[Debate] (Fwd) Occupiers, make demands - but not pragmatic ones (Zizek)

Tue Apr 24 19:39:29 BST 2012

("let us not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not 
corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be 
corrupt.")

  Occupy Wall Street: what is to be done next?

How to think past the paradox of a protest movement without a programme 
confronting a capitalist system that defies reform

  * Slavoj Zizek <http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/slavojzizek>
  *
      o
        Slavoj Z(iz(ek <http://www.guardian.co.uk/profile/slavojzizek>
      o guardian.co.uk <http://www.guardian.co.uk/>, Tuesday 24 April 2012

occupy oakland november
A demonstrator in Oakland holds a sign on 2 November, 2011. Photograph: 
Eric Thayer/Getty Images

What to do in the aftermath of the Occupy Wall Street 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/occupy-wall-street> movement, when the 
protests that started far away -- in the Middle East, Greece, Spain, UK 
-- reached the centre, and are now reinforced and rolling out all around 
the world?

In a San Francisco echo of the OWS movement on 16 October 2011, a guy 
addressed the crowd with an invitation to participate in it as if it 
were a happening in the hippy style of the 1960s:

    "They are asking us what is our program. We have no program. We are
    here to have a good time."

Such statements display one of the great dangers the protesters are 
facing: the danger that they will fall in love with themselves, with the 
nice time they are having in the "occupied" places. Carnivals come cheap 
-- the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our 
normal daily life will be changed. The protesters should fall in love 
with hard and patient work -- they are the beginning, not the end. Their 
basic message is: the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best 
possible world; we are allowed, obliged even, to think about alternatives.

In a kind of Hegelian triad, the western left has come full circle: 
after abandoning the so-called "class struggle essentialism" for the 
plurality of anti-racist, feminist etc struggles, "capitalism" is now 
clearly re-emerging as the name of /the/ problem.

The first two things one should prohibit are therefore the critique of 
corruption and the critique of financial capitalism. First, let us not 
blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not corruption or 
greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The 
solution is neither Main Street nor Wall Street, but to change the 
system where Main Street cannot function without Wall Street. Public 
figures from the pope downward bombard us with injunctions to fight the 
culture of excessive greed and consummation -- this disgusting spectacle 
of cheap moralization is an ideological operation, if there ever was 
one: the compulsion (to expand) inscribed into the system itself is 
translated into personal sin, into a private psychological propensity, 
or, as one of the theologians close to the pope put it:

    "The present crisis is not crisis of capitalism but the crisis of
    morality."

Let us recall the famous joke from Ernst Lubitch's Ninotchka 
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninotchka>: the hero visits a cafeteria 
and orders coffee without cream; the waiter replies:

    "Sorry, but we have run out of cream, we only have milk. Can I bring
    you coffee without milk?"

Was not a similar trick at work in the dissolution of the eastern 
european Communist regimes in 1990? The people who protested wanted 
freedom and democracy without corruption and exploitation, and what they 
got was freedom and democracy without solidarity and justice. Likewise, 
the Catholic theologian close to pope is carefully emphasizing that the 
protesters should target moral injustice, greed, consumerism etc, 
without capitalism. The self-propelling circulation of Capital remains 
more than ever the ultimate Real of our lives, a beast that by 
definition cannot be controlled.

One should avoid the temptation of the narcissism of the lost cause, of 
admiring the sublime beauty of uprisings doomed to fail. What new 
positive order should replace the old one the day after, when the 
sublime enthusiasm of the uprising is over? It is at this crucial point 
that we encounter the fatal weakness of the protests: they express an 
authentic rage which is not able to transform itself into a minimal 
positive program of socio-political change. They express a spirit of 
revolt without revolution.

Reacting to the Paris protests of 1968, Lacan said:

    "What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a new master. You will get
    one."

It seems that Lacan's remark found its target (not only) in the 
indignados of Spain. Insofar as their protest 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/protest> remains at the level of a 
hysterical provocation of the master, without a positive program for the 
new order to replace the old one, it effectively functions as a call for 
a new master, albeit disavowed.

We got the first glimpse of this new master in Greece and Italy, and 
Spain will probably follow. As if ironically answering the lack of 
expert programs of the protesters, the trend is now to replace 
politicians in the government with a "neutral" government of 
depoliticized technocrats (mostly bankers, as in Greece and Italy). 
Colorful "politicians" are out, grey experts are in. This trend is 
clearly moving towards a permanent emergency state and the suspension of 
political democracy.

