{"id":9370,"date":"2011-11-11T12:41:28","date_gmt":"2011-11-11T17:41:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/?p=9370"},"modified":"2012-12-26T16:07:59","modified_gmt":"2012-12-26T21:07:59","slug":"zizek-on-occupy-wall-street-and-future-alternatives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.prosebeforehos.com\/article-of-the-day\/11\/11\/zizek-on-occupy-wall-street-and-future-alternatives\/","title":{"rendered":"\u017di\u017eek On Occupy Wall Street And Future Alternatives"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Article:<\/strong> Six Questions for Slavoj \u017di\u017eek<\/a> by J. Nicole Jones in Harpers.<\/p>\n

The Text:<\/strong> For a philosopher who claims to eschew the carnivalesque, Slavoj \u017di\u017eek creates quite a circus wherever he goes. After his concluding remarks as host of a recent conference in New York called Communism: A New Beginning?, the Marxist thinker, whose marriage of pop culture and theory has made him possibly the most famous Slovenian ever, was immediately mobbed by admirers. Like a rock star, he headed for the back door, leading me through a meandering underground passageway before we emerged to the streets of Manhattan. As we made our way to a nearby caf\u00e9, he collected a new entourage around him \u2014 mostly autograph-seekers and undergraduate fanboys grilling him for term-paper advice. He obliged the autograph-hunters, asked that aspiring intellectuals email him with specific questions, and initially insulted a man who wanted a photograph, saying \u201cOne idiot more!\u201d The man withdrew his request with polite apologies, and a strange tug of war ensued as \u017di\u017eek then insisted on being photographed.<\/p>\n

\u017di\u017eek seems to thrive on contradiction. As we spoke, he veered from one stream of thought to another in his famously thick accent. Although he claimed at one point to prefer solitude, he delighted in making attention-drawing remarks \u2014 proclaiming with impish glee, for example, that Gandhi was technically more violent than Hitler, or advising me to tell panhandlers, \u201cYes I have some change. Fuck off!\u201d<\/p>\n

The week before, he had spoken at Occupy Wall Street, where he championed the movement and told a cheering crowd, \u201cWe are not dreamers. We are the awakening from a dream that is turning into a nightmare.\u201d When we reached the caf\u00e9, I asked him about the experience, the prospects for the Occupy movement, and the new beginning he was pondering for communism:<\/p>\n

1. When you visited Zuccotti Park, what did you think of the Occupy Wall Street protesters? What are they doing right, and what are they doing wrong?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s difficult to answer this question because I was tired, I had to work a lot, so I literally came there three minutes before I did it. I instantly disappeared. You know, this may be part of my character, but that\u2019s how I function. There is a certain clich\u00e9 about communists or radicals. They usually say, you like humanity in abstract, but you don\u2019t like concrete people. You are even ready to kill them for humanity. Okay, fuck it. If this is it, then I am definitely a totalitarian. I like humanity, maybe great works of art, but the majority of the people I don\u2019t like. I like to be alone. For example, you have seen it today, how my first reaction was just to disappear. I like so much to be alone. I just have a couple of friends.<\/p>\n

So again also for theoretical reasons, I don\u2019t think that mingling with them, whatever, would have brought any special, deep insight. I would probably have heard just these stupidities \u2014 \u201cWe want justice, ooh, one percent has so much money, blah blah blah.\u201d<\/p>\n

I do [sense] a readiness to question the fundamentals of the system. Even with radical liberal leftists, it was [formerly] within the existing system: less racism, more freedom to women, abortion, divorce. The basic insight I see is that clearly for the first time, the underlying perception there is a flaw in the system as such. It\u2019s not just the question of making the system better.<\/p>\n

2. The title of the conference you\u2019ve just hosted is \u201cCommunism: A New Beginning?\u201d I wonder if communism isn\u2019t a devalued brand. Why not find a new word for it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m well aware of this. The PR, public relations problem. Many friends are telling me, \u201cListen, we agree with everything, but why use this terrible term, which has such a horrifying connotation \u2014 gulag, whatever, no?\u201d My reason is that, first, in the radical tradition, millenarian movements [were] egalitarian revolts, and I would like to keep fidelity to that tradition.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

