After Zizek’s Talk of Communist Catastrophe: An Alternative Script
Posted by Mike E on January 11, 2010
Women fighters during heroic communist battles of the 20th century
Kasama has posted some talks by philosopher-provocateur Slavoj Zizek that include in the BBC HardTalk interview both an insistance of communism’s future promise and a harsh summation of 20th century communism as a disaster. Here is a response.
A Failure to Gauge the Situation
Critical Reflections on Slavoj Zizek’s Hard Talk
By Radical-Eyes
The question needs to be asked: What on earth does Zizek hope to gain through his appearances on shows such as Hard Talk on BBC? What is the purpose of such interviews? For Hard Talk and the BBC? For Zizek himself? And what can we learn about Zizek’s critical method and political orientation from scrutinizing the footage that emerges from such a foray into “Hard Talk”?
It’s hard to imagine that such a performance could even increase his book sales, though it may up his name recognition. For better and for worse.
All in all this Zizek performance on HT was disappointing, both from the standpoint of performance, and from the standpoint of substance.
In terms of performance, Zizek often seemed somewhat caught off guard, stuck in the middle of a long tangential aside, unable to complete a full thought, unable even to answer the question he was being asked. It seems a bit as though he is expecting the interviewer to just give him the floor and let him propound in whatever direction he desires. He seems almost annoyed; as if he is accustomed to being granted all the space he needs to say whatever he wants to say in whatever times it takes to say it. He comes off as ill-prepared for this venture into somewhat “hostile terrain.”
In terms of substance, Zizek—to be frank—spends an awful lot of time here, really a significant percentage of his total appearance, shitting on previous attempts at communism and revolution, and or facilitating the hosts doing so.
He goes beyond even what the interviewer is asking for in calling the Communism of the 20th century a “total failure” and assents to the notion that it was essentially a “catastrophe.” He even goes so far as to say that in terms of “abstract suffering,” “Stalinism” can be deemed worse than fascism or Nazism—due to the arbitrary and contingent nature of terrors, which, he says, could not be localized within a particular racial, political, or religious group as was the case with Nazi Germany, and so left no person unthreatened, as he puts it…
The only reason he gives here to justify calling himself a “communist” is that Communism was a significant historical response to a crisis of capitalism…or words to that effect.
He then compounds the insult and injury to communism by one-sidedly emphasizing that the problems within the socialist-communist project, that manifested themselves so clearly in “Stalinism” can be traced all the way back to the writings of Marx. This is all well and good to do in a conversation amongst Marxists; it is I think—and Zizek in his writings can be useful in this vein—important to resist the urge to “find the Fall” within Marxism, in a fetishistic, scape-goating, and undialectical manner (blaming Marx after 1844, or Engels, or Lenin, or, or even Stalin, for the lapse away from communist perfection). It is important to attend to the contradictions in every thinker, even and especially the “great ones,” and to avoid projecting internal problems onto some excised “other.”
That said, for his particular—presumably largely non-Marxist—audience on BBC, wouldn’t the more proper emphasis have been to say, before collapsing into concession, to state clearly something like:
“Look, I am a Marxist; and I think that any serious attempt to understand capitalism, its historical emergence, its internal dynamics, its positive as well as its many negative features, needs to include a close study of the writings of Karl Marx, especially Capital, Volume One, as well as other thinkers in the Marxist tradition, including Lenin and so on; Marx is not adequate to understanding our contemporary moment in its totality, but he remains absolutely necessary.”
If he actually wanted to go on the offensive, instead of playing defense, and that deep in his own territory, Zizek could then add,
“That so many so-called Economics departments in the West continue to systematically ignore Marx’s work, even twenty years after the fall of the wall, and even in the face of such a monumental crisis of capitalism as the one through which we are presently living, is tribute to the fundamentally ideological and even apologetic function of these disciplines within today’s capitalist societies.”
Then, if ole’ Slavoj was really feeling enthusiastic, he might have actually given at least some positive inkling of what it means to be a communist today, saying something like:
“In addition, though I do not think we find clear solutions or blueprints for how to today transcend capitalism and realize a socialist or capitalist order in Marx—and indeed Marx himself was famously reluctant to speak about such matters, saying that they were better left to those in the future who would have to make them in their own particular historical conditions—I do still, as a Marxist, find inspiration in Marx’s formulation that communism would be characterized by a classless social situation in which “the free development of each was the condition of the free development of all” and where the motto would be ‘from each according their ability, to each according to their need.’ Something like this remains the goal, for me, even today, although how we get there, and what exactly these phrases mean in practice –or even in theory—remains very much an open question.”
