Никој не мора да биде негативец

Nobody has to be vile
By Slavoj Zizek

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n07/print/zize01_.html

Since 2001, Davos and Porto Alegre have been the twin cities of
globalisation: Davos, the exclusive Swiss resort where the global elite
of managers, statesmen and media personalities meets for the World
Economic Forum under heavy police protection, trying to convince us
(and themselves) that globalisation is its own best remedy; Porto
Alegre, the subtropical Brazilian city where the counter-elite of the
anti-globalisation movement meets, trying to convince us (and
themselves) that capitalist globalisation is not our inevitable fate –
that, as the official slogan puts it, ‘another world is possible.’ It
seems, however, that the Porto Alegre reunions have somehow lost their
impetus – we have heard less and less about them over the past couple
of years. Where did the bright stars of Porto Alegre go?

Some of them, at least, moved to Davos. The tone of the Davos meetings
is now predominantly set by the group of entrepreneurs who ironically
refer to themselves as ‘liberal communists’ and who no longer accept
the opposition between Davos and Porto Alegre: their claim is that we
can have the global capitalist cake (thrive as entrepreneurs) and eat
it (endorse the anti-capitalist causes of social responsibility,
ecological concern etc). There is no need for Porto Alegre: instead,
Davos can become Porto Davos.

So who are these liberal communists? The usual suspects: Bill Gates and
George Soros, the CEOs of Google, IBM, Intel, eBay, as well as
court-philosophers like Thomas Friedman. The true conservatives today,
they argue, are not only the old right, with its ridiculous belief in
authority, order and parochial patriotism, but also the old left, with
its war against capitalism: both fight their shadow-theatre battles in
disregard of the new realities. The signifier of this new reality in
the liberal communist Newspeak is ‘smart’. Being smart means being
dynamic and nomadic, and against centralised bureaucracy; believing in
dialogue and co-operation as against central authority; in flexibility
as against routine; culture and knowledge as against industrial
production; in spontaneous interaction and autopoiesis as against fixed
hierarchy.

Bill Gates is the icon of what he has called ‘frictionless capitalism’,
the post-industrial society and the ‘end of labour’. Software is
winning over hardware and the young nerd over the old manager in his
black suit. In the new company headquarters, there is little external
discipline; former hackers dominate the scene, working long hours,
enjoying free drinks in green surroundings. The underlying notion here
is that Gates is a subversive marginal hooligan, an ex-hacker, who has
taken over and dressed himself up as a respectable chairman.

Liberal communists are top executives reviving the spirit of contest
or, to put it the other way round, countercultural geeks who have taken
over big corporations. Their dogma is a new, postmodernised version of
Adam Smith’s invisible hand: the market and social responsibility are
not opposites, but can be reunited for mutual benefit. As Friedman puts
it, nobody has to be vile in order to do business these days;
collaboration with employees, dialogue with customers, respect for the
environment, transparency of deals – these are the keys to success.
Olivier Malnuit recently drew up the liberal communist’s ten
commandments in the French magazine Technikart:

1. You shall give everything away free (free access, no copyright);
just charge for the additional services, which will make you rich.

2. You shall change the world, not just sell things.

3. You shall be sharing, aware of social responsibility.

4. You shall be creative: focus on design, new technologies and science.

5. You shall tell all: have no secrets, endorse and practise the cult
of transparency and the free flow of information; all humanity should
collaborate and interact.

6. You shall not work: have no fixed 9 to 5 job, but engage in smart,
dynamic, flexible communication.

7. You shall return to school: engage in permanent education.

8. You shall act as an enzyme: work not only for the market, but
trigger new forms of social collaboration.

9. You shall die poor: return your wealth to those who need it, since
you have more than you can ever spend.

10. You shall be the state: companies should be in partnership with the
state.

Liberal communists are pragmatic; they hate a doctrinaire approach.
There is no exploited working class today, only concrete problems to be
solved: starvation in Africa, the plight of Muslim women, religious
fundamentalist violence. When there is a humanitarian crisis in Africa
(liberal communists love a humanitarian crisis; it brings out the best
in them), instead of engaging in anti-imperialist rhetoric, we should
get together and work out the best way of solving the problem, engage
people, governments and business in a common enterprise, start moving
things instead of relying on centralised state help, approach the
crisis in a creative and unconventional way.

Liberal communists like to point out that the decision of some large
international corporations to ignore apartheid rules within their
companies was as important as the direct political struggle against
apartheid in South Africa. Abolishing segregation within the company,
paying blacks and whites the same salary for the same job etc: this was
a perfect instance of the overlap between the struggle for political
freedom and business interests, since the same companies can now thrive
in post-apartheid South Africa.

Liberal communists love May 1968. What an explosion of youthful energy
and creativity! How it shattered the bureaucratic order! What an
impetus it gave to economic and social life after the political
illusions dropped away! Those who were old enough were themselves
protesting and fighting on the streets: now they have changed in order
to change the world, to revolutionise our lives for real. Didn’t Marx
say that all political upheavals were unimportant compared to the
invention of the steam engine? And would Marx not have said today: what
are all the protests against global capitalism in comparison with the
internet?

