Demanding the Impossible

by Slavoj Zizek

  In all these domains, I think, we can find proletarian positions. Frankly, I don’t see any easy way out. But it’s clear that the liberal capitalist way will not work. This became evident after the 2008 crisis. Everybody would agree with it now. It’s also clear that, in ecology, old-fashioned state regulation will not work. Communism proved that state communism, the way it was, will not work. If there is something clear, it was that communism was even worse ecologically. It’s incredible how much worse communism was in that respect.

  These are problems of the commons, the resources we collectively own or share. The commons contains nature, biogenetics, intellectual property. So when intellectual property is appropriated by private property we have a new enclosure of the commons. This has given a new boost to capitalism, but in the long term, it will not work. It’s out of control.

  17

  Intrusion of the Excluded into the Socio-Political Space

  Particularly in Latin American countries, there have been various attempts to solve the problem of exclusion. Could we find the possibility of emancipatory politics of some sort there? Will it just end up as a failed Latin American populism?

  SŽ: There is another problem here. People often take me to be against democracy. I was in England during the 2005 elections when the Labour Party won. And you know what happened? A week before the elections, there was a big TV talk show on the BBC and people were voting about “who is the most hated person in Britain?” Tony Blair won. But a week later, he won the election. This is a very dangerous sign for me. Obviously there is some strong level of dissatisfaction, which cannot be captured by the electoral system. I’m not against democracy. The point is not to criticize democracy in the sense that we need an authoritarian regime. The key is to ask questions about the representative democracy we have today: is it still able to capture the social discontent or formulate the relevant public demands? Or is it getting more and more sterile? We should search for solutions.

  In Latin America, for example, the solution they give is to combine representative democracy (the model of Lula or Morales) with social movements. If we vote, do we really even debate what is needed to make big economic decisions, like world trade agreements or crucial economic agreements like NAFTA in the United States? Nobody votes about that. Specialists give you their opinions in a way you cannot judge. But, somehow, the decision is made by them. What we vote about are mostly stupid cultural matters: immigrants, abortion, and all that stuff. This should worry us. It will create an explosive situation. Even after democratic multiparty elections that have been fairly fought, there can still be an extreme level of dissatisfaction which explodes. It’s a big challenge. And it’s time to start questioning whether this system is really what we aspire to? And if even the experts often cheat, are they really honest?

  Another thing that worries me is the reason why China weathered this financial crisis much more easily than elsewhere. The great danger is that all of a sudden, because of its virtual nature, crisis erupts. What is needed more and more are big radical decisions. In the democracy we have now, it’s difficult. You have to go through all the mechanisms. But I read a book on China, which is very critical of China, but which nonetheless admits that, when the fiasco happened in 2008, the banks generally put a limit on borrowing because people were not paying back loans, and it was this that eventually pushed the economy further down. But in China, the communist political power bureau gave an order: “No, you should give people even more credit.” And it worked perfectly. It is somehow very sad to discover that authoritarian power is much more efficient in these conditions. It also worries me that capitalism is entering a state in which it can still be formally seen as a democracy, but it’s really just a ritual, where an actual authoritarian power will work better.

  There was one very good argument for capitalism. Let’s be frank. Until now, capitalism has always inextricably generated a demand for democracy. It’s true there were, from time to time, episodes of direct dictatorship, but, after a decade or two, democracy again imposed itself – like in South Korea or in Chile after Pinochet. But then, things started to move. But I wonder if this so-called “capitalism with Asian values,” a Chinese-Singaporean authoritarian capitalism, is not a new form of capitalism, which is economically even more dynamic. It’s productive and it functions even better. But it doesn’t generate a long-term demand for democracy. Now, however, the link between democracy and capitalism has been broken.

  I really think that this is what should worry us, this big divorce slowly developing between democracy and today’s capitalism: the success of Chinese communist-run capitalism is an ominous sign that the marriage between capitalism and democracy is approaching a divorce. And here, I’m not into leftist paranoia saying that this is some kind of dark plot. I think it is economic logic itself. How to get out of this problem is a big task. I don’t have any easy solutions. I just see the problem and urge everyone to look for the solution.

  Some of my friends are enthusiastic about Latin American populism. But I am rather skeptical about it as a right solution. I think Chávez was getting crazy and going down and down. Now it’s developing slowly into this typical Latin American populism, with a strong leader who made rather strange, eccentric decisions. And it became embarrassing. Chávez prohibited some songs as being dangerous for the morals of the young. And he forced the public station to play some Catholic melodrama. It’s simply losing the edge. He became a total, omnipotent leader. He had talk shows: Aló Presidente Práctico and Aló Presidente Teórico. He discussed theory with the people. Alas, I don’t believe in Latin American populism and I think this will ruin it.