Frankly, it seems opportunist to me to not establish some of these key points before launching into non-contextualized admissions and concessions that “yes yes the horrors of Stalinism” can be traced all the way back to Marx himself.
And what of the ignoring of Maoist China here?
Surely the Chinese Revolution (as economist Amartya Sen has shown, by comparing life-expectancies in post-revolutionary China to non-revolutionary India) provides a great counter example of how social revolution could reduce the level of violence and suffering (due to hunger and starvation for starters) in society? He could have also reminded his audience that it was the Soviet Union—much more so than the much-lauded late-coming US– that saved Europe from Nazi domination in World War II! (Why not, if he is interested in challenging the cultural “horror” over “big collective acts.”)
But Zizek doesn’t want to go here, perhaps because he himself is still too mired in bad anti-communist accounts of the horrors and death tolls of Communism, whether in China or the Soviet Union.
A previous Kasama posting critiqued Alain Badiou’s HardTalk inteview , who fared a bit better, though still not well on this same show some months ago. And like in that earlier interview, it seems to me that a key problem for Zizek is that he is so caught up in his negative dialectic of critical opposition, that he is often unable to articulate a coherent—even if provisional and place-holding—notion of communism as a positive historical alternative, even at the level of a utopian horizon, let alone an actually existing political movement. (Of course, like Raymond Lotta in his recent interview, Zizek makes no mention of any political tendency that is trying to take up the challenge, whether in Nepal, or Bolivia.)
Here I may be lapsing back again to a critique of performance rather than substance, but Zizek’s handling of the history of Afghanistan here is really particularly terrible.
He fails even to get to the essential point, which is known well to many of my first-year college students, even before they enter my classroom: namely that the US (and Saudi Arabia) in their anticommunist crusade to vanquish the Soviet Union and the specter of Socialism-Communism, organized and developed the very right wing “Islamo-fascist” forces that since 9/11 now it dubs its enemy.
From reading his books I know that Zizek knows this connection well, but here his broken response leaves it looking like it was the Soviet Union that was chiefly responsible for the disruption, when in reality, as Gary Leupp and others have often pointed out, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter’s own advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski has stated quite clearly that it was the U.S. that—well before the Soviet invasion—intervened in Afghanistan, beginning to build up right-wing forces precisely in order to provoke the Soviet Union to invade the country…to give the USSR “its Vietnam.” Stumbling and stuck on the history, Zizek then slips back to euphemisms about Afghanistan’s political regression stemming from “world politics” rather the more focused cause of imperialist interference.
That such a fundamental historical point slips Zizek’s mind or his lips under pressure suggests how much work he still has to do to get his act together, at least if he is going to continue trying to enter the lion’s den like this. Truly here, style and substance converge; Zizek’s rhetorical approach leaves him open to attacks, even undeserved ones.
I have found that almost always Zizek seems to speak as if he is among co-conspirators, among experts who are “up” on all the latest theoretical wrangling, as if he is among comrades, or at least friends—and friends who have had the time to read up on all the latest theoretical “breakthroughs.” Often to hear and watch him is to be dropped in media res into his own private musing and mutterings.
Don’t get me wrong: I often find these musings fascinating, provocative, and insightful. Yet, he is reluctant to synthesize and to sum up what is essential before moving back into the hyper-theoretical thicket. He (and we) need to be able to better gauge the situation when we venture into the “public” to make our case for communism. Especially if and when we are taking the struggle onto enemy terrain.
On a different note:
Why does it seems that other communist or revolutionary minded intellectuals are not able to gain and hold the stage the way that Zizek is?
TOR said
Zizek will never provide us revolutionary communists with what we are looking for from a philosopher in terms of someone who represents the communist movement in an intelligent way, though he will continue to be interesting and to ask us interesting questions.
