Slavoj Žižek’s aim in this book is to move people through the 5 stages of grief in order to more quickly bring people to the fifth stage, acceptance, in which, once having passed the zero point, one is finally ready to act productively to address the four “horsemen” of the late capitalist apocalypse: the ecological crisis, the biogenetic revolution, imbalances in the system, and social divisions.
Bargaining: The Return of the Critique of Political Economy
A revolution can be defeated in three ways 1) sheer force of arms against it, 2) when it wins but just replace one ruling clique with another, or 3) when “guided by the correct instinct that every consolidation of the revolution into state power results in its betrayal, but unable to invent or impose a truly alternative social order, the revolutionary movement engages in a desperate strategy of protecting its purity”. This is called “the sacrificial temptation of the void”. The initial actions and changes that need to be made are never enough because they need the silent consent of those tepid souls who do not know what to do but know that something needs to be done. The silent majority having given their silent consent often withdraw it when what is at stake really manifests itself and then the revolution often eats them. The revolution must move forward but it moves backward to ideological purity. It cannot move forward because it knows not what to do. The void is past that does not work but sounds good because it got masses and the revolution as far as a “victory.” Often leaders are tempted to sacrifice an uncertain future for the un-working or unsustainable but known and comfortable past.
This sacrificial temptation of the void does not happen only in revolutions. One current example is in the study of the economy where, in the name of science, the term “political” was dropped. This was accomplished in order to get at the universal laws of economics independent of ideology. But ideology is everywhere and all it actually did was cement the neo-liberal ideology as the hidden political force behind economics today. “[O]nce we accept that the economy is always a political economy, a site of political struggle—in other words that its de-politicization, its status as a neutral sphere of ‘servicing the good,’ is in itself always already the outcome of a political struggle—then the prospect of a re-politicization of the economy, and thus of its re-assertion as the possible site of a Truth-Event is opened up.” A Truth-Event is a pre-fact or an event that brings about its own factual existence. For example by removing the term “political” from “political economy” a truth-event was created in which people now hold that good (or the best) economics does not deal with political or policy matters thereby preventing alternatives from being thought let alone expressed. Another example was the lie of the Greek finance minister that Greece “had” achieved the economic conditions to enter the European Currency Union however having been accepted, world confidence in the Greece’s situation changed such that it did satisfy the conditions to enter.
Quoting Marx, Žižek says, “the task of critical analysis is to unearth the ‘metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties’ in what appears at first sight just an ordinary object.” He goes through many varied examples while applying this type of analysis (such as class, labour value, and even Microsoft’s Windows dominance). We will look at one: Universal Basic Income (UBI). A UBI is an attempt to prolong the basic evils of our capitalist system and insure it against revolution. In late capitalism the shift to intellectual/immaterial labour necessarily reduces the type of alienation experienced on an assembly line and replaces it with a more hidden kind: where in the past the worker was not really physically connected to the product in any meaningful way (because it always was sold), but, for today’s knowledge or affective worker their labour is not taken from the worker in the same way (that is physically) but both workers are the same in that they are giving up the commodified “substance” of their work. It is only in the commodification of labour that today’s knowledge worker resembles the factory worker. “It is against this back ground that we should measure the ambiguity of what is arguably the Left’s only original economic idea of the last few decades: the basic (citizen’s) income, that is, a form of rent ensuring the dignified survival of all citizens, in particular those who have no other resources. The term ‘rent’ as used in Brazil (renta basica) should be taken seriously here: the introduction of a basic rent brings to a conclusion the becoming-rent of profit which characterizes contemporary capitalism. After the rent is paid to those who have privatized parts of the ‘general intellect’ (like Bill Gates, who collects rent for enabling people to participate in global networking), and the rent collected by those who dispose of scarce natural resources (oil, etc.), finally, the work force, the third element in the production process, would also be paid a rent. On what is this rent based? As its other name (‘citizen’s income’) indicates, it is a rent paid to all the citizens of a state, privileging them over non-citizens….we are dealing with a rent, something citizens receive on account of the mere fact of being citizens of a state, independently of what they do.” Žižek acknowledges the many benefits of a UBI such as, improving general genuine freedom and equality (he admits that these two have traditionally been opposed and a UBI would end that dichotomy). He goes on to admit that economic justice would also be advanced in a multitude of ways. It would produce a kinder, gentler capitalism; a sort of socialist capitalism. He even imagines “a worldwide basic income in which rich states support poor ones…” however all is not well because all the Left is doing is justifying capitalism when it is at the services of the welfare state.
“The basic income society is a kind of symmetrical reversal of this capitalist socialism: it too would give away everything, everything except the essential: the smooth running of the capitalist machine….The basic income would make it possible to accept and render functional the trend towards the marginalization of 80 percent of the population within the economy.” Echoing and expanding on the liberal-conservative critique of Peter Sloterdijk, Žižek agrees that “in our developed Western societies the balance between two basic life forces, [1] eros and [2] thymos, [1] desire grounded in lack and need and [2] pride grounded in self-assertive generosity, has been fatally disturbed: [1] lack and need have priority over [2] excess and generous giving, [1] guilt and dependence over [2] pride and self-assertion, [1] precariousness over [2] excess…. ‘We have practically no understanding for the complementary dimension of the life of the human soul, the pride, the honor, the generosity, the having and the bequeathing, the whole scale of giving virtues which belong to the complete thymotic life.’” As an example consider how poorly the white man understood the Haida potlatch tradition. “‘[O]ur thinking, caught in the categories of lacking and needing, prohibits us from grasping even approximately the numerous pride-cultures which continue to exist on the earth together with their life-projects in which the [person] possesses a plus and demands honor.’… our fundamental right is more and more simply the ‘right to dependence’: ‘Welfare is today a drug on which more and more people depend.” Welfare here is to be understood in its widest context including such things as accessibility, sustainability, forced equality, as well as prejudices against discrimination. A basic income takes this “drug addiction” to the highest capitalist levels such that each context of welfare becomes like profit in capitalism. “it is capitalism itself which, in its very core, is driven by a perverted eros, by a lack which becomes ever deeper the more it is satisfied….Therein resides the superego core of capitalism: the more profit [welfare] you amass, the more you need.” A determining property of capitalism is “limitless increases” which when put at the service of the welfare state increase the categories of “limitless increases” from one (simply profit) to many, that is all welfare categories. While this may seem good at first sight it (it is not since it is not too hard to imagine someone trying to treat sadness or other perceived bad psychic states with drugs), another effect of “limitless increases” in a welfare state serviced by capitalism is an increase without limit in the negative emotions such as resentment, envy, and outrage. “The basic income[‘s]… division of society into ‘basic’ and ‘productive’ citizens poses uncharted problems of resentment.” A UBI within a capitalist system will likely create and accentuate more problems than it solves; psychological problems as well as sustainability problems. In other words, we and the world are likely better off with fewer compulsions to limitless increases than with more. Žižek is not necessarily against a UBI, but he is against it in a capitalist dominated world where limitless increases are the expected norm of operations.