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Subject: [DEBATE] : Žižek Resists You
Date: Wed, 7 Nov 2007 18:12:20 -0500
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http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n22/zize01_.html
LRB 15 November 2007
"Resistance Is Surrender"
by Slavoj Žižek
One of the clearest lessons of the last few decades is that
capitalism is
indestructible. 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. Even Mao’s attempt, in the Cultural Revolution,
to wipe out
the traces of capitalism, ended up in its triumphant return.
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’.
Or, it accepts the futility of all struggle, since the hegemony is so
all-encompassing that nothing can really be done except wait for an
outburst of
‘divine violence’ – a revolutionary version of Heidegger’s ‘only
God can save
us.’
Or, it recognises the temporary futility of the struggle. In
today’s triumph of
global capitalism, the argument goes, true resistance is not
possible, so all
we can do till the revolutionary spirit of the global working class
is renewed
is defend what remains of the welfare state, confronting those in
power with
demands we know they cannot fulfil, and otherwise withdraw into
cultural
studies, where one can quietly pursue the work of criticism.
Or, it emphasises the fact that the problem is a more fundamental
one, that
global capitalism is ultimately an effect of the underlying
principles of
technology or ‘instrumental reason’.
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).
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, 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).
These positions are not presented as a way of avoiding some ‘true’
radical Left
politics – what they are trying to get around is, indeed, the lack
of such a
position. This defeat of the Left is not the whole story of the
last thirty
years, however. There is another, no less surprising, lesson to be
learned from
the Chinese Communists’ presiding over arguably the most explosive
development
of capitalism in history, and from the growth of West European
Third Way social
democracy. It is, in short: we can do it better. In the UK, the
Thatcher
revolution was, at the time, chaotic and impulsive, marked by
unpredictable
contingencies. It was Tony Blair who was able to institutionalise
it, or, in
Hegel’s terms, to raise (what first appeared as) a contingency, a
historical
accident, into a necessity. Thatcher wasn’t a Thatcherite, she was
merely
herself; it was Blair (more than Major) who truly gave form to
Thatcherism.
The response of some critics on the postmodern Left to this
predicament is to
call for a new politics of resistance. Those who still insist on
fighting state
power, let alone seizing it, are accused of remaining stuck within
the ‘old
paradigm’: the task today, their critics say, is to resist state
power by
withdrawing from its terrain and creating new spaces outside its
control. This
is, of course, the obverse of accepting the triumph of capitalism.
The politics
of resistance is nothing but the moralising supplement to a Third
Way Left.
Simon Critchley’s recent book, Infinitely Demanding, is an almost
perfect
embodiment of this position.[*] For Critchley, the liberal-
democratic state is
here to stay. 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? 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’? The
ambiguity of
Critchley’s position resides in a strange non sequitur: if the
state is here to
stay, if it is impossible to abolish it (or capitalism), why
retreat from it?
Why not act with(in) the state? Why not accept the basic premise of
the Third
Way? Why limit oneself to a politics which, as Critchley puts it,
‘calls the
state into question and calls the established order to account, not
in order to
do away with the state, desirable though that might well be in some
utopian
sense, but in order to better it or attenuate its malicious effect’?
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. 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.
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!’
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’?
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
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.
Note
Verso, 168 pp., £17.99, May, 978 1 84467 121 2.
Slavoj Žižek is a dialectical-materialist philosopher and
psychoanalyst. He also
co-directs the International Centre for Humanities at Birkbeck
College. The
Parallax View appeared last year.
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