Slavoj Žižek on Left Chances and Communism
Posted by Mike E on January 11, 2010
Kasama makes these two very different statements available (as usual) without implying agreement with the details of analysis.
Slavoj Žižek on the resurrection of the left in the midst of current crises — and sharply disputes the ideas of limited local activities as a substitute for large collective actions.
Slavoj Žižek on the BBC calls the communism of the twentieth century as a “total failure” and catastrophe — and advocates communism as the necessary answer to capitalism in the twenty-first century.
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jfsp said
I agree on the large collective actions. The problem is that so many groups on the left cannot get along for five minutes, and it’s been that way since the 60′s. Lets face it large numbers talk. In the first Chicago immigration march (a couple of years ago) those numbers got press and spoke volumes, the first anti-war march in Chicago where they took over the drive (about 5 years ago) spoke volumes and got press. I remember going to a demonstration about 5 years ago and there were 10 different groups with four or five members each, common goal but could not get along between them.
zerohour said
Sadly, Zizek’s penchance for provocation renders him naive or simplistic-sounding at times.
In the first video, he calls for large-scale collective projects, as opposed to “micro-politics”. I don’t find this objectionable, but neither do I find it particularly insightful since radicals have been arguing this point for a couple of centuries now. Perhaps he is challenging postmodernists and those who think we can transform society one food co-op at a time, but he is mistaking the symptom for the cause. If there is no global project of radical transformation it’s not because people are too busy with local work, its because we are also at a loss to envision how such a project could look that does not repeat the errors of the past.
As for the second video, it demonstrates that he doesn’t have a grasp of the constraints of television in the same way that someone like Chomsky has. When one makes a blanket [and outrageous] statement like “communism is a total failure” and still calls himself a communist, it requires more than a couple of minutes to work through the argument. Here, he just comes off as a confused ideologue whose conclusions don’t follow from their premises.
As for his point about communism, I think it’s telling he keeps referring to Stalin and [he even reduces 20th century communism to Stalinism] as if China and other Third World communisms didn’t exist. According to author Minqi Li in a a recent talk at the Brecht Forum, in New York City, the fastest rising leftist trend in China today is Maoism, and when peasants and workers protest, they still use the language, imagery and ideas from the Mao period. Communism’s “total” failure, which Zizek describes as ideological, political, ethical, social, was not so total in China.
In the past, I’ve defended Zizek against charges of Eurocentrism but I’m rethinking that now.
Radical-Eyes said
Zerohour, is there a video recording of that Minqi Li talk?
I found his recent The Rise of China and the Demise of the World Capitalist Economy (Monthly Review, 2009) to be a terrific book.
It’s funny (and yes, disappointing)–Zizek’s recent books (especially In Defense of Lost Causes) spends some considerable time with Mao (though not as much with the Chinese Revolution more broadly)…but in these interviews, yes, it all seems to “boil down” to “Stalinism”…Talk about selecting to fight the battle on enemy terrain! :0
nando said
zerohour writes
This is a problem of a great many left trends that emerge from Europe. It is tempting to see it as a continuation of a long (and non-radical) European tendency to see themselves and their culture as the center of the world — and to see others as a refraction, reflection or mutation of that.
To see Mao, China’s revolution and Maoism as merely a subset of Stalinism is to miss both the essence and the ruptures of these matters.
Jody Blanco said
Zerohour nailed it exactly — this guy is totally out of touch with any and every form of grassroots activism. All of us WANT our projects to be large-scale collective projects: if they aren’t it’s not for lack of trying! I WISH everyone working for environmental causes would take an interest in human trafficking; or that everyone interested in human trafficking would be interested in debt forgiveness. Anybody working for a real cause knows it doesn’t work that way.
These guys are all the same. Ten years ago I went to this Pierre Bourdieu talk — he’s a guy whose work I really admired — and his solution to the collapse of the Left as a coherent theoretical doctrine was to form a new “club” of like-minded intellectuals! Being a professor, I eschew the “you intellectuals vs. we activists” grandstanding, but when you listen to guys like Zizek you totally understand why activists see people like academics as completely out of touch.
InDefenseofZizek said
Nando and the like really need to investigate Zizek’s work around Maoist China before they really speak about Zizek’s thoughts on it. Zizek never simply thinks of Maoism as simply a subset of Stalinism, this is plainly false if you have actually ventured to read what Zizek has written on the Chinese Revolution, particularly the Cultural Revolution.
Lets speak bluntly and honestly, lets go right to Badiou on the question of China – to set up Zizek here as merely “reducing” the history is a falsehood, and moreover even in the work of Badiou what they see as the contradiction of the “Party-State” they see as the legacy of the Stalinist mode of political form. Its also the legacy in which today revolutionaries throughout the red arc are dealing with or not dealing with depending on the level of dogmatism.
On the Hard Talk point – seriously folks. What actual interview have you seen on Hard Talk has ever allowed for the open space for one to fully articulate themselves and ever let yourself look the most coherent? I’ve been watching this show for years, its the nature of that show. Maybe it just means people shouldn’t go on Hard Talk, or really theoretically nuanced discussions shouldn’t be had there.
@Jody
“Zerohour nailed it exactly — this guy is totally out of touch with any and every form of grassroots activism…but when you listen to guys like Zizek you totally understand why activists see people like academics as completely out of touch.”
And being someone a part of the “grassroots” (where ever that is right now), I can see what exactly Zizek is saying about the NGO-ized liberal left that really have embedded themselves in the space of doing something to do nothing – I think Zizek’s Bartelby Politics is precisely what we need more today.
