Comradely Greetings

by Slavoj Zizek

  There are, of course, many traps awaiting those engaged in these struggles. Let me take the case of Turkey. The motto that united those who protested in Taksim Square was “Dignity!”—a good but ambiguous slogan. The term is appropriate insofar as it makes it clear that protests are not just about particular material demands, but about the protesters’ freedom and emancipation. In the case of the Taksim Square protests, the call for dignity not only referred to corruption but was also, and crucially, directed against the patronizing ideology of the Turkish prime minister. The direct target of the Gezi Park protests was neither neoliberal capitalism nor Islamism, but the personality of Erdoğan: the demand was for him to step down. Why? What made him so annoying as to become the target of both secular educated protesters as well as of anti-capitalist Muslim youth, the object of a hatred which fused them together? Here is how my friend Bülent Somay explains it:

  Everybody wanted PM Erdoğan to resign. Because, many activists explained both during and after the Resistance, he was constantly meddling with their lifestyles, telling women to have at least three children, telling them not to have C-sections, not to have abortions, telling people not to drink, not to smoke, not to hold hands in public, to be obedient and religious. He was constantly telling them what was best for them (“shop and pray”). This was probably the best indication of the neo-liberal (“shop”) soft-Islamic (“pray”) character of the JDP rule: PM Erdoğan’s utopia for Istanbul (and we should remember that he was the Mayor of Istanbul for four years) was a huge shopping mall and a huge mosque in Taksim Square and Gezi Park. He had become “Daddy Knows Best” in all avenues of life, and tried to do this in a clumsy patronizing disguise, which was quickly discarded during the Gezi events to reveal the profoundly authoritarian character behind the image.

  Is “shop and pray” not a perfect late-capitalist version of the old Christian ora et labora, with the worker or toiling peasant replaced by the consumer? The underlying wager is, of course, that praying (fidelity to the old communal traditions) will make us even better “shoppers,” i.e., participants in the global capitalist market. However, the call for dignity is not only a protest against such patronizing injunctions; dignity is also the appearance of dignity, and in this case the demand for dignity means that I want to be duped and controlled in such a way that proper appearances are maintained, that I don’t lose face—is this not a key feature of our democracies? This is how our democracies function—with our consent: we act as if we are free and freely deciding, silently not only accepting but even demanding that an invisible injunction (inscribed into the very form of free speech) tells us what to do and think. As Marx recognized long ago, the secret is in the form itself. In this sense, in a democracy, every ordinary citizen is effectively a king—but a king in a constitutional democracy, a king whose decisions are only formal, whose function is to sign measures proposed by the executive administration. This is why the problem of democratic rituals is homologous to the big problem of constitutional democracy: how to protect the dignity of the king? How to maintain the appearance that the king effectively decides, when we all know this is not true? What we call a “crisis of democracy” occurs not when people stop believing in their own power, but, on the contrary, when they stop trusting the elites, those who are supposed to know for them and provide the guidelines, when they realize, with some anxiety, that “the (true) throne is empty,” that the decision really is now theirs. There is thus in “free elections” always a minimal aspect of politeness: those in power politely pretend that they do not really hold power, and ask us to freely decide if we want to give it to them—in a way which mirrors the logic of a gesture meant to be refused.

  So, back to Turkey, is it only this type of dignity that the protesters want, tired as they are of the crude and blatant ways in which they are cheated and manipulated? Is their demand merely: “We want to be duped in the proper way—at least make an honest effort to cheat us without insulting our intelligence!” or is it really something more? If we aim at more, then we should acknowledge that the first step of liberation is to dismiss the appearance of false freedom and openly proclaim our un-freedom. The first step towards women’s liberation, for example, is to reject the appearance of respect for women and openly proclaim that women are oppressed—today’s master more than ever does not want to appear as the master.

  Does this mean that we should simply get rid of the masters? Here, I would like to conclude with a provocation. A true Master is not an agent of discipline and prohibition, his/her message is not “You cannot!” or “You have to …!”, but a releasing “You can!”—what? Do the impossible, i.e., what appears impossible within the coordinates of the existing constellation—and today, this means something very precise: you can think beyond capitalism and liberal democracy as the ultimate framework of our lives. A Master is a vanishing mediator who gives you back to yourself, who delivers you to the abyss of your freedom: when we listen to a true leader, we discover what we want (or, rather, what we always already wanted without knowing it). A Master is needed because we cannot accede to our freedom directly—to gain this access we have to be pushed from outside, since our “natural state” is one of inert hedonism, of what Alain Badiou calls the “human animal.” The underlying paradox here is that the more we live as “free individuals with no Master,” the more we are effectively non-free, caught within the existing frame of possibilities—we have to be compelled or disturbed into freedom by a Master.

