by Slavoj Zizek
I think the first step is to accept the consequence of modernity, which is radical freedom not only in the good sense, but also in the terrifying sense that we have to decide. It’s totally up to us. This is what Jacques Lacan means when he says: “There is no big Other – il n’y a pas de grand Autre.” There is no agency on which we can rely. Whenever there is a crisis, people spontaneously look for some kind of a lost balance. All this started with Confucius, whom I think of as the original form of idiot. Confucius was not so much a philosopher as a proto-ideologist: what interested him was not metaphysical truths but, rather, a harmonious social order within which individuals could lead happy and ethical lives.
No wonder that Confucius’ description of the disorder he sees in society around him ironically provides a good description of a really democratic society. Confucius proposes here a kind of proto-Althusserian theory of ideological interpellation: the ideological “big Other” (tradition), embodied in its apparatuses (rituals), interpellates individuals, and it is up to the individual to live and act in accordance with the title that makes him what he is. Confucius’ idea was that crisis happens when the original harmony is lost and then the idea is to restore harmony. I think that we should drop this. There is no harmony to which we should or can return. For harmony, we have to decide what we want and we have to struggle and fight for it.
4
Means Without End: Political Phronesis
What kind of values should we foster to help guide our ethico-political decisions?
SŽ: What fascinates me are the events going on in Egypt. The West has been saying for years that “we want Arabs to become democratic.” This is all hypocrisy. Now we have had a democratic explosion, which involved, at the same time – at least till now – absolutely no Muslim fundamentalism. Nonetheless everybody is afraid. This is what always fascinates me. Here, theoretical analysis begins and this is often true in politics: you bridge something from very different sides.
In Slovenia, we have a proverb that, if you talk too much, you want something: you really are afraid that something could happen and you talk a lot to make sure that it doesn’t. It’s a little bit like this with democracy in Arab countries. Everybody was saying that they needed democracy, but everyone was deadly afraid that democracy would finally come about there.
This is maybe where you should teach me. When you say common good, I think of something like true political activity – and of course I don’t mean power struggle or corruption; rather, I mean the process of decision-making. In this political domain of judgments and decisions, we need what Aristotle called phronesis, a reflection, where you don’t have any advanced theoretical measure and cannot determine your priorities in a non-political way. Politics for me is not just a means to make decisions on religious, social, and ethical issues in an objective way. It simply is not true.
The lesson of politics is that you cannot distinguish between means and ends (goals). We all know this was the big contradiction of Stalinism. They wanted communist freedom, but the way they went about it achieved the opposite. So again, for me, politics precisely means that everything is a matter of decision-making, not that you have this self-willful contingent decision. But decisions are to be made, especially today and not only with ecology, but also with biogenetics and all other issues.
It is clear that we have to decide everything. In a very short period of time, we will be able to do horrific things that not only influence physical appearances, by manipulating genes, but that also influence psychological properties. For example, a couple of years ago, I visited Beijing and Shanghai and met some people who were working for the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and they showed me a pretty horrifying program at their Institute of Biogenetics. They said: “Our goal is to take care of the physical welfare and also the psychological welfare of the Chinese people.” This means that they plan somehow to control even the psychological properties of the people. Here, the old religion doesn’t work. All our traditional wisdoms – you can’t apply them here. Because the basic coordinates are undermined.
Traditional ethics tells us that one should do one’s duty and work hard. But let me give an example of two students. One is lazy and the other works hard. In normal ethics, the good guy who works hard will win. But what if the lazy one takes some pills, which tremendously enhance his ability so that he then works just a little bit and beats the hard-working one? What will you do here? Will you prohibit pills? The ethical coordinates change here.
Jürgen Habermas – although I disagree with him – was aware of this, and his solution was simply not to do it. But I don’t think his solution works. Can you imagine how painful a decision this is? Let’s say I am a lazy student and you are a hard-working student. You work hard and I take a pill and do it much faster, without any effort, than you. Then you will have every right to feel like an idiot. Why did you have to go through all that ethical effort and hard work? What is the basis of our ethics? That you become free? As people like to say: “Freedom comes with duties. To be free you have to earn it by disciplining yourself and working hard.” But what if we have to change the very discipline and the sense of work? What if it can be influenced through some chemical means, even genetics? Everything changes. So we are in a totally new situation.
So again, if what you mean by the common good is an awareness that we have to decide what the common good is, then I agree with you. I just don’t believe that, with regard to where humanity is today, we still can apply the traditional Confucian paradigm that there is chaos so we should return to stability. We should decide what stability we want. And we don’t have any guarantee of any natural balance or social harmony. In this respect, I am a pessimist.
5
“May You Live In Interesting Times”
Speaking of our strikingly new situation, you once quoted Antonio Gramsci: “The old world is dying away, and the new world struggles to come forth: now is the time of monsters.” And in these interesting times, there is something right in front of us. Among all these so-called monsters, how do you analyze the rise of China, seen by some as the new monster?
