<nettime> Zizek Capitalism: How the left lost the argument.

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Capitalism: How the left lost the argument.
BY SLAVOJ ZIZEK | NOVEMBER 2012

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/10/08/capitalism


One might think that a crisis brought on by rapacious, unregulated 
capitalism would have changed a few minds about the fundamental nature 
of the global economy.


One would be wrong. True, there is no lack of anti-capitalist sentiment 
in the world today, particularly as a crisis brought on by the system's 
worst excesses continues to ravage the global economy. If anything, we 
are witnessing an overload of critiques of the horrors of capitalism: 
Books, newspaper investigations, and TV reports abound, telling us of 
companies ruthlessly polluting our environment, corrupted bankers who 
continue to get fat bonuses while their banks are bailed out by taxpayer 
money, and sweatshops where children work overtime.

Yet no matter how grievous the abuse or how indicative of a larger, more 
systemic failure, there's a limit to how far these critiques go. The 
goal is invariably to democratize capitalism in the name of fighting 
excesses and to extend democratic control of the economy through the 
pressure of more media scrutiny, parliamentary inquiries, harsher laws, 
and honest police investigations. What is never questioned is the 
bourgeois state of law upon which modern capitalism depends. This 
remains the sacred cow that even the most radical critics from the likes 
of Occupy Wall Street and the World Social Forum dare not touch.

It's no wonder, then, that the optimistic leftist expectations that the 
ongoing crisis would be a sobering moment -- the awakening from a dream 
-- turned out to be dangerously shortsighted. The year 2011 was indeed 
one of dreaming dangerously, of the revival of radical emancipatory 
politics all around the world. A year later, every day brings new proof 
of how fragile and inconsistent the awakening actually was. The 
enthusiasm of the Arab Spring is mired in compromises and religious 
fundamentalism; Occupy is losing momentum to such an extent that the 
police cleansing of New York's Zuccotti Park even seemed like a blessing 
in disguise. It's the same story around the world: Nepal's Maoists seem 
outmaneuvered by the reactionary royalist forces; Venezuela's 
"Bolivarian" experiment is regressing further and further into 
caudillo-run populism; and even the most hopeful sign, Greece's 
anti-austerity movement, has lost energy after the electoral defeat of 
the leftist Syriza party.

It now seems that the primary political effect of the economic crisis 
was not the rise of the radical left, but of racist populism, more wars, 
more poverty in the poorest Third World countries, and widening 
divisions between rich and poor. For all that crises shatter people out 
of their complacency and make them question the fundamentals of their 
lives, the first spontaneous reaction is not revolution but panic, which 
leads to a return to basics: food and shelter. The core premises of the 
ruling ideology are not put into doubt. They are even more violently 
asserted.

Could we in fact be seeing the conditions for the further radicalization 
of capitalism? German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk once told me that, if 
there is a person alive to whom they will build monuments 100 years from 
now, it is Lee Kuan Yew, the Singaporean leader who did more than anyone 
else to promote and implement the marriage of capitalism and 
authoritarianism -- an arrangement he euphemistