Ruminations of the Professor

“Pandemic – Covid 19 Shakes the World,” by Slavoj Zizek, 2020

The main point of this little book seems to be that a form of war ‘Communism’ is how the world has to handle the pandemic – and it is already doing so in parts.  Boris Johnson has nationalized the British rail system, which Corbyn wanted to do.  The U.S. Federal Reserve and the Treasury have once again floated the whole U.S. capitalist system – or at least the parts they want to really protect.  In Europe it has been done in a less corrupt and more efficient manner.  Science, the now sub-textual common idea of most countries, has achieved a prominent place once more. Countries have had to cooperate and help each other in part, with the U.N.’s WHO in a central position.  So nationalism has been replaced by internationalism for a short time – except with zenophobic exceptions like Brazil, Trump, the U.S. Republican Party and Hungary’s Orban.  Yet even the U.S. government has instituted the war-time Defense Production Act.  So the choice Zizek sees is a reinvented Communism or a barbaric “survival of the fittest. “  Letting the old die was a Nazi strategy, as you might remember. 

Of course the word communism here has a meaning more akin to the attempted Republican slur, but there is a grain of truth in this.

Zizek makes stray points on how many higher-level white-collar workers have to exploit themselves at home in order to do their jobs - to be ‘creative,’ “think outside the box,” plan so the corporation doesn’t lose profits.  This leads to spiritual exhaustion, unlike people with real jobs like nurses and doctors who have a justified exhaustion. He also once again defends  what he considers the European project against firebugs like Erdogan, who was deeply involved in the Syrian civil war that has created so many refugees, and Putin, who also opposes the European project.   He quotes the head of Die Linke, a left party in Germany, as to why it is reasonable to pay attention to poverty and war in other countries.  Instead of lame appeals to abstract humanitarianism, it is because otherwise those people will become refugees and be forced to move!

Zizek mentions that the Chinese CP did not ‘trust the people,’ as Mao’s dictum went, when it arrested the doctor who first identified Covid-19.  His point is that free speech is essential to combating a virus.  He keeps on saying that ‘we are in the same boat now’ riffing off of something MLK said.  However, as we know, that is only in the abstract, as different classes and ethnicities suffer differently. But the biggest question for him is “How did our system, with all the warnings, let this happen?”  The rulers – government bureaucrats, politicians, capitalists - have once again failed.

Zizek glories in the demise of cruise ships (for a time), the lack of automobiles on the roads, the closure of theme parks, moments of withdrawal from the world, a non-consumerist atmosphere, a bottom-up universal and local solidarity among people, reductions in air pollution, a chastened stock market, touches of Universal Basic Income, calls for a cessation of the numerous wars around the globe, the truce in the favelas between gangs.  Then he calls ruminations like this ‘new age spiritualist meditations.’ Having it both ways is one of his polemical tactics.

If the virus leads to increasing dictatorial control by governments, Zizek says using his Slovenian experience:  “all the dictatorial powers that the state apparatuses are amassing simply makes their basic impotence all the more palpable.”  It is clear capital has again been deeply wounded, but the problem is one of organization.  How will proletarians unite and chart a new socialist, universal and emancipatory future?  Zizek provides very little except ‘self-organization’ in this slight book.

Prior blog reviews on Zizek books, use blog search box upper left:  “Living in the End Times,” “Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?” ”Violence,” “Like a Thief in Broad Daylight,” “First as Tragedy, Then as Farce,” (all by Zizek).

And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog

May 1, 2020

Happy May Day! 
Cheers to all the proletarians who always were more valuable than the bosses, their acolytes and their managers.