anti-Semitic tone, to put blame on him. Sorry, he just embodied at its purest the logic of the system. And it was almost for me anti-Semitic: ah, now we find him, a dirty Jew who cheated us all. But nonetheless let me just finish. The—I think that capitalism will be forced, that—this will be the result of this last financial crisis, to deal with these three sets of problems, to somehow organize itself. And I claim, that's my conclusion, the choice will be communism or socialism. To survive, capitalism will have to become socialist. The reason I don't like the term socialism is that well, already the well-known Otto Weininger wrote: "Socialism is Aryan, communism is Jewish", no? That is to say, socialism always has this principle of, potentially of organic unity, cooperation and so on and so forth. So this is my answer to liberals who fear "you as a communist want some dictatorship and so on". No, what I'm saying is—those who claim "oh, you as a communist are utopian". No, there is only one utopia, true utopia today. The utopia is that the thing the things the way they are, our precious welfare state can go on indefinitely. I claim that, and I'm not talking about years. I'm cynical like you: if you tell me in years we will have trouble, I will say f- off, like I will be dead, I don't care. I'm talking about years. Maximum. Where all these problems will explode and this will be the real harsh choice. Either a kind of—either we will all have some kind of, it's already starting in Italy and so on, some kind of Asian values capitalism. Of course it will be Westernized but basically the same. A kind of a newly segregated state with—you know, it will not be the old authoritarianism. It will be something like Berlusconi is crucial, I think, or did you see that wonderful film, years old, Terry Gilliam, Brazil? He got it for the first time that new forms of authorities will be what is Berlusconi, like Groucho Marx in power. You know, a regime which doesn't directly terrorize you but all the authoritarian structure—it will be that. And capitalism will have to re-socialize itself in a new authoritarian way. Or we do it in a communist way. Thank you very much.