Žižek on what it is to be a revolutionary
I’ve only just had a chance to watch the video above, of Žižek’s performance at Marxism 2009. Probably the most powerful thought to come out of Žižek’s speech is the notion of victims with their own voices.
Žižek talks about how, at a Hitchcock conference in California, he was denounced by a man there for talking about such trifling things while the war in Yugoslavia raged. The implication was that those not involved could talk about whatever they wanted, but as a Yugoslavian, Žižek had a duty to dwell on his victimhood, on the trauma of his home country. Something in this struck home with me.
Sympathy with those whose countries have suffered civil war and the brutality which Žižek describes is the wrong emotion. Solidarity is the right one. The difference, I think, is that, through our sympathy we develop a tendency to impute noble qualities to the victims of trauma, when they are just people. For the Left, this is repeated in the myth of the ‘noble’ proletariat, the good but stupid pawn of the ruling class.
The answer, which Žižek doesn’t make explicit, is to focus on the material context in which the ideological must exist.
To give an example, Silvio Berlusconi, of late a favourite of Žižek, appears in the speech, this time as the masque worn by capitalism-with-asian-values, the authoritarian capitalism that Žižek contends is being developed. Italian political discourse faces being sidelined in favour of a grotesque pantomime that neuters political opposition by displacing real grievances.
Instead of talking about and understanding the actual material things which cause them hardship in their lives, instead of knowing who their real opponents are, citizens of the Italian democracy become invested in the spectacle at work on stage. Likewise the media, already aligned to act as a conduit from Westminster or the Palazzo Montecitorio, recycling consensus as if was news and adding to the distortion, remains glued to the spectacle.
There is a similar a phenomenon regularly talked about by Marxists. Racism, we often contend, is a displaced class struggle. Without effective means of expressing solidarity with one another, or challenging the ruling class, the ‘real’ mechanisms of power become concealed from the working class. They appear as the ‘normal’ background to life; “it’s how the world works”.
Without appreciating that this normal background is not permanent but changeable, blame for the ill-effects of the system are transferred to elements which appear as if from ‘outside’. Immigrants are the standard example, being literally as well as metaphorically from outside, and therefore the most common victim of this transference.
Real grievances in the Italian case can be blamed on the excesses of Berlusconi’s stupidity, much in the way people in America blamed their problems, come the recession, on the stupidity of George W. Bush. Many Americans couldn’t believe that the country had elected such an obvious bumbling moron as President. It was only when he was ousted, and Obama took his place without a real change in direction that the depth of the problem was revealed.
The result, absent a political alternative, has been apathy on the part of those who swung things for Obama. Arguably, at second glance, the process may still be at work, with the continuing deadlock being ascribed to Republican wingnuts, who, as poll after poll tells us, are wildly out of touch with reality. This forestalls deeper analysis.
Generalised stupidity or ignorance of the ‘real’ issues are thus not the cause of relative quiescence of our class, despite some furious outbreaks of resistance. Quite the opposite. The collapse and continuing weakness of once-powerful social solidarities are the failure of the politically conscious elements of the working class to articulate an effective strategy whereby resistance doesn’t merely explode on to the streets and then fade away.
That’s an extraordinarily broad group – including seven million trades unionists of all trades and disciplines, community workers, politicians and many other groups, not just the band of easily dismissed supposedly ‘middle class’ revolutionaries, professional or otherwise.
Instead of culminating in a march that is defeated when the government pursue their agenda regardless, resistance must be the method for forming links of more general purpose than solving the specific grievances raised. To give an example, the Public and Commercial Services Union has announced that it will ballot its members in response to the government’s decision to slash pension and redundancy entitlements, making laying off workers cheaper.
Many workers in jobcentres will be affected, the very place where some of them might end up as claimants. There is the opportunity here for workers and the unemployed to link up and show their solidarity with one another. The workers will appreciate, more keenly than ever, the threat of unemployment – and it’s suddenly in their broader interest to demand greater security nets for the unemployed.
Regrettably Žižek doesn’t deal in concrete activism, and so his discussion of what it means to be a revolutionary doesn’t provide much solid advice when it comes to day-to-day work, and his claim that the Left should ruthlessly use state power against the ruling class is rather undermined by the gap left as regards how we conquer state power.
Great article Dave.