My second reason is that it\u2019s still the best among the least worst. The least bad. Because all others concede too much to hegemonic field. You say socialism? Socialism is harmless. Everybody today is a socialist, you know? It just needs some vague solidarity. It doesn\u2019t have this more radical egalitarianism. Every fascist can be said to be socialist, you know. Democracy, my god. Everyone refers to that word. It\u2019s meaningless. Justice, fuck it. Which justice?<\/p>\n

And the last, paradoxical reason. Yes, horrible things were done in the name of communism, but it\u2019s good to have a name to remind you of that. It\u2019s good to be aware of the dangers. I claim that with all the anticommunism, we don\u2019t really even have a good theory of how this mega-catastrophe called Stalinism could have happened. What went wrong? I don\u2019t like those easy philosophical generalizations in the style of Karl Popper, who\u2019s a Plato-totalitarian-whatever, and then Rousseau or whoever. My problem with liberal anticommunist historians is that if anything they are not critical enough [of the] Stalinist regime. Their explanation is typically liberal. They reduce it to bad people who wanted money, power, whatever.<\/p>\n

Did you see the film that I always mention? The German one who got Oscar? Life of Others? Not severe enough, I claim. We have a bad minister who wants to have the wife of the writer, so he [gets] the Stasi to follow the writer, to get something from him to get rid of him to have fully the wife. But this still reduces Communist terror surveillance to a single bad guy with some private pathology, as if beneath every evil here is some evil person who wants money, power, sex, whatever. What the film doesn\u2019t confront is that even if there were no corrupted minister, even if all Stasi agents were relatively honest, we would have exactly the same observation, control, and so on. Because the horror of Communism, Stalinism, is not that bad people do bad things \u2014 they always do. It\u2019s that good people do horrible things thinking they are doing something great.<\/p>\n

Robert Conquest, [Simon Sebag] Montefiore, they try to emphasize how Stalin was bad, that one was bad, that one was bad. That\u2019s too simple. The system was such that even good people break down. [The most tragic example] is, when Stalin ordered forced collectivization, late twenties, thousands of honest communists volunteered to go to the countryside and convince farmers to join, and it turned very violent, shooting. This is true tragedy, I think.<\/p>\n

So no, my problem is that we don\u2019t even have a good critique of communism.<\/p>\n

3. You wrote that the only surprising thing about the 2008 financial meltdown is that it was considered a surprise. Why do you think these warnings and protests keep failing?<\/strong><\/p>\n

This is proof of how ideology is a lie. I don\u2019t always agree with him, but the Nobel Prize guy, Paul Krugman, I quote him. He made a very intelligent comment. A journalist asked him, \u201cNow that we know, Paul, the mistakes that we were doing before, allowing banks these crazy credit schemes, do you think if we were to know all this twenty, thirty years ago that we would have done it in a different way?\u201d He said, \u201cNo, exactly the same. It wouldn\u2019t have mattered.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a very deep insight, you know? This is the power of ideology. You may know it, but you don\u2019t take it seriously. You nonetheless act in that way. I\u2019m very much a pessimist here. I really believe in the material deficiency of ideology.<\/p>\n

4. Why do you think people are unable to transcend ideology and effect change?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Here I have a very traditional Marxist answer. Ideology is not only ideas. Ideology is something which structures our daily practices. Ideology is not that you think money is something mystical; ideology is in how you deal with money everyday. Legal ideology is that even if you don\u2019t trust the legal, you use it, you rely on it. In the Wittgensteinian sense, it\u2019s a form of life. I even develop often that today in our cynical times, for an ideology to function, it doesn\u2019t matter if you believe in it or not. In a way, you have not to take it too seriously.<\/p>\n