  Lula was much more efficient. Here I agree with Negri: Lula is more interesting than Chávez. He succeeded, in an almost wonderful way, in keeping things within a democratic framework. He didn’t mess with capitalism too much, so it worked, but at the same time he did create a lot for the poor and middle classes. It’s incredible to see how much poverty was abolished. Negri is right. Lula followed one of the formulas: one was a purely party democratic system. But he had a problem with his smaller parties, on which he had to rely, so what did he do? Corruption. He systematically paid the small parties to support his power in Parliament. I also would have done the same – it’s dirty, but it works.

  But when everybody knew and tried to stop him, he did something that was really genius. He and his government collaborated with various social movements – for example, ecologist, workers, and farmers. So the government is related not only to the parties, but also to participatory movements. And this brought a new dynamic. It is a dialectical relation between government and social movements. The political axis was not only rooted in the party structure within the government, but was also in constant dialogue, exchanging pressure and cooperation with these movements. The miracle is that he didn’t screw it up. Economically it worked. So maybe in the short term this is one of the possible models. Somehow all these civil society movements should think not just about organizing a big demonstration once a year in Trafalgar square or wherever, but about engaging in a more active cooperation. Maybe this is what can work. I don’t have any better formulas here.

  18

  Rage Capital and Risk-Taking Revolutionar y Changes

  Does activism arise when people feel secure enough to take political risks? For example 1968, during a time of global economic expansion. Or does it take place when people are in severe pain or the rage capital is high enough? What accounts for today’s relative passivity in many industrialized countries: too little security and contentedness, or too much?

  SŽ: This is a very good question. But I’m still a pessimist. One thing that I don’t believe is the simple causality whereby people living in a really bad situation end up by exploding. No, I think it’s much more complicated. If you look at all successful revolutions, they usually happen when power is already weakening. Let’s take a great anti-communist uprising that occurred in 1956 in Hungary. When Imre Nagy was prime minister, lib
eralization was already taking place. Also, look at the French Revolution. The king was already losing power by 1785 and they overthrew him when they started to perceive his position as unjustified. Here the shift was purely ideological. Revolutions sometimes do happen, maybe in times of chaos. But they usually happen when there’s neither a war nor chaos. Revolutions happen under two conditions: in times of poverty, and when justice breaks down. Yet the two are not necessarily connected. Usually in order to realize that your situation is unjust, you must at least experience a certain ideological freedom. Because the first step toward freedom is to become aware of your situation – the situation of injustice and unfairness.

  Let’s look at how feminism started. The feminist movement began not with an attempt to liberate women but with women becoming aware that what they traditionally experienced as a normal situation – being limited to the family and serving their husbands – was not a natural hierarchy but rather a violation of justice. So under what conditions does the revolution occur? The first step in liberation is that you perceive that your situation is unjust. This already is the inner freedom.

  This is how we approach the revolutionary situation – as in Egypt now. We have, as you know, all these ideologies of development, globalization, and so on. In the case of globalization, it is very dangerous in a way for capitalism. Imagine an Indian farmer. When he was starving there, totally isolated, why should he rebel? Now he is in contact with the world, seeing what is happening around the world, and he knows what economic development looks like. Not only this, but the official ideology of development – saying that we all should have an equal opportunity – creates expectations. Even in Egypt, if you look at it closely, the correct analysis wasn’t that Mubarak was an absolute dictator. I spoke with some people there and learned that there was a small group of people who were allowed to criticize the regime a little bit, and some were not.

  So, again, with regard to safety, I think, in order to articulate your rage, you should feel minimally safe. Because, if you don’t have a feeling of minimal safety, you will not risk showing your rage. This is the way I see the strategy, which was very dirty, that the Mubarak regime took a few days before the revolution. They basically withdrew the police and stopped the trains, because they wanted to create a totally insecure environment – but of course it didn’t work, because people showed enough solidarity.

  And it’s a very typical process that all enemies of democracy, like the conservatives in the United States, focus on. They often say that Egypt is approaching chaos. But, here, things are much more paradoxical. Revolutionary changes don’t happen when things are at their worst. Take North Korea, for example. What they need is a minimal openness; people becoming aware of their situation and then the government starting to compromise a little bit. This is why they know they have to remain isolated. Here I also agree with those American liberals who claim that Reagan and Bush were the idiots who kept Castro in power. I entirely believe the statements of liberals who claim that when the United States was saying “You all go to Cuba, it’s a wonderful country,” hundreds of thousands of Americans, out of curiosity, went to Cuba, so then either Castro would have had to stop this, or it would have all exploded. So this is why, as Herbert Marcuse of the Frankfurt School once put it very nicely in his essay on liberation, “freedom is the condition of liberation.” In order to liberate yourself, you must be free. Even in revolution, it goes the same way.

  19

  Café Revolution

  If we could presuppose the minimal safety and freedom, what should the leftist revolution aim for?