So we should see in this development also a challenge: it is not enough 
to reject the depoliticized expert rule as the most ruthless form of 
ideology; one should also begin to think seriously about what to propose 
instead of the predominant economic organization, to imagine and 
experiment with alternate forms of organization, to search for the germs 
of the New. Communism is not just or predominantly the carnival of the 
mass protest when the system is brought to a halt; Communism is also, 
above all, a new form of organization, discipline, hard work.

The protesters should beware not only of enemies, but also of false 
friends who pretend to support them, but are already working hard to 
dilute the protest. In the same way we get coffee without caffeine, beer 
without alcohol, ice-cream without fat, they will try to make the 
protests into a harmless moralistic gesture. In boxing, to "clinch" 
means to hold the opponent's body with one or both arms in order to 
prevent or hinder punches. Bill Clinton 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/clinton>'s reaction to the Wall Street 
protests is a perfect case of political clinching; Clinton thinks that 
the protests are "on balance ... a positive thing", but he is worried 
about the nebulousness of the cause. Clinton suggested the protesters 
get behind President Obama's jobs plan, which he claimed would create "a 
couple million jobs in the next year and a half". What one should resist 
at this stage is precisely such a quick translation of the energy of the 
protest into a set of "concrete" pragmatic demands. Yes, the protests 
did create a vacuum -- a vacuum in the field of hegemonic ideology, and 
time is needed to fill this vacuum in in a proper way, since it is a 
pregnant vacuum, an opening for the truly New. The reason protesters 
went out is that they had enough of the world where to recycle your Coke 
cans, to give a couple of dollars for charity, or to buy Starbucks 
cappuccino where 1% goes for the third world troubles is enough to make 
them feel good.

Economic globalization is gradually but inexorably undermining the 
legitimacy of western democracies. Due to their international character, 
large economic processes cannot be controlled by democratic mechanisms 
which are, by definition, limited to nation states. In this way, people 
more and more experience institutional democratic forms as unable to 
capture their vital interests.

It is here that Marx's key insight remains valid, today perhaps more 
than ever: for Marx, the question of freedom should not be located 
primarily into the political sphere proper. The key to actual freedom 
rather resides in the "apolitical" network of social relations, from the 
market to the family, where the change needed if we want an actual 
improvement is not a political reform, but a change in the "apolitical" 
social relations of production. We do not vote about who owns what, 
about relations in a factory, etc -- all this is left to processes 
outside the sphere of the political. It is illusory to expect that one 
can effectively change things by "extending" democracy into this sphere, 
say, by organizing "democratic" banks under people's control. In such 
"democratic" procedures (which, of course, can have a positive role to 
play), no matter how radical our anti-capitalism is, the solution is 
sought in applying the democratic mechanisms -- which, one should never 
forget, are part of the state apparatuses of the "bourgeois" state that 
guarantees undisturbed functioning of the capitalist reproduction.

The emergence of an international protest movement without a coherent 
program is therefore not an accident: it reflects a deeper crisis, one 
without an obvious solution. The situation is like that of 
psychoanalysis, where the patient knows the answer (his symptoms sare 
such answers) but doesn't know to what they are answers, and the analyst 
has to formulate a question. Only through such a patient work a program 
will emerge.

In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German 
worker gets a job in Siberia. Aaware of how all mail will be read by 
censors, he tells his friends:

    "Let's establish a code: if a letter you will get from me is written
    in ordinary blue ink, it is true; if it is written in red ink, it is
    false."

After a month, his friends get the first letter written in blue ink:

    "Everything is wonderful here: stores are full, food is abundant,
    apartments are large and properly heated, movie theatres show films
    from the west, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair --
    the only thing unavailable is /red ink/."

And is this not our situation till now? We have all the freedoms one 
wants -- the only thing missing is the "red ink": we feel free because 
we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. What this lack of 
red ink means is that, today, all the main terms we use to designate the 
present conflict -- "war on terror", "democracy and freedom", "human 
rights", etc -- are false terms, mystifying our perception of the 
situation instead of allowing us to think it.

The task today is to give the protesters red ink.

NYPL logo

/. This article is based on remarks Slavoj Z(iz(ek will be making at an 
event at the New York Public Library on 25 April 
<http://www.nypl.org/events/programs/2012/04/25/slavoj-zizek-back-2011-year-dreaming-dangerously?pref=node_type_search%2Fevents>, 
ahead of publication of The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (2012) 
<http://www.versobooks.com/authors/2-slavoj-zizek>./

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