Comradely Greetings

by Slavoj Zizek

  One cannot but note the cruel irony of this contrast between Berardi and Hardt/Negri. Hardt and Negri celebrate “cognitive capitalism” as opening up a path towards “absolute democracy,” since the object, the “stuff,” of immaterial work is increasingly social relations themselves. Their wager is that this directly socialized, immaterial production not only renders owners progressively superfluous (who needs them when production is directly social, formally and in terms of its content?), but the producers also master the regulation of social space, since social relations (politics) is the stuff of their work: economic production directly becomes political production, the production of society itself. Berardi’s conclusion is the exact opposite: far from bringing out the potential transparency of social life, today’s “cognitive capitalism” makes it more impenetrable than ever, undermining the very conditions of any form of collective solidarity among the “cognitariat.” What is symptomatic here is the way the same conceptual apparatus leads to two radically opposed conclusions.

  If we are not able to step outside the compulsion of the system, the gap between the frantic dynamics it imposes and our corporeal and cognitive limitations sooner or later brings about a fall into depression. Berardi makes this point apropos his friend Félix Guattari, who, in theory, preached a gospel of hyper-dynamic “de-territorialization,” while personally suffering from long bouts of depression:

  Actually the problem of depression and of exhaustion is never elaborated in an explicit way by Guattari. I see here a crucial problem of the theory of desire: the denial of the problem of limits in the organic sphere … The notion of the “body without organs” hints at the idea that the organism isn’t something that you can define, that the organism is a process of exceeding, of going beyond a threshold, of “becoming other.” This is a crucial point, but it’s also a dangerous point … What body, what mind is going through transformation and becoming? Which invariant lies under the process of becoming other? If you want to answer this question you have to acknowledge death, finitude, and depression.

  What can be done in a situation where demonstrations and protests prove to be of no use, where democratic elections fail to make any difference? According to Berardi, only withdrawal, passivity, and the abandonment of illusions can open up a new way: “Only self-reliant communities leaving the field of social competition can open a way to a new hope.” I, of course, do not follow him here, but I do share his skepticism about chaotic resistance. I am more and more convinced that what really matters is what happens the day after: can we convince the tired and manipulated crowds that we are not only ready to undermine the existing order, to engage in provocative acts of resistance, but are also able to offer the prospect of a new order?

  I think that Pussy Riot’s performances cannot be reduced to being just subversive provocations. Beneath the dynamics of your acts, there is the inner stability of a firm ethico-political attitude. Pussy Riot does not propose merely a Dionysian destabilization of the existing static order—in a deeper sense, it is today’s society that is caught in a crazy capitalist dynamic with no inner sense or measure, and it is Pussy Riot which de facto offers a stable ethico-political point. Pussy Riot’s very existence communicates to thousands the fact that opportunist cynicism is not the only option, that we are not totally disoriented, that there still is a common cause worth fighting for.

  So what I wish you is also good luck in our common cause. To be faithful to that cause means to be brave, especially today—and, as the old saying goes, fortune favors the brave!

  Yours,

  Slavoj

  “As I serve my ‘deuce’ in lockdown”

  Nadya to Slavoj, July 13, 2013

  Dear Slavoj,

  Let me start this letter out by drawing a distinction I find crucial to avoiding the pitfalls of fictive universalization.

  At the beginning of your letter, you caught yourself in a moment of male chauvinism. But I’m inclined to think you and I and our whole conversation are susceptible to a more justified—and so heavier—charge: that of a colonial perspective. What I mean is that we haven’t so far been accounting for regional differences and quirks in the operation of the economic and political mechanisms we’re discussing. This omission, this silence, feels suddenly shameful. Seduced by your arguments, I fell unreflectingly into the classic trap of exclusive and discriminatory universalization. And in the end, like anyone toying with unfounded universals, I excluded and discriminated against myself.