  SŽ: Again, this is a very good question. I think that we leftists shouldn’t simply believe in chaos. We shouldn’t say – you know, all this horrible leftist strategy – “the worse it is or the more chaotic it is, the better it is.” The problem is that when the situation is totally desperate, especially in a situation where you don’t have to organize opposition, it’s much more probable that some dictator or new authoritarian figure will emerge.

  You probably didn’t experience the war, but I did. I can tell you that it’s not nice at all to live in that kind of situation. It’s nice to go on a demonstration and then go and sit in a cafeteria and discuss the demonstration and so on. To see the public order disintegrate is not a nice thing. This is why I think that, if you want revolution, you should be a part of law and order. There’s nothing dishonorable about people wanting basic security. My god, I like to feel safe. Horrible things happen if you don’t have this basic law and order.

  So again, I claim, things are not as dangerous as we may think. And people believe that the police are usually much more efficient and aligned in authoritarian countries. But this is the myth of strong authoritarian countries. “OK, you don’t have freedom, but at least there’s order and the police provide security.” No, it’s not like that! This is why I like to read the history books about everyday life under Stalinism. Beneath the surface, it was extremely violent and chaotic. When somebody beat you, you couldn’t do anything. This is a paradox. If you were raped, for example, under Stalinism, and you went to the police station, you know what they would tell you? “Sorry, we cannot take your case. Because we have to report that there is less and less crime in the statistics. If we take cases like yours, it would ruin our statistics.” They were simply corrupted.

  I never much liked the 1960s, but when I spoke with my friends in France, they used to say that the most beautiful moment in May ’68 was when you came in a car from the suburbs, parked it to the north of Notre Dame Cathedral, and walked across the river; then you demonstrated, sometimes burning some cars, but not caring because it’s not your car, and then, in the evening, you went north and sat in the café, and debated over coffee. Doesn’t this sound interesting?

  If there is a lesson from so-called postmodern, post-’68 capitalism, it’s that the regulatory role of the state is getting stronger. This was the point of my fight with Simon Critchley. I think it’s too easy to say that state power is corrupted, so let’s withdraw into this role of ethical critic of power, etc.

  But here I’m almost a conservative Hegelian. How many things have to function in order for something to be done? Laws, manners, rules: these are what make us feel truly free. I don’t think that people are aware of this fact. That was the hypocrisy of many leftists there: their target was the whole structure of the state apparatus of power. But we still need to count on all the state apparatus functioning.

  So my vision is not some utopian community without a state. We can call it the state or whatever, but more than ever what we actually need are certain organisms of social power and its distribution. Today’s world is so complex. If you want to build a company today, you have to be very deeply entwined with the state apparatus – more and more so. This is why I was always deeply distrustful of those libertarian socialists who claim: “We just want local communal organization.” I don’t believe in that. I always try to enumerate how many things have to function at a state level so that they could do their so-called “local self-management or communal organization.”

  I think that the left should drop this model of immediate transparent democracy. It cannot be globalized in order to function. It needs a very strong state apparatus, which regulates things. If not, things will happen, as you can see today, just like capitalism which is getting so chaotic, especially in the third world.

  What fascinates me, therefore, is the idea that we the left should now take over this ideology: “We are the true law and order. We are the true morality.” I very much like this idea of the left taking this position. And my position is that we have to engage wherever we can and do whatever is possible. And all this is what I think we miss in today’s left.

  20

  To Begin From the Beginning

  What does it mean to be the moral majority and to represent law and order? What then is today’s left missing? What will be the moral obligation of the left today?

  SŽ: Well, concerning civility or publi
c morality, you can now see what’s happening in art. For any art exhibition in London, for example, to be effective, it must do something disgusting: show some dead fish or the excrement of cows. At one exhibition, my god, they showed a video of a colonoscopy. Today, more and more, the cultural-economic apparatus itself has to incite stronger and more shocking effects and products. These are the recent trends in arts. But the thing is that transgressive excess is losing its shock value. I don’t think these transgressive things shock people any more. They have become, to such an extent, part of the system – the operation of today’s capitalism. The apparent radicality of some postmodern trends should not deceive us here. So the transgressive model should no longer be our model.

  There was a famous scandal in New York almost 10 years ago – a notorious scandal concerning the exhibition “Andres Serrano: Works 1983–93” at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. Many people find his work “Piss Christ,” which depicts a crucifix immersed in urine, subversive. But why is this subversive? No! I tried to oppose him. Then he told me that, in this way, he could undermine our standard notion of decency. But I told him “OK, but what’s the point? I can film myself shitting in a disgusting way. Then people would say this is subversive. Mr. Žižek started to problematize the notion of disgust!” But why should I problematize this? Some things are simply disgusting. I don’t think this is a bourgeois plot or the proletarian reappropriation of high culture, or whatever.