I think it is fair enough that Zizek operates his work from a distance to the existing labour movement, only because Zizek is not quite there yet. The regard for which high society views success is obviously reversed for us on the left, where academia seems far nobler a trade than trade unionism in high culture, it is preferable (and correct) for us to displace, reverse, this view.
An appropriate example is Lenin himself; he had spent years taking down theory – most notably his year studying Hegel in a Bern library – only to later point out that the masses need to teach the leaders of the revolution, not the other way around. See for example this important example, written at the time of the split from Plekhanov, regarding Russian social-democratic theory:
“… in order that the workers may not cease to understand us [during the time of a party split], in order that their fighting experience and proletarian instinct may teach us “leaders” something too, the organised workers must learn to keep an eye on any potential causes of splits (in any mass party such causes have always arisen and will always recur), to properly evaluate these causes, to appraise what happens in some “backwater”, in Russia or abroad, from the standpoint of the interests of the entire Party, of the entire movement.”
The lesson here is that for Lenin to begin to be an appropriate leader for the workers, reliance was put not on an understanding of Hegel – though theoretically necessary for a Marxian analysis – but rather a dialogue with the masses, for it was they who identified the markers for potential causes of splits (and here is something that some – from the blogosphere for example Sunny Hundal – leftists forget, one should and must criticise the left from within the left itself, in order to identify those very splits that Lenin picked up on (from a Marxist perspective there are obvious shortfalls of social-democratic theory). Unfortunately some on the left see self-criticism as counter-productive, energy that could be better spent criticising the right, but the clear lesson from history is that if you’re own house is not in order, how can you expect to win in a battle of minds.
Where does Zizek fit in here? We are lucky that he even talks about Obama, Hugo Chavez, Berlusconi or Ahmadinejad at all. The trajectory of his work has been Hegel tinged with Lacan, Marx, Schelling, Habermas, Jesus Christ, G.K. Chesterton and St. Paul. He is within the academic system fully, even if he denies his full membership. Since 9/11, and later with Iran, he has returned to politics proper. This means he is on right course for being qualified to talk about the labour movement – like Lenin, from academia, to politics to … the labour movement. He is just not there yet, which is why, Dave, you are worried that he doesn’t deal with concrete activism. In my opinion, I’m happy he doesn’t yet deal with concrete activism, for he is not yet ready, but he is on his way.
What did strike me as his notable points in that lecture – which you have rightly pointed out – are sympathy and race/class. The way in which zizek uses the concept of sympathy, as opposed to solidarity, can best be expressed by his references to charity, particularly in Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. Charity is a way in which capitalism is rendered formal – as he, or Badiou, might put it. This goes hand-in-hand with whom I identify as no-logoists – those whose demands of capitalism are easily met, and fully congruent with the way of capital operates (Power2010, for example). The crux of liberal anti-capitalism over the past 30 years has been renewable energy, fair trade and charity. Those are weak demands, that have now been fulfilled – green corporates and the likes of Zac Goldsmith, nestle using fairly traded sources, the so-called liberal-communists of Bill Gates and George Soros giving money to the poor third-world – and it has not crippled capitalism, it has strengthened it, it has rendered it compassionate capitalism. However, what these no-logists have not demanded is the way capital functions, the way it is organised, concentrated and commits invisible harm. I’m an anti-capitalist not because I think a hedge fund manager wasn’t giving enough to victims in Haiti – and I would only be too happy that he do so – but rather because I dislike the way capital circulates. The no-logoists formalise the way capital circulation, under the illusion that they are radicals – they are quite the opposite. Sympathy, as with charity, is an expression of keeping things exactly how they are, and is the appropriate expression of the Gates and soros’ of this world – sympathy as such is a way of saying I’m rich, you’re poor, and that’s the way I intend it to stay. As you have noted, Dave, it is solidarity that is the appropriate expression for those on the left.
With race and class, my short contribution to this is that if Zizek only knew about the Big Brother incident, with Shilpa Shetty and Jade Goody, I think he’d perfectly utilise this as an example of where what seems to be a racial incident, is actually displaced class prejudice (George Galloway wrote about this in the Guardian – though I can not find it now – closer to the time saying that though we can not in any way condone racial profiling, or being petty, there was more at play here, something that stirred of snobbishness, or to use the lingo of the day, chav-hatred).
cheers