Radical-Eyes said
“InDefenseofZizek”:
I too will “defend” Zizek in all sorts of company, including my fellow marxist friends who see Zizek as just the post-marxist “flavor of the month,” and my academic friends who see him as merely a performative (and often perverse) provocateur, lacking a serious theory of culture, history, etc…
I have read just about everything that he has written in the past five years or so (plus a number of his earlier works), including In Defense of Lost Causes. This book, to my knowledge, includes Zizek’s most developed discussion to date of Mao and Maoist China. (Much of this has been included in the introduction to Verso’s new “Revolutions” edition of Mao’s On Practice and On Contradiction.) It is true, Zizek expresses some admiration for and demonstrates understanding of a number of maoist concepts. Moreover, he offers a number of criticisms of mao as well as of contemporary society here that deserve attention.
That said, even here his treatment of the chinese revolution leaves much to be desired. His method is essentially to concede the worst case scenarios of this revolution (as put out by anticommmunist commentators, like Chang and Halliday), and then defend mao anyway, on what often seems like partly perverse and provocative grounds. The most clear example of this is Zizek citing the figures of those “millions” killed by mao-made famine during the Great Leap Forward. (Yes, he includes a footnote mentioning that the C-H book is “controversial” but this seems more like Zizek innoculating himself from criticism, rather than really engaging the question of where the truth of the matter lies concerning the lives killed or saved by maoism and/or the chinese revolution.)
More broadly, I think that it is symptomatic of Zizek’s “first concede the catastrophe…then defend communism” approach that in these sorts of forums, where he is forced to boil down what he is saying, he tends to go to the Soviet Union and to “Stalinism” as the true culmination of 20th century Communism. He does NOT tend to go to China here–indeed I don’t think that I have EVER seen him discuss China, in any of the YouTube footage that I have seen of Zizek…whereas jokes about (the horrors or failues of) the “stalinist” USSR are a commonplace.
That said, of course, getting into a close and critical discussion of what Zizek actually _does_ have to say about mao and china is necessary…Hopefully we will get into that soon.
nando said
InDefense writes:
First, I can only agree with this sentiment. I have read “in” Zizek — but I am eager to be corrected if I mischaracterize. And I am equally eager to learn more — both Zizek’s thoughts on various methods, but also his method on various thoughts. (I think we can all learn to be more provocative, more plugged into the actual controversies around us, more biting, more original etc. — all the things that makes his stream of consciousness so irresitable.)
I am a bit amused to here referense to “Nando and the like”… especially from InDefense and the like. I didn’t know we moved around in afinity pools.
InDefense writes:
It is always dangerous to accuse people of ignorance simply because they disagree with you. First, it is insulting. Second, you might be wrong — they may just have a different insight from you.
It is also dangerous to reduce the arguments of others to something silly, and then accuse them of silliness. For example, InDefense argues that “Zizek never simply thinks of Maoism as simply a subset of Stalinism….” injecting what we could call “the two simply’s.”
Of course no one here believes this “simply” — since we have (actually) read Zizek on Mao (especially Zerohour who is, as Indefense knows, a Zizek freakazoid).
Joking and jibes aside:
There are at least two larger problems at work here that I would like to explore a lot more:
First, there is a powerful tendency to one-sidedly dismiss the communist experiments of the 20th century. Badiou does it. Zizek does it. The often interesting writers of the Cliffite trend do it (and they are the worst offenders in reducing Mao to Stalin). People influenced by anarchism do it.
And there are many pragmatic reasons why that might be done: It is very hard to unravel all this. And it is very hard to present our unraveling to a broad audience (who often have very very little nuanced sense of that history). It is far easier to say “that was then, this is now.” and “That was them, this is us.” In other words to say “our” communism is not “their” communism (meaning Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc.)
I think the pressure to do this is particularly hard on those most determined to (a) speak broadly and (b) to have standing within the “official” debates of politics and academia.
And then, to be fair, I think Zizek and Badiou are sincere — I think Zizek is not playing games when he says he thinks communism in the twentieth century was a disaster and a catastrophe. I think this is his view — and we should treat them seriously when they say that, understand what they are ACTUALLY saying, and engage (among ourselves, with them, and broadly) whether it is true.
Second, I believe there IS a tendency to see the continuity of Mao (with the comintern and previous communism) and under appreciate the discontinuity (the originality and new invention, and the attempt to “rectify” glaring errors that preceded him).
I think that when Badiou says that Mao led the last revolution, and did not appreciate that the target should be the “party state” — Badiou is making a mistake. I think his is misunderstanding the complexities of party and state (and the objective contradictions that the need for party and state arise from). This arises in his view of the Cultural Revolution (and particularly in his not-uncommon equating of the Cultural Revolution with its brief most heady days of mass conflict and mobilization.)
And, yes, I acknowledge (as InDefense correctly puts it) that Zizek does not ‘SIMPLY” equate Maoism with a subset of Stalinism… he is more knowledgable than the worst Euro-leftists, he deals with china and Mao with some specificity, etc.
But i think Zerohour’s point remains valid: Socialist revolution advanced in TWO waves in the twentieth century — the first arose out of the collapse of multinational empire in Europe’s first world war, the second arose out of the anti-colonial revolution following the second world war. They had real specificity, and (largely thanks to Mao) the Chinese revolution had significant differences in method (including state party methods) from the Soviet Union (or to be more precise, in China there was intense and ongoing struggle IN ORDER TO BE SIGNIFICANTLY DIFFERENT in method from the Soviet Union.)
Zizek is not simply oblivious to that — but I would continue to assert that he is (like many European leftists) remarkably centered in Europe. (While Badiou like many French leftists is a bit more narrow, and somewhat focused on France — its histories, its Jacobin tradition, its specific 1968 experience, etc.)
more later