SŽ: I don’t know if this is true, but in Europe we claim that the Chinese have this proverb that if you really hate someone, the curse to fling at them is: “May you live in interesting times!” But when I was in China, they told me that they heard this from Western people. It’s typical how you attribute something to some people and then if you go to them, they don’t know anything about it. Somehow, historically, the “interesting times” have been periods of unrest, war and struggles for power in which millions of innocents suffered the consequences. And today we definitely live in interesting times – with danger and tensions.
Who knows what will happen with the growing chaos of nature and economics. This is what worries me: there have been big debates where some people started to doubt ecologists, claiming that they are just exaggerating global warming. But the point is just an easy answer: when you listen to the good ecological scientists, they warn that global warming doesn’t simply mean that it will get warmer everywhere, it means there will be more extremes. There is a prediction, which is paradoxical, that if global warming continues, there may be a new ice age in Western Europe. It’s a theory about the Gulf Stream: if it gets warmer, the Gulf Stream will no longer reach Europe. People tend to forget that New York is geographically at the same level as Spain. That is to say we, in Europe, have relatively warmer weather than people in the North. So global warming means a new ice age in Europe. This is madness.
Again, this is what I try to adhere to: given the sense of urgency, we need to think – and this is not because of any of my communist dreams. I have lived in a communist country. I know how horrible it was – in a more global sense. Let’s say something like a new ice age in Europe or more severe droughts in Africa do happen. At the same time, they tell us – I don’t know whether it’s true – the gigantic forests in northern Siberia will become habitable because the permafrost is melting there. True, c
limate change will bring increased competition for resources, coastal flooding, infrastructure damage from melting permafrost, stresses on animal species and indigenous cultures of the region – all this accompanied by ethnic violence, civil disorder, and local gang rule. In the same way, we hear more and more voices enjoining us to heed global warming. The pessimistic predictions should be put into a more balanced context.
But if this happens, do we even have mechanisms to organize things? How will we transfer people from, let’s say, Africa to wherever? There are already spontaneous transfers happening. In a year or so, cargo ships will be able to take a direct northern route, cutting the consumption of fuel and reducing carbon emissions. And I was told that many Chinese are already moving to Siberia. Are we aware of what is happening? Two million Chinese are already in Africa taking over. This horrifies my leftist friends there.
But I’m telling them that we are effectively approaching a multicentric world, which means we need to ask new, and for the traditional left, unpleasant questions. Doesn’t this mean that maybe we should accept that the United States is not always automatically the bad guy? We talk about America being an economic neocolonialist state, but what about Chinese neocolonialism? I am what you might call abstractly an anti-capitalist. I am, for instance, suspicious of the old leftists who focus all their hatred on the United States. Why is the left silent about that? When I say this, it annoys them, of course. But it is obvious that China is now a mega economic colonial power in Africa. They are doing some better things than the West, but not all. For example, take Sudan or Zimbabwe where they are ruthlessly creating factories run by local tyrants. Or take Myanmar. It is absolutely clear how the General survived the great protest led by the Buddhist monks a couple of years ago: the military regime was saved with the discreet help of Chinese security advisors. Myanmar is effectively a Chinese economic colony, with China playing the standard postcolonial strategy of supporting the corrupt military regime in exchange for the freedom to exploit the vast natural resources.
It is the same as what South Korean business corporations tried to do in Madagascar. I’ve heard that it didn’t go through, but it is another example of capitalist colonialism. As I was told, the plan was pretty horrible. Daewoo Logistics, one of the major international corporations in South Korea, announced that it wanted to buy some 3.2 million acres of farmland, the most fertile land, in Madagascar, amounting to nearly half of its arable land. And it plans to put about three-quarters of this land under corn, with the remainder used to produce palm oil, a key commodity in the global biofuels market. And they claim that their deal will also benefit Madagascar. But everyone knows that it is OK as long as the economy goes well. If not, people in Madagascar will suffer from hunger. I really think we are living in such crazy times, where, without some kind of links beyond and above the level of state, we will be lost in a new chaos. The circle of postcolonial dependence is thus closed again.
From what I heard from my political friends, many states are silently already preparing for debt. One way to read American politics is to see it based on the premise that most of the world will be in chaos soon. So we just have to isolate ourselves, protect ourselves and think about how we have control over a few vital issues, like oil in the Middle East. And the others – who cares? Let them starve. So communism is once again at the gates. Who is to decide on the priorities here, and how, if such decisions cannot be left to the market? It is here that the question of communism has to be raised once again.
6
Communism: The Ethico-Political Fiasco
As you have argued, the resuscitation of the notion of communism can only be justified when it is related to the commons. And in an interesting interview with the Guardian, you “disclosed the secret” that communism will win. What did you mean by that? And by your claim that the explosion of uprisings and rebellions would lead us to overcome the failures of twentieth-century communism?