  The difference I feel a civic duty to stipulate is between how what you call “global capitalism” works in the US or Europe, and how that same capitalism works in Russia. From where I’m sitting as a political activist, not to address and problematize this distinction would amount to intellectual cowardice. I know that comparing Russia with a hypothetical “West” will always yield more questions than answers, and I guess that’s why, even though I would’ve loved to, I didn’t get into the distinction in my last letter (which I had to jot down quickly while at my sewing machine). I’d never have time to say as much as I was thinking, sitting here in jail in one of those Special Economic Zones, the zones of institutionalized exploitation.

  But recent political events have left me completely enraged: the appalling trial of Alexei Navalny and the Bolotnaya Square demonstrators,1 which has degraded all of Russia; the introduction of language into the Constitution of the Russian Federation limiting free speech; laws that protect the “faithful” from offense, while codifying inequalities between those of “traditional” and “non-traditional” sexual orientation. I have to speak out about my country’s political and economic practices. The last time I was so infuriated was October 2011, when Putin announced his third term. The rage, indignation, and steely determination I was feeling then led to the creation of Pussy Riot. What will such feelings lead to this time? Time will tell.

  I hope thinking through the specifics of Russia’s situation might be of some use to you.

  Who knows—it might be productive to consider the practices of a country where those who decide the fates of people, ideas, creative energies, and entrepreneurial and political initiatives consult not a meticulous, considered portrait of the situation, as in Europe, but rather a post-expressionist spasm of color. By contemplating the state that holds me in this labor camp, you might just answer your own perplexing questions about the creation of a stable, ethico-political feeling that can unite winds of discontent. If we want to understand the future of global capitalism, we need to consider its past. In the Russia of today, of Putin’s third term, a vintage politics is masquerading as new—global capitalism reenacting its past before our eyes.

  How exactly is this going to be useful?

  Again, I insist that even the most developed capitalist formulation presupposes hierarchization, normalization, and exceptions. You quote Marx saying that “constant revolutionizing of production [and] uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions … distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones.” Agreed, we see upheavals in all social relations, but they don’t cancel out exploitation and standardization. Instead, the outsourcing you often criticize comes into play. Antiquated techniques of discipline migrate to the Third World, into countries like mine, rich in raw materials. Of course, in the so-called “developed” world, disciplinary power doesn’t disappear—but there are more bases of production and they’re spread farther apart, so that the implementation of disciplinary power can be softer, more yielding in the face of resistance. Meanwhile, “developing” countries have cornered the market in discipline, which develops a horrific, archaic character. (For a striking example, consider the law “On Offenses Against the Emotions of the Faithful”—the comeuppance on such “offenses” is a three-year deprivation of actual, personal liberty, which in Russian penal practice always includes forced labor.)

  And here in Russia, I’m keenly aware of the cynicism with which “developed” countries regard “developing” ones. The “developed” ones exhibit a conformist
loyalty to governments that manhandle and suppress their citizens—a little rich for my taste. The US and Europe are glad to collaborate with a Russia where medieval laws have become the norm and the jails swell with prisoners of conscience. They’re glad to collaborate with China, where things are happening that would make your hair stand on end. So the question arises: what are the acceptable limits of tolerance? When does it cease to be tolerance and become instead collaborationism, conformism, even criminal complicity?

  The most common justification for this kind of cynicism goes something like this: “It’s their country, let them do what they want.” But that’s just not viable, since countries like Russia and China have been enfranchised as equal partners in the system of global capitalism (which, it turns out, is by no means anti-hierarchic and rhizomatic everywhere). Russia’s resource-based economy, and the Putin regime that draws strength from it, would be completely undermined if the political principles being forfeited by the buyers of its petroleum and gas were rendered visible. Even so small a gesture as Europe’s passage of its own Magnitsky Act2 would be important in principle, its implications primarily moral. A boycott of the 2014 Sochi Olympics could likewise serve as an expression of ethics. Instead, the world’s continuing collusion in Russia’s resource-based economy shows implicit support for, even approbation of, the Russian regime (not in words, of course, but rather in the flow of capital). It demonstrates a desire to protect the global economy’s status quo and division of labor, that is, the current economic and political hierarchy. This is ample cause for concluding that the scope of anti-hierarchic trends in contemporary capitalism has been significantly overstated by Western theorists.

