A friend of mine handed me a recent (November 15) article by Slavoj Žižek, entitled “Resistance Is Surrender”. It comes from the London Review of Books. This friend wanted to know my opinion. My answer? The short version is not appropriate for a public audience, so I’ll share with you the long version. Just about everything in the article is worthy of a counterpoint, but I’ll try to limit myself. I encourage the reader to read Žižek’s article in full first. Most of it has been quoted below, but there are a few chunks I left out:
One of the clearest lessons of the last few decades is that capitalism is indestructible.
Well, that’s a good start, Mr. Dialectical-Materialist. Why bother belaboring the point with the rest of the article?
Marx compared it to a vampire, and one of the salient points of comparison now appears to be that vampires always rise up again after being stabbed to death.
Not that I really think talking about supernatural beings is the best medium through which to discuss revolutionary politics, but what about wooden stakes?
Even Mao’s attempt, in the Cultural Revolution, to wipe out the traces of capitalism, ended up in its triumphant return.
Yes, EVEN MAO failed. As if this was somehow the most thoroughgoing effort, the one with the most promise, the one with the most liberating potential.
Today’s Left reacts in a wide variety of ways to the hegemony of global capitalism and its political supplement, liberal democracy. It might, for example, accept the hegemony, but continue to fight for reform within its rules (this is Third Way social democracy).
Or, it accepts that the hegemony is here to stay, but should nonetheless be resisted from its ‘interstices’.
“Here to stay.” Žižek, if this article is any indication, is a huge fan of this phrase. Part of the logic behind the notion of interstitial struggle is that “here” is not a monolithic and inescapable place. It is in the interstices that one can withdraw from hegemonic controlling processes. This is not a utopian dream, it is where most of the people living on this planet spend much (or at least some) of their time. It is just difficult to recognize it as such. So hegemony is “here” to stay only insofar as “here” is the flat, smooth terrain of capital and state, the interstices of which capital and state cannot or do not enter because they do not recognize them as being “here” (or “there”) at all.
Or, it posits that one can undermine global capitalism and state power, not by directly attacking them, but by refocusing the field of struggle on everyday practices, where one can ‘build a new world’; in this way, the foundations of the power of capital and the state will be gradually undermined, and, at some point, the state will collapse (the exemplar of this approach is the Zapatista movement).
I don’t think this is a fair representation. I, at least, don’t believe that just, spontaneously, at some point, the state will collapse, its foundation having been undermined. It will most certainly have to be pushed, and undermining its foundations will certainly help. However, this horizontally stratified metaphor of capital as a building is rather too simple, but our writer seems to traffic in simplicities.
Or, it takes the ‘postmodern’ route, shifting the accent from anti-capitalist struggle to the multiple forms of politico-ideological struggle for hegemony, emphasising the importance of discursive re-articulation.
Or, perhaps on the other hand he is rather too obtuse. Maybe I just haven’t read enough theory lately, but this doesn’t really say anything to me. Too many dashes.
Or, it wagers that one can repeat at the postmodern level the classical Marxist gesture of enacting the ‘determinate negation’ of capitalism: with today’s rise of ‘cognitive work’, the contradiction between social production and capitalist relations has become starker than ever, rendering possible for the first time ‘absolute democracy’ (this would be Hardt and Negri’s position).
I haven’t read all of Empire (and it has been some time since I read what I did), but I can say from what I have read that it’s rubbish. Hardt and Negri engage in a fundamental misreading of any actually-existing anti-globablization movement and a hopelessly naïve faith in an imaginary “absolute democracy”.
For [Simon] Critchley, the liberal-democratic state is here to stay [there he goes again]. Attempts to abolish the state failed miserably; consequently, the new politics has to be located at a distance from it: anti-war movements, ecological organisations, groups protesting against racist or sexist abuses, and other forms of local self-organisation. It must be a politics of resistance to the state, of bombarding the state with impossible demands, of denouncing the limitations of state mechanisms. The main argument for conducting the politics of resistance at a distance from the state hinges on the ethical dimension of the ‘infinitely demanding’ call for justice: no state can heed this call, since its ultimate goal is the ‘real-political’ one of ensuring its own reproduction (its economic growth, public safety, etc). ‘Of course,’ Critchley writes,
history is habitually written by the people with the guns and sticks and one cannot expect to defeat them with mocking satire and feather dusters. Yet, as the history of ultra-leftist active nihilism eloquently shows, one is lost the moment one picks up the guns and sticks. Anarchic political resistance should not seek to mimic and mirror the archic violent sovereignty it opposes.
