The Situation is Excellent?

 “Heaven in Disorder” by Slavoj Žižek, 2021

This is a series of essays our Slovenian professor wrote in 2020 covering a plateful of events.  The Lacanian word-salad is absent, except for the unnecessary substitution of “Master-Signifiers” for ideological dominance in his discussion of Chile.  Generally, he seems to be moving away from any “Leninist” conceptions towards critical support for mass social-democratic struggle within the capitalist context.  Perhaps that is his reformist ‘transitional’ approach, as Lenin’s slogans in 1917 were “Bread, Land and Peace” not ‘socialist revolution.’  I’m going to give a flavor of each chapter in one sentence.  See if I can do it.

    1.   Yemen:  Houthi drone attack on Saudi Arabia is not a ‘game changer.’

     2.   Kurdistan/Rojava:  ‘Anti-imperialists’ who criticize the left-wing Kurds for trying to survive through a military link with the U.S. don’t live in the real world or care for social progress.

     3.   Hong Kong:  China warns the West, in solidarity, that street demonstrations also threaten them.

     4.   Assange:  Žižek visited Assange in the U.K.’s “humanist prison” and confirms that the U.K., especially after Brexit, is more than ever a U.S. poodle. 

     5.   Bolivia: The religious white-people’s coup against Morales, Arce and indigenous people failed because Morales had been successful in improving Bolivia.

     6.   Chile:  The APRUEBO Constitutional process was victorious in dispensing with the Pinochet constitution due to a mass class polarization.

     7.   U.K. Labour Party:  The LP failed in the election because they didn’t take a clear stand on Brexit - they should have been against it.

     8.   Israel & Palestine:  Anti-Israeli government politics and anti-Semitism are not the same thing, as Zionism itself is now anti-Semitic.

     9.   Iraq:  The U.S. assassinating General Soleimani was a rational act in a 'mad' middle-east intent on fomenting Sunni versus Shia bloodshed as an excuse for nationalist dominance.

     10.     EU:  Reactionary states like Turkey, Russia and Trump’s U.S. are against the EU in principle, though the ‘nation-state’ is outmoded.

11.     U.S.:  The U.S. contains 4 ‘parties’ – centrist Republicans, Trumpists, centrist Democrats and Sandernistas.

12.     France:  Zizek supports Corbyn, Sanders and ‘people’s assemblies’ as part of a “a moderately conservative left.”

13.     Brazil:  The Amazon is burning and Žižek calls for a “strong global agency” – a.k.a. 'communism' - to coordinate against global climate change.

14.     Immigrants:  The answer to immigration is not abstract and moralistic humanitarianism but changing the world conditions that are forcing immigrants to leave their countries.

15.      Censorship:   Liberals who censor leftist art that parodies fascism (Rammstein and Philip Guston) underestimate viewers.

16.     Corbyn:  The removal of Jeffrey Corbyn from the Labour Party for ‘anti-Semitism’ was actually a removal for anti-capitalism.

17.     U.S. Right:  Žižek spends chapters writing about Trump, Biden, the pandemic and January 6, 2021 in pretty familiar terms.  He calls the latter a ‘carnival’ based on a fragment of the population seeking to restore ‘pleasure’ to the “American Way of Life.”  Actually, a nice psychological insight.

18.     Christ:  The problem of evil and Christ’s inability to shield humans from disaster.  Really?  In 2022?  This is an issue?

19.     AOC:  AOC has been coopted and now polemicizes against the social democrat U.S. left as making inauthentic criticisms, which is not news.

20.     Europe:  Against the liberal idea of Europe as a space for humanitarianism; the capitalist idea of a world economic power; the conservative idea that it is a military front of nations, he supports Europe as a bastion of the secular and scientific Enlightenment which still has emancipatory potential.

I can’t do it.  Žižek’s best chapter is on Mao’s On Contradiction, which famously made the case that that the struggle against Japanese occupation was the key link in the class struggle, the “main contradiction.”  (Though class-collaborationism with the Kuomintang made this ‘contradiction’ much harder to resolve…)  He quotes Maurizio Lazzarato as to the “irreducible plurality of struggles for emancipation, and the resonance between them.” In other words, the present struggle for the right of women to control their own bodies related to abortion, or the struggle against racist police killings, brutality and the incarceration state - are all forms of class struggle.

The Paris Commune - the First Workers' State

Yet Žižek stands behind ‘class’ as not just another identity (as fascists, liberals and even Trump made out…) but because it “over-determines the totality of social identities.”  In other words the goals for anti-racist or anti-sexist struggle is mutual respect, equality, cooperation and peaceful co-existence.  The goal of class struggle is the elimination of its opponent and in the process eliminating class in toto.  This makes class an irreconcilable antagonism in a capitalist society.  It is not just another contradiction, though it is tied to all the others.

Žižek chooses a vague form of communism as the only way out of the impasse, as opposed to the false solutions of liberal capitalism or authoritarian populism. In his description or nostalgia for the Paris Commune, he points out the January 6, 2021 riot was an idiot’s Commune, a form of middle-class, white, anti-Enlightenment barbarism.  It proves that ‘the people’ can be manipulated.  While supporting local councils in France in one essay, he downplays their chaotic self-organization during the Paris Commune in another – a Commune led by Blanqui.  He calls for actual leadership – Party, personal or otherwise:  “A true leader literally creates the People as a united political agent out of a confused mess of inconsistent tendencies.”  No shit.  Chaotic ‘self-organization,’ so beloved of anarchists, never rises to the level of a serious threat if left at that level.  Žižek once again proves the point that it is the organizational question which is paramount.

P.S. - Zizek takes his Euro-Vision into overdrive, supporting NATO and the Zelensky government in an editorial in the 6/21/22 Guardian. In Point 20. above, he supposedly opposed "the conservative idea that it is a military front of nations."  Seems like he's doing a Hitchens.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “Violence,” “Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?”, “First As Tragedy, Then as Farce,” “Like a Thief in Broad Daylight,” “Living in the End Times” and “Pandemic” (All 6 by Zizek); “The Invisible Committee,” “Parasite,” “Nomadland,” “Capital in the 20^th Century” (Piketty) “On Contradiction” (Mao); “From the Factory to the Metropolis” (Negri); “Left Confusion on Brexit,” “Illegals, Migrants and Refugees.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / June 12, 2022