  You quote Marx saying “all that is solid melts into air.” Here I sit, in a country where the ten people who run and profit from the most important spheres of the economy are quite simply Vladimir Putin’s oldest friends—buddies from school, the people he plays sports with, cronies from his KGB days. What could be more elitist, more deadening than that? What else to call it except feudalism?

  And then, Marx adds: “all that is holy is profaned.” In a country where even a passing mention of religious images, ideas, and understandings might carry with it the threat of three years’ hard labor, this characterization of the “bourgeois epoch” (made in 1840!) can’t but elicit nervous laughter.

  My idea’s pretty simple: I think it would be helpful for Western theorists to set aside their colonial Eurocentrism and consider global capitalism in its entirety, encompassing all regional variants. Maybe then some of them will come around to my perspective that the “mad flux” of “late” capitalism is in fact one of the most successful and far-ranging maneuvers in the history of humanity. I’m in no way suggesting that anti-hierarchic trends don’t exist. For that matter, far be it from me to essentialize all advertising as superficial, inauthentic, and insincere. But advertising does impose a structure on commodities, and is in this sense a part of the process of production. So while I’m not calling for the rejection of advertising as a “false mask,” I am calling for us to remember that all advertising has something to keep silent about, something it must render absent. And public critical theorists, inasmuch as they’re engaged in critique rather than PR for “late” capitalism, should be studying the workings of this silence, exposing it to the light of analysis (rather than unreflexively parroting as their own theories global capitalism’s image of itself—this seems to me what we see happening in Hardt and Negri).

  Very seductive, an idea like “hyper-dynamic deterritorialization.” From time to time, I succumb to its charm. But I guess I’ve been saved from overindulging, and from the kind of depression Guattari suffered, by living in a country that over and over again confronts me with palpable evil, staggering in its enduring, deep-rooted corporeality. I think I know exactly “what body, what mind is going through transformation and becoming” (Berardi) as I serve my “deuce”3 (Putin) in lockdown.

  All my sincere thanks to you, Slavoj, for this correspondence; I impatiently await your reply.

  Your Nadya

  1 In late 2011, Moscow’s Bolotnaya Square became the epicenter of vocal anti-corruption protests. Among the leaders was Alexei Navalny, a Russian lawyer, blogger, and activist. A consistent critic of Putin’s government, Navalny has been arrested repeatedly. In July 2013 (the month this letter was written) he was sentenced to five years’ forced labor on charges of fraud and embezzlement; the following day he was released from custody. Later that year, he came in second in Moscow’s mayoral elections.

  2 Sergei Magnitsky was a Russian accountant who, after alleging that government officials had overseen the plunder of state holdings, was arrested by Russia’s Interior Ministry. Detained without charge for 358 days—a week short of the legal maximum—he died suspiciously in custody on November 16, 2009, having previously been beaten and telling doctors he feared for his life. Three years later, the US government implemented the Magnitsky Act, a law restricting the access of Russian officials complicit in the incident to the US and its banking system. Russia responded with a similar law barring entry into that country by officials complicit in US torture and indefinite detention programs.

  3 In an interview for a TV special celebrating his sixtieth birthday on October 7, 2012, Putin, asked about Pussy Riot, said that the court had “slapped them with a deuce,” referring to the women’s two-year sentence. He then added, “I have nothing to do with this. They asked for it, they got it.”

  “I would like to conclude with a provocation”

  Slavoj to Nadya, December 12, 2013

  Dear Nadya,

  I think our conversation should go on, because we left it open at a crucial point. In your last message, you emphasized the importance of taking into account the diversity among different countries, and how this diversity demands different forms of struggle. I fully agree, of course, but I would just like to add that this very diversity has to be located within the totality of global capitalism.