  There was a trace of this authentic Master’s call even in Obama’s slogan from his first presidential campaign: “Yes, we can!” A new possibility was thereby opened up. But, one might object, did not Hitler also do something formally similar? Was his message to the German people not “Yes, we can …”—kill the Jews, crush democracy, attack other nations? A closer analysis immediately brings out the difference: far from being an authentic Master, Hitler was a populist demagogue who carefully played upon people’s obscure desires. It may seem that in doing so he followed Steve Jobs’ infamous motto: “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” However, in spite of all there is to criticize about Jobs, in his own understanding of the motto he was close to being an authentic Master. When asked how much research Apple undertakes into what its customers want, he snapped back: “None. It’s not the customers’ job to know what they want … we figure out what we want.” (In India, thousands of impoverished intellectual workers are employed in what are ironically called “like-farms,” where they are miserably paid to spend the whole day in front of a computer screen endlessly clicking “like” buttons on pages requesting visitors to “like” or “dislike” a specific product. In this way, a product can be made to appear very popular and so seduce ignorant prospective customers into buying it, or at least checking it out, following the logic of “there must be something in it if so many customers are so satisfied!”—so much for the reliability of customer reactions …) Note the surprising turn of this argumentation: after denying that customers know what they want, Jobs doesn’t go on with the expected reversal—“it is therefore our task (the task of creative capitalists) to figure out what they want and ‘show it to them’ on the market.” Instead, he says: “we figure out what we want.” This is how a true Master works: he doesn’t try to guess what people want; he simply obeys his own desire and leaves it up to others to decide if they want to follow him. In other words, his power stems from his fidelity to his desire, from refusing to compromise on it. Therein lies the difference between a true Master and, say, the Stalinist leader who pretends to know (better than the people themselves) what people really want (what is really good for them), and is then ready to enforce it on them even against their will.

  Just as I was finishing this letter, I learned that Nelson Mandela died—was he an authentic master? In the last two decades of his life, Mandela was celebrated as a model of how to liberate a country from the colonial yoke without succumbing to the temptation of dictatorial power and ant
i-capitalist posturing. In short, Mandela was not Mugabe, and South Africa remained a multi-party democracy with a free press and a vibrant economy well integrated into the global market and immune to hasty socialist experiments. Now, with his death, his stature as a saintly wise man seems confirmed for eternity: there are Hollywood movies about him; rock stars, religious leaders, sportsmen and politicians from Bill Clinton to Fidel Castro are all united in his beatification.

  Is this, however, the whole story? Two key facts are obfuscated in this celebratory vision. In South Africa today, the miserable life of the poor majority remains broadly the same as it was under apartheid, and the rise of political and civil rights is counterbalanced by growing insecurity, violence, and crime. The main change is that the old white ruling class has been joined by a new black elite. Secondly, people remember the old African National Congress which promised not only the end of apartheid, but also more social justice, even a kind of socialism. This much more radical ANC past is gradually being obliterated from memory. No wonder that anger is growing among the black poor.

  South Africa is here just one version of the recurrent story of the contemporary Left. A leader or party is elected with universal enthusiasm, promising a “new world”—then, sooner or later, it stumbles upon the key dilemma: should one dare to interfere with the capitalist mechanisms, or should one decide to “play the game”? If one chooses to disturb the mechanisms, one is very swiftly “punished” with market perturbations, economic chaos, and the rest. This is why it is all too simple to criticize Mandela for abandoning the socialist perspective after the end of apartheid: did he really have a choice? Was the move towards socialism ever a real option?

  It is easy to ridicule Ayn Rand, but there is a grain of truth in the famous “hymn to money” from her Atlas Shrugged: “Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns or dollars. Take your choice—there is no other.” Did Marx not say something similar in his well-known formula about how, in the universe of commodities, “relations between people assume the guise of relations among things”? In the market economy, relations between people can appear as relations of mutually recognized freedom and equality: domination is no longer directly enacted or visible as such. What is problematic is Rand’s underlying premise: that the only choice is that between direct or indirect relations of domination and exploitation, with any alternative dismissed as utopian. However, we should nonetheless bear in mind the moment of truth in Rand’s otherwise ridiculously ideological claim: the great lesson of state-socialism was effectively that a direct abolishment of private property and market exchange, in the absence of concrete forms of social regulation of the process of production, necessarily resuscitates direct relations of servitude and domination. If we merely abolish the market (and so market exploitation) without replacing it with a proper form of the Communist organization of production and exchange, domination will return with a vengeance, and with it direct exploitation.