This is of course maybe my own weird experience because when I was young in Communist Yugoslavia, we had an extreme form of this. I witnessed how the regime experienced as the greatest threat when people took the regime\u2019s own ideology too seriously.<\/p>\n

5. You were critical of some of the slogans used by protesters in 2008 \u2014 \u201cSave Main Street, Not Wall Street\u201d for example. During Occupy Wall Street, people say, \u201cBanks got bailed out, we got sold out.\u201d Is there a better slogan to be had?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The problem is that if you mobilize against the bad financial system you fall into a certain ideological trap, the fascist trap. This is the basic fascist idea: we have the truly productive strata \u2014 workers, industrial capitalists \u2014 and then we have the bad Jewish bankers who exploit them. The problem is not to fight Wall Street. The problem is, why does the system need Wall Street to function? I totally understand Obama and all of those in 2008 who, although they knew all the manipulations that the banks did, they nonetheless voted for the first mega-sum of $750 billion. If Wall Street collapses, then Main Street collapses. That\u2019s how the system works.<\/p>\n

6. So what should the protesters be asking for?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Just two things. On the one hand, at this point more important than asking is to think, to organize, to lay down the foundations for some kind of a network so that this will not just be a kind of magic explosion that disappears. And point two, the way to start to think about doing something is to select some very specific issues \u2014 the model should be the health-care bill \u2014 which in a way are very realistic.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s often terrifying to read right-wing Republican attacks on Obama\u2019s health-care reform. It was watered down through clear material force of ideology. Nonetheless, I like the debate because it showed us how our notion of freedom is totally penetrated, controlled by a certain ideology.<\/p>\n

One of the strategies [for doing] something concrete is to pick very carefully issues for which you fight, and then try to organize a popular movement. Which have two features: First, they are realistic. But at the same time, [they have] dramatic points which are extremely penetrated by ideology. So things which are absolutely possible but are unacceptable for ideology frame \u2014 like healthcare, universal healthcare \u2014 this is, I think, maybe the thing to do at this point, apart from laying the foundations, getting ready.<\/p>\n

Even with banks \u2014 okay this is not [a recommendation] for the people, it\u2019s for the system \u2014 the irony is that those countries where the state controls the movement of money in the banks can do very well in capitalist terms. Look at China, Singapore, and so on. There, money transfers, especially international transfers, are all tightly controlled by the banks. I remember how when they started to play this game twenty years around ago, I remember The Economist said, \u201cThis is suicide, it will be a catastrophe.\u201d It wasn\u2019t. The result is that in the 2008 crisis, 2009 crisis, Singapore had record growth of 15 percent. China, India, and so on. Okay, things are more complex here, because they have different conditions, but nonetheless you can see how countries which have a more flexible approach towards state intervention are doing very well.<\/p>\n

One of the good results of this crisis is that neo-liberalism, for reasonable people, is dead. We are becoming aware not only that it doesn\u2019t work but that, let\u2019s be clear, there never even was neoliberalism. Like, what neoliberalism? Already with Reagan, Bush, the state is growing stronger and stronger, intervening all the time. I really think it\u2019s a total misperception that we live in some kind of a wild capitalist neoliberal universe. No.<\/p>\n

I think this is the first thing maybe that we should do. To note how we are already entering a new type of organized capitalism which is no longer liberal capitalism, and which more and more relies on strong state interventions.<\/p>\n

Sorry, I have, now, I slowly getting to collapse. You want something to conclude or whatever?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Article: Six Questions for Slavoj \u017di\u017eek by J. Nicole Jones in Harpers. The Text: For a philosopher who claims to eschew the carnivalesque, Slavoj \u017di\u017eek creates quite a circus wherever he goes. After his concluding remarks as host of a recent conference in New York called Communism: A New Beginning?, the Marxist thinker, whose […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[259],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\n\u017di\u017eek On Occupy Wall Street And Future Alternatives - Prose Before Hos<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The Article: Six Questions for Slavoj \u017di\u017eek by J. Nicole Jones in Harpers. 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