Badiou did do much better, but we really need someone a bit tougher to go on. Maybe Eagleton would be better, though he isn’t as famous.
mediated abstraction said
What I think can be best learned here is how this plan to “break into” traditional bourgeois media with famous intellectuals or activists is a complete dead end. The Communist left ought to take a page from the anarchist movement and begin collaborating on the task of building independent media institutions/outlets beyond a party paper.
It’s an uneven playing field and the cards are stacked against dissident voices in this arena. Rather than putting our valuable talent, time, and effort into the Sisyphean task of getting our message out through a hostile institution, we ought to be working to undermine it.
nando said
Mediated says:
Why be so one-sided? Is it not possible to do several things?
I deeply agree on the opening that now exists for alternative media — thanks mainly to digital media and networking.
But does this really prove that using the mainstream press is a “COMPLETE dead end”? How?
Zizek could have done better (and has on other topics done better). Why couldn’t better performances be at least part of our effort?
KurtFF8 said
Exactly, I hardly see how this demonstrates how this is a dead end, especially considering that on this very blog another interview with a Communist who did quite well was posted.
Building alternative media is quite valuable: I watch Democracy Now! quite often, for example, and it’s a great source and watched by many.
But the idea that we can “just build an alternative” is just like saying we could do that in terms of worker ownership: let’s just build worker-coops and combat capitalism!
The problem is that it leaves the very dominant productive relations, or in this case: media structure quite in tact and doesn’t directly challenge it. And that’s what we need to be doing. Just because Zizek did an awful job here doesn’t mean that other Marxists should refrain from getting air time. And besides, he usually doesn’t represent Marxism quite this poorly.
mediated abstraction said
Then why not run candidates in bourgeois elections as well? Conceding bourgeois media’s legitimacy by participating in it hardly seems like an effective way to challenge it.
TOR said
I actually fully believe in running candidates in bourgeois elections at certain points in time in certain local and national contexts. Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder makes important points about this.
Vijayendra said
I have no pretensions to being a communist or marxist myself, though I must say my attitude is more of empathy with it than of being in opposition. Yet,more I try to make sense of Slavoj Zizek’s ideas, the more I begin to realise that somewhere he could be playing up a self-imposed fallacy; a “cognitive game” played in the field that lies between him and his audience.
Here the truth values begin to gain currency though willful act of aligning oneself with it, mainly as a belief system and then as the very truth procedure being realized through its partisan avowal and repetition. Ideology in that sense has more to do with beliefs than reason. and according to Zizek ideology is not an abberation but something of a destiny and its grip is total and unconditional – irrespective of its historical contents.
This approach informs Zizek’s attitude, where he keeps repeating that it was in the course of Europe’s tryst with enlightenment project that pinnacle of abstract formal thought was reached and that therefore, it remains the only possible benchmark for drawing out a new universalist project. Zizek’s approach towards any other social and political identities, thus becomes marginal foot-note to his central project of founding the universal singularity of Communist utopia. Though one does not here deny the fact that – both in its progressive and regressive forms, the European enlightenment values of rationalism, secularism and such political practices as imperialism and colonialism, etc have been responsible for comprehensive and lasting political transformations and other cutural and social changes in many parts of the world – to go further and insist that we must therefore, unconditionally accede the historical ground (of effective causality) to Europe (and most recently his affinity to millenarian Christianity) as bases for shaping of historical and political subjectivity is just going a bit overboard.
The old colonial legacy as much today’s hyper-globalisation no doubt, blunt and blur the distinctions and differences among various political constituencies and communities within the third world by shifting cutural and political limelight on external factors but to see this adumbrated process, as if it were an irrevocable singular totality is conceding far too much. A singular global universality, in the guise of either global capitalism or communism that foreshadows many regional local particularities is untenable and is perhaps the reason behind the historical blunders that communist movement witnessed in the past and is going through till date.
Zizek;s effort to see that that such a universal project can only be a continuation and further extension of the European enlightenment project and thereby deny that any cultural forms of freedom, creativity, systems of formal thought, that have their origin outside Europe to be just traces of medieval oppression/obscurantism can only be nothing but a a haughty claim that should be firmly questioned.
Radical-Eyes said
To be fair, Zizek seems to fair better in this bit, from a Dutch program. The discussion starts a couple of minutes in: http://bedeutung.wordpress.com/2010/01/13/slavoj-zizek-living-in-the-end-times/
jim said
http://www.mediafire.com/file/zmqnyzg3log/Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy.pdf