  The Hegelian notion of totality to which I refer here is not an organic Whole, but a critical notion—to “locate a phenomenon in its totality” does not mean to see the hidden harmony of the Whole, but to include in a system all its distortions (“symptoms,” antagonisms, inconsistencies) as its integral parts. In other words, the Hegelian totality is by definition “self-contradictory,” antagonistic, inconsistent: the “Whole” which is the “True” (Hegel: “das Ganze is das Wahre”) is the Whole plus its symptoms, the unintended consequences which betray its untruth. For Marx, the “totality” of capitalism includes crises as its integral moments; for Freud, the “totality” of a human subject includes pathological symptoms as indicators of what is “repressed” in the official image of the subject. The underlying premise is that the Whole is never truly whole: every notion of the Whole leaves something out, and the dialectical effort is precisely the effort to include this excess, to account for it. Symptoms are never just secondary failures or distortions of a basically sound System—they are indicators that there is something “rotten” (antagonistic, inconsistent) at the very heart of the System. Or, to shift to a brutally concrete case: if you want to talk about global capitalism, you have to include Congo, a country in disarray, with thousands of drugged child-warriors, but as such fully integrated into the global system. And the same holds for Russia.

  We should always bear in mind that global capitalism does not automatically compel all its subjects into a hedonist/permissive individualism. The fact that, in countries which have recently undergone rapid capitalist modernization (like India), many individuals stick to their so-called traditional (premodern) beliefs and ethics (family values, rejection of unbridled hedonism, strong ethnic identification, preference for community ties over individual achievement, respect for elders, etc.) in no way proves that they are not fully “modern,” as if only those in the liberal West can afford direct and full capitalist modernization, while those from less developed Asian, Latin American, and African countries can only su
rvive the onslaught of capitalist dynamics with the help of traditional values, i.e., as if such values are only needed when local populations are not able to survive liberal capitalism by adopting its own hedonist-individualist ethics. Post-colonial “subaltern” theorists who see the violent modernity of global capitalism as disruptive of traditional ties are here thoroughly wrong: on the contrary, fidelity to premodern (“Asian”) values is paradoxically the very feature that allows countries like Singapore or India to follow the path of capitalist dynamics even more radically than Western liberal countries. Appeals to traditional values enable individuals to justify their ruthless engagement in market competition in ethical terms (“I am really doing it to help my parents, to earn enough money so that my children and cousins will be able to study …”). We can say something similar about today’s China: it is wrong to claim that China faces the choice of either becoming a truly capitalist country or of maintaining a Communist system which inevitably thwarts full capitalist development. This choice is a fake one: in today’s China, capitalist growth is exploding not in spite of Communist rule but because of it—far from being an obstacle to capitalist development, Communist rule guarantees the optimal conditions for an unbridled capitalism.

  In short, global capitalism is a complex process which affects different countries in different ways, and what unites the protests in their multifariousness is that they are all reactions against different facets of capitalist globalization. The general tendency of contemporary capitalism is towards further expansion of the reign of the market, combined with progressive enclosures of public space, sweeping cuts in public services, and a rising authoritarianism in the functioning of political power. It is in this context that the Greeks protest against the reign of international financial capital and their own corrupt and inefficient clientelist state increasingly unable to provide basic social services; that Turks protest against religious authoritarianism and the commercialization of public space; that Egyptians protested against a corrupt authoritarian regime supported by the Western powers; that Iranians protested against a corrupt and inefficient religious fundamentalist rule, etc. What unites these protests is that they all deal with a specific combination of (at least) two issues: a more or less radical economic one (from corruption and inefficiency to outright anti-capitalism) and a politico-ideological one (from demands for democracy to demands for overcoming the standard multiparty democracy). And does the same not hold for the Occupy Wall Street movement? Beneath the profusion of (often confused) statements, Occupy Wall Street incorporated two basic insights: 1) a discontent with capitalism as a system—the problem is the capitalist system as such, not any particular corruption; and 2) an awareness that the institutionalized form of multiparty democracy is incapable of holding back the excesses of capitalism, i.e., that democracy has to be reinvented.