  The general rule is that, when a revolt breaks out against an oppressive half-democratic regime, as was the case in the Middle East in 2011, it is easy to mobilize large numbers of people with slogans that can only be described as “crowd pleasers”—for democracy, against corruption, etc. But then we gradually approach more difficult choices: when the revolt succeeds in its immediate goal, we come to realize that what really bothered us (social corruption, our un-freedom, humiliation, lack of prospects for a decent life) continues in a new guise. The ruling class here mobilizes its entire arsenal to prevent us from reaching this radical conclusion. We are now told that democratic freedom brings with it its own responsibility, that it comes at a price, that we are not yet mature if we expect too much from democracy. In this way, they blame us for our failure: in a free society, so we are told, we are all capitalists investing in our own lives; it’s up to us to put more time and effort into our education than into having fun if we want to succeed, etc.

  At a more directly political level, US foreign policy pursued a determined strategy of damage control by way of re-channeling popular uprisings into acceptable parliamentary-capitalist constraints—as was done successfully in South Africa after the fall of apartheid regime, in the Philippines after the fall of Marcos, and in Indonesia after the fall of Suharto, etc. It is at this precise conjuncture that radical emancipatory politics faces its greatest challenge: how to push things further after the first enthusiastic stage is over, how to take the next step without succumbing to the catastrophe of the “totalitarian” temptation—in short, how to go further than Mandela without becoming Mugabe.

  If we want to remain faithful to Mandela’s legacy, we should thus dispense with the celebratory crocodile tears and focus on the unfulfilled promises his leadership gave rise to. We can also safely surmise that, on account of his undoubted moral and political greatness, he was at the end of his life aware of how his very political triumph and elevation into a universal hero was itself the mask of a bitter defeat. His universal glory is but a sign that he didn’t really disturb the global order of power—which certainly cannot be said of Pussy Riot.

  Awaiting your answer, and with the hope that the two of you who are still in prison will soon be released,

  Slavoj

  “When you put on a mask, you leave your own time”

  Nadya to Slavoj, March 11, 2014

  Dear Slavoj, a good day to you,

  As fate would have it, your last letter found me already out of prison. Which came as quite a surprise, since my time there was marked by a completely unfounded, irrational certainty that prison goes on forever.

  But in some sense, prison really does go on forever. My “co-conspirator” Masha Alyokhina and I lost no time after our release in founding the “Zona Prava”1 movement, the goal of which is the reeducation of prison wardens and the establishment of a protest training program inside the camps. We’re beginning with women’s camps, since female prisoners are the ones most totally deprived of voice. Why is this so? Probably because women have long had inculcated into them a deep a sense of weakness, of their need for a big, strong man … Our work is already turning up evidence that a lot of them buy into this garbage. And their “big, strong man,” since these women are prisoners, can come only from the prison administration. Our task, Zona Prava’s task, is to provide them an equally big and strong alternative.

  In due time, we and Zona Prava will have to answer an old question: can the—pardon me—subaltern speak? How can sister-inmates develop their own language, existing alongside the official one spoken by prison administrators? How can they draw up the map to another world, a world different than that of the administrators? The story of the subject’s development in prison is extremely meaningful.

  A Russian jail is an island of institutional totalitarianism, a site where thought and action become unified. Further, the template for this unification has little in common with other officially promulgated prisons, like our conception of motherhood, orthodox religion, and respect for the law. In fact, so long as the administration isn’t inconvenienced, a person’s decline and fall is encouraged. A high level of aggression is encouraged, and a foundation is set for baseless anger and hatred. By what right can we call this a system of “corrections”? Is it not, rather, the rubric for a slavishly obedient, oppressed, and humiliated existence? Or an existence that is two-faced, cynical, and hypocritical, one that survives by the reptilian law of “you die today, I’ll wait until tomorrow”? What can we make of people being expected to form their personalities in a place where they can barely even try rethinking the assumptions that form their daily lives? How is such a personal reformation possible when every act of protest is met with diabolical evil and reprisals from the agents of state authority?

  Prison goes on forever. And because it’s run not by official rules but according to its own internal processes, it
makes you understand how the structures of power, subordination, and protest are related in a community whose ultimate purpose is unification and degradation. In a community for whose creation any elite of unbounded power de facto strives.