SŽ: I like the aspect of common, in the sense that we are facing mega problems where old notions of sovereign states or even issues like ecology are being questioned. See, for example, what they did for the financial crisis: compare the $700 billion spent by the US alone in order to stabilize the banking system to the fact that, of the $22 billion pledged by richer nations to help develop poorer nations’ agriculture in the face of the current food crisis, only $2.2 billion has so far been made available. The financial meltdown made it impossible to ignore the blatant irrationality of global capitalism. In this sense, the Copenhagen Climate Summit was simply a fiasco. When there is any type of ecological meeting, all they say is: “Yes, we should go on talking and then we succeeded because we decided that we will meet again and talk in two years.” You see, nonetheless, for the financial crisis, they are able to act immediately with sums of money, which are simply unbelievably huge. This, I think, is a paradox.
Look what Stalin said: “If you shoot one person you are a murderer. If you kill a couple of persons you are a gangster. If you are a crazy statesman and send millions to their deaths you are a hero.” It’s horrible. We now can say the same thing about crime. If you steal one hundred thousand dollars, you are a thief. If you destroy billions, banks and the state will help you. I’m really worried.
This is what I mean about my communism – not the Leninist version, which was total madness. Many leftists hate me when I argue that twentieth-century communism might have been the biggest ethico-political fiasco in the history of humanity. I think there is no other soft explanation. Some things were done well here and there, but globally it was a fiasco. But the problems, to which communism tried to provide an answer, are still here, more than ever. They are returning.
This is why I like to say communism, for me, is not an answer. Communism is not the name of a solution but the name of a problem: the problem of the commons in all its dimensions – the commons of nature as the substance of our life, the problem of our biogenetic commons, the problem of our cultural commons (“intellectual property”), and, last but not least, the problem of the commons as that universal space of humanity from which no one should be excluded. Whatever the solution might be, it will have to solve this problem. So what you are trying to capture with the common good is the name of a problem. This is communism for me. What will be the answer? I don’t know. Maybe we don’t have an answer. Maybe it will be a catastrophe. Maybe … I don’t know.
Nonetheless, and I’m not being too pessimistic here, but what shocks me, again and again, is how so-called specialists are proven wrong. About 10 or 15 years ago, people said that in postmodern times there are no longer revolutions; forget about people taking to the streets. My god, now you have them all around. Who knows where we will go from here?
I would like to see Saudi Arabia. This is the true worry. Everybody is in a panic not so much because of Egypt, but Saudi Arabia, which is an incredibly corrupt regime. But do you know what’s really absurd? It is that corruption, in a way, doesn’t exist there, because it is the system itself. In other countries you have politicians who steal from the state, but there the king is the state, so he doesn’t have to steal. The system itself is simply horrible.
I was in Qatar for the New Year and I met some people from Saudi Arabia who told me this incredible story. Basically, the royal family possesses the state. They don’t even have to steal anything, because they already have it. The key is that they all have a mistress and the breeding, so there are around 10,000 princes in the family. They all have a wonderful life. But if you go out into the neighborhoods, the country has its own poverty. Did you know that, a couple of years ago, there were small demonstrations even in Saudi Arabia? It has already started there. Now everyone is afraid in the West, but don’t they see that the more it is postponed, the more crazy and self-destructive the explosion will be?
I see explosions everywhere. In Qatar, a female curator at a museum took me to an industrial city in the suburb of Doha. I asked immediately who does the work for all those nice buildings. It seemed almos
t like a concentration camp. You have military barracks for immigrant workers. They just seem like self-employed men who sold themselves into slavery. Many of them came from Nepal, Indonesia, or the Philippines. And for four years, they take away the workers’ passports and claim that it is a safe way to pay the stipend. They are not even free to leave. They have to work without air-conditioning where the temperature in summer rises to 57ºC. Literally, in this temperature, if you step out you can fry eggs without any problem. And they are paid $150 per month out of which the company takes some for food.
Now comes the beauty: they want them to be invisible. On Friday, they are free to visit the city. But to prevent them from going to stores, they found an ingenious solution. Every Friday, entry into a shopping mall is prohibited to single men – officially, to maintain the family spirit in the malls; but this, of course, is only an excuse. Of course, all these workers are single. So under the pretext of protecting the family, they are prohibited from going to shopping malls on the only day they are free. This is all just waiting to explode. It’s interesting what is happening in all these places – Qatar, Abu Dhabi, Dubai. This is slavery and it will just explode.
7
Who Is Afraid of a Failed Revolution?
We are now witnessing all these explosions, from Egypt to Tunisia. And what if they just end up as a mere revolutionary episode? In these economically stressed times, why is it that we are expanding the war, why is the US administration expanding the war in Afghanistan?
