Thus Spake Slavoj Zizek

Zizek here in the London Review of Books (via 3 Quarks Daily).

According to liberal communist ethics, the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity: charity is part of the game, a humanitarian mask hiding the underlying economic exploitation. Developed countries are constantly ‘helping’ undeveloped ones (with aid, credits etc), and so avoiding the key issue: their complicity in and responsibility for the miserable situation of the Third World. As for the opposition between ‘smart’ and ‘non-smart’, outsourcing is the key notion. You export the (necessary) dark side of production – disciplined, hierarchical labour, ecological pollution – to ‘non-smart’ Third World locations (or invisible ones in the First World). The ultimate liberal communist dream is to export the entire working class to invisible Third World sweat shops.

We should have no illusions: liberal communists are the enemy of every true progressive struggle today. All other enemies – religious fundamentalists, terrorists, corrupt and inefficient state bureaucracies – depend on contingent local circumstances. Precisely because they want to resolve all these secondary malfunctions of the global system, liberal communists are the direct embodiment of what is wrong with the system. It may be necessary to enter into tactical alliances with liberal communists in order to fight racism, sexism and religious obscurantism, but it’s important to remember exactly what they are up to.

Etienne Balibar, in La Crainte des masses (1997), distinguishes the two opposite but complementary modes of excessive violence in today’s capitalism: the objective (structural) violence that is inherent in the social conditions of global capitalism (the automatic creation of excluded and dispensable individuals, from the homeless to the unemployed), and the subjective violence of newly emerging ethnic and/or religious (in short: racist) fundamentalisms. They may fight subjective violence, but liberal communists are the agents of the structural violence that creates the conditions for explosions of subjective violence. The same Soros who gives millions to fund education has ruined the lives of thousands thanks to his financial speculations and in doing so created the conditions for the rise of the intolerance he denounces.

This entire essay needs parsing, which I'm not motivated enough to do. But I can make a few points here.

Zizek's basic claim takes the framework of critical theory and its emphasis on capitalism as appropriative of themes from its nemeses, appropriating them into itself in order to control their meaning. The standard "everything that is solid melts into air" idea. To this extent, Balibar's "subjective violence" may even be useful to the extent that it reinforces the bases for structural violence. Thus, the argument is to attack the disease rather than treat symptoms, the latter which merely echoes the activities of "liberal communists."

Agreed, although the term "liberal communists" is, in its supposed irony, simply misleading. It concretizes the dualism we ought to be confronting - that between what's possible in the world here, now, and how those possibilities can be both criticized and marshalled in the name of shared evolving ideals. It's a cliché to say that "charity" is a kind of assuaging of guilt. It may be true, but the cliché does little to advance criticism and dialogue on the problem Zizek clearly wants open to criticism and dialogue. We can be critical of double-speakers, and ought to be, but we need a better analysis of just what kind of problem we wish to solve and how we go about solving it.

How does the latter happen? First, we should move away from thinking that capital has some sort of autonomous internal and historical logic. We don't need to set up the problem of class exploitation in terms of dialectical materialism. We can set it up in terms of the obstacles that exploitation (and exclusion, racism, sexism, etc.) construct for broader social intelligence and human growth that places such restrictions on membership to the club of those engaged in social criticism and reconstruction.

So, treating the symptoms is crucial. Yes, the symptoms vary due to local contingencies, but we can't say that they're not universal due to these variations. They form the structural conditions. Zizek has this backwards. He has it backwards because he's looking for some sort of imminent universal logic for the structural conditions of globalization. The worst parts of globalization just are these contingent particulars posing as universals. To call them secondary is to miss entirely the role of local contingencies backed by very real power.

When we move to actual politics rather than a politics that relies on logics of history, we ought to take it as a symptom of something rather positive that the global elite that currently runs the planet has any sense of social responsibility, not to mention one in which class plays an important role. This is a result not simply of a kind of elitist psychotherapy, but of real socio-political pressure brought to bear on the supposed "secondary malfunctions."

One wonders what contribution Zizek himself makes. Lacanian psychoanalysis or the reconstruction of dialectical materialism is at least as elitist and prophetic a political project as the actions of those he derides. The particular form these analyses take is one that reinstantiates the battle over putative structure rather than the battle over the importance of secondary malfunctions of structure which, in fact, constitute "structure."

Progressive politics runs aground on its own intellectualism when it engages politics at the level of broader "structure." Progressive politics ought to be about intellectual and practical agility, solving concrete problems where they arise by looking for causes and consequences. If the cause is "capital," then the only answer is revolution. That's not going to happen, and such politics are the road to despair.