So what should, say, the US Democrats do? Stop competing for state power and withdraw to the interstices of the state, leaving state power to the Republicans and start a campaign of anarchic resistance to it?
Since when did it ever become helpful in the furtherance of radical left politics to ruminate upon the hypothetical actions of the US Democrats? Are we to assume here that Žižek regards the Democrats as a vanguard of resistance to … anything? If there is a point to be made at all here, our writer certainly chose a most preposterous manner in which to make it.
And what would Critchley do if he were facing an adversary like Hitler? Surely in such a case one should ‘mimic and mirror the archic violent sovereignty’ one opposes? Shouldn’t the Left draw a distinction between the circumstances in which one would resort to violence in confronting the state, and those in which all one can and should do is use ‘mocking satire and feather dusters’?
First we’re supposed to envision the US Democrats as a vanguard, and now we’re resurrecting the ghost of Hitler? Completely ex nihilo, no political or historical context whatsoever. Even Hitler, the great historical bogeyman, would not have been immune to a resistance that did not fall under the rubric of “mimicking and mirroring the archic violent sovereignty”. Žižek speaks as if there are no options but the latter form of state violence and “mocking satire and feather dusters.” No strikes, no non-violent direct action, no sabotage, no armed resistance that could possibly organize itself except as a mirror to state violence. His simplicity and obscurantism are second only to his complete lack of imagination, or, apparently, contact with anyone actually engaged in struggle.
These words simply demonstrate that today’s liberal-democratic state and the dream of an ‘infinitely demanding’ anarchic politics exist in a relationship of mutual parasitism: anarchic agents do the ethical thinking, and the state does the work of running and regulating society.
This is an interesting hypothesis, but still quite wrong. “Anarchic agents” may do the ethical thinking, and certainly, the state attends to statecraft. This does nothing to prove that there is any “parasitic” relationship. As an anarchist, I often felt put in that role of being merely the “ethical voice” within a small worker-owned collective, but I don’t think the less radical members of the collective ever felt vindicated in their real-politic positions by letting me vent. They just wanted me (or at least my arguments) to go away. If we couldn’t even produce a “parasitic” relationship in the small, controlled environment of a worker-collective, where mutual parasitism is virtually de rigeur, I hardly see it happening in a much more variegated and dynamic context of struggle in a broader arena.
Critchley’s anarchic ethico-political agent acts like a superego, comfortably bombarding the state with demands; and the more the state tries to satisfy these demands, the more guilty it is seen to be. In compliance with this logic, the anarchic agents focus their protest not on open dictatorships, but on the hypocrisy of liberal democracies, who are accused of betraying their own professed principles.
To the extent that anarchic agents do not focus their protest on open dictatorships, it is because they are more likely than not (surprise, surprise) to protest the regime under which they live, most of which are not open dictatorships, a fact which is due in part, I would propose, BECAUSE there are anarchic agents, and people sympathetic to them, in substantial numbers in those countries. Secondly, this grand realization is more likely an artifact of Žižek’s own preoccupation with western liberal democracies, failing to recognize anarchic agents anywhere else in the world (except for the Zapatistas, it would seem, who are notable in this case for their ability to have captured the imagination of those in the global North).
The big demonstrations in London and Washington against the US attack on Iraq a few years ago offer an exemplary case of this strange symbiotic relationship between power and resistance. Their paradoxical outcome was that both sides were satisfied. The protesters saved their beautiful souls: they made it clear that they don’t agree with the government’s policy on Iraq. Those in power calmly accepted it, even profited from it: not only did the protests in no way prevent the already-made decision to attack Iraq; they also served to legitimise it. Thus George Bush’s reaction to mass demonstrations protesting his visit to London, in effect: ‘You see, this is what we are fighting for, so that what people are doing here – protesting against their government policy – will be possible also in Iraq!’