Above all, liberal communists are true citizens of the world – good
people who worry. They worry about populist fundamentalism and
irresponsible greedy capitalist corporations. They see the ‘deeper
causes’ of today’s problems: mass poverty and hopelessness breed
fundamentalist terror. Their goal is not to earn money, but to change
the world (and, as a by-product, make even more money). Bill Gates is
already the single greatest benefactor in the history of humanity,
displaying his love for his neighbours by giving hundreds of millions
of dollars for education, the fight against hunger and malaria etc. The
catch is that before you can give all this away you have to take it
(or, as the liberal communists would put it, create it). In order to
help people, the justification goes, you must have the means to do so,
and experience – that is, recognition of the dismal failure of all
centralised statist and collectivist approaches – teaches us that
private enterprise is by far the most effective way. By regulating
their business, taxing them excessively, the state is undermining the
official goal of its own activity (to make life better for the
majority, to help those in need).

Liberal communists do not want to be mere profit-machines: they want
their lives to have deeper meaning. They are against old-fashioned
religion and for spirituality, for non-confessional meditation
(everybody knows that Buddhism foreshadows brain science, that the
power of meditation can be measured scientifically). Their motto is
social responsibility and gratitude: they are the first to admit that
society has been incredibly good to them, allowing them to deploy their
talents and amass wealth, so they feel that it is their duty to give
something back to society and help people. This beneficence is what
makes business success worthwhile.

This isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. Remember Andrew Carnegie, who
employed a private army to suppress organised labour in his steelworks
and then distributed large parts of his wealth for educational,
cultural and humanitarian causes, proving that, although a man of
steel, he had a heart of gold? In the same way, today’s liberal
communists give away with one hand what they grabbed with the other.

There is a chocolate-flavoured laxative available on the shelves of US
stores which is publicised with the paradoxical injunction: Do you have
constipation? Eat more of this chocolate! – i.e. eat more of something
that itself causes constipation. The structure of the chocolate
laxative can be discerned throughout today’s ideological landscape; it
is what makes a figure like Soros so objectionable. He stands for
ruthless financial exploitation combined with its counter-agent,
humanitarian worry about the catastrophic social consequences of the
unbridled market economy. Soros’s daily routine is a lie embodied: half
of his working time is devoted to financial speculation, the other half
to ‘humanitarian’ activities (financing cultural and democratic
activities in post-Communist countries, writing essays and books) which
work against the effects of his own speculations. The two faces of Bill
Gates are exactly like the two faces of Soros: on the one hand, a cruel
businessman, destroying or buying out competitors, aiming at a virtual
monopoly; on the other, the great philanthropist who makes a point of
saying: ‘What does it serve to have computers if people do not have
enough to eat?’

According to liberal communist ethics, the ruthless pursuit of profit
is counteracted by charity: charity is part of the game, a humanitarian
mask hiding the underlying economic exploitation. Developed countries
are constantly ‘helping’ undeveloped ones (with aid, credits etc), and
so avoiding the key issue: their complicity in and responsibility for
the miserable situation of the Third World. As for the opposition
between ‘smart’ and ‘non-smart’, outsourcing is the key notion. You
export the (necessary) dark side of production – disciplined,
hierarchical labour, ecological pollution – to ‘non-smart’ Third World
locations (or invisible ones in the First World). The ultimate liberal
communist dream is to export the entire working class to invisible
Third World sweat shops.

We should have no illusions: liberal communists are the enemy of every
true progressive struggle today. All other enemies – religious
fundamentalists, terrorists, corrupt and inefficient state
bureaucracies – depend on contingent local circumstances. Precisely
because they want to resolve all these secondary malfunctions of the
global system, liberal communists are the direct embodiment of what is
wrong with the system. It may be necessary to enter into tactical
alliances with liberal communists in order to fight racism, sexism and
religious obscurantism, but it’s important to remember exactly what
they are up to.

Etienne Balibar, in La Crainte des masses (1997), distinguishes the two
opposite but complementary modes of excessive violence in today’s
capitalism: the objective (structural) violence that is inherent in the
social conditions of global capitalism (the automatic creation of
excluded and dispensable individuals, from the homeless to the
unemployed), and the subjective violence of newly emerging ethnic
and/or religious (in short: racist) fundamentalisms. They may fight
subjective violence, but liberal communists are the agents of the
structural violence that creates the conditions for explosions of
subjective violence. The same Soros who gives millions to fund
education has ruined the lives of thousands thanks to his financial
speculations and in doing so created the conditions for the rise of the
intolerance he denounces.

--

Slavoj Zizek, a philosopher and a (Lacanian) psychoanalyst, is
international director of the Centre for Advanced Studies in the
Humanities at Birkbeck. The Parallax View, his latest attempt to
rehabilitate dialectical materialism, comes out in April 2006.









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