More evidence that Žižek knows absolutely no one actually engaged in struggle. I attended some of those massive demos (in San Francisco, not Washington), and I can tell you with a great deal of certainty that no one I know was “satisfied” with the outcome. No one went to the demonstrations with the goal of “saving their beautiful souls.” There is nothing “strange” about this supposedly “symbiotic” relationship between protest and power. The fact that Bush’s handlers skillfully managed to spin the protests as proof of the beneficence of US empire is evidence only of the ability (hardly a modern or post-modern novelty) of the state to recuperate the message of resistance movements. This is evidence of a straightforward, nearly unidirectional exercise of absolute and arbitrary power. There is nothing “symbiotic” about it. Furthermore, to suggest that the administration was untroubled by the protests requires the same sort of baseless postulating that leads Žižek to the conclusion that the protesters were “satisfied” with “saving their beautiful souls.”
It is striking that the course on which Hugo Chávez has embarked since 2006 is the exact opposite of the one chosen by the postmodern Left: far from resisting state power, he grabbed it (first by an attempted coup, then democratically), ruthlessly using the Venezuelan state apparatuses to promote his goals. Furthermore, he is militarising the barrios, and organising the training of armed units there. And, the ultimate scare: now that he is feeling the economic effects of capital’s ‘resistance’ to his rule (temporary shortages of some goods in the state-subsidised supermarkets), he has announced plans to consolidate the 24 parties that support him into a single party. Even some of his allies are sceptical about this move: will it come at the expense of the popular movements that have given the Venezuelan revolution its élan? However, this choice, though risky, should be fully endorsed: the task is to make the new party function not as a typical state socialist (or Peronist) party, but as a vehicle for the mobilisation of new forms of politics (like the grass roots slum committees). What should we say to someone like Chávez? ‘No, do not grab state power, just withdraw, leave the state and the current situation in place’?
Let’s put aside for the moment this crass endorsement of authoritarianism (dressed up as “mobilisation of new forms of politics”). The statement assumes that Chávez is the person “we” (I am less and less inclined to consider Žižek any sort of ally) should be speaking to. What about all those hundreds of thousands of people who form his political base. Are “we” to understand that Chavez has some special libertarian socialist gene that will allow him, and him alone, to lead the people to a socialist utopia? Are we back in the realm of the supernatural, with Chavez the Vampire Slayer? It is already quite past the point of telling Chavez not to grab state power. He did that rather decisively eight years ago and is now clearly well down the path of consolidating that grip: a rather different matter.
Chávez is often dismissed as a clown – but wouldn’t such a withdrawal just reduce him to a version of Subcomandante Marcos, whom many Mexican leftists now refer to as ‘Subcomediante Marcos’? Today, it is the great capitalists – Bill Gates, corporate polluters, fox hunters – who ‘resist’ the state.
I see. So not only are we “anarchic agents” dreamy-eyed anachronisms, but we’re also really allies of the corporate slimeballs we profess to hate. Thanks for the update, Mr. Žižek. Seriously. Žižek started out this article by drawing distinctions between no less that eight different tendencies on the contemporary left, and yet he still seems incapable of drawing any meaningful distinction between most (or at least several) of those tendencies and Bill Gates. And he has the gall to castigate anarchists for focusing their ire on the liberal democracies in which they live.
The lesson here is that the truly subversive thing is not to insist on ‘infinite’ demands we know those in power cannot fulfil. Since they know that we know it, such an ‘infinitely demanding’ attitude presents no problem for those in power: ‘So wonderful that, with your critical demands, you remind us what kind of world we would all like to live in. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, where we have to make do with what is possible.’ The thing to do is, on the contrary, to bombard those in power with strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands, which can’t be met with the same excuse.
On the contrary, the lesson here is to steer clear of navel-gazing academics resigned to a defeatist philosophy that obliges them to project a warped analysis of and reaction to their own failures on your current struggles. That, and wear garlic around your neck.
Excellent analysis. I’ve never liked Zizek’s writing much and this confirms my initial feeling. It’s so important to not only think for yourself but carefully dissect academic or “post-modern” jargon-y discourse if you want to avoid being fooled. Words can either be used to mystify or enlighten. They probably always do both. Yet words have power that affects us. Lenin says “dictatorship of the proletariat” and it doesn’t hurt you. But put into effect it’s counter-revolution and purges. Or it leads us into a way of living that is passive, or keeps us in denial. Too many people will swallow philosophical swill like this because he is a “rational authority”. Good for you for seeing through the gauzy bullshit and using simple and direct language to cut through it. Kudos.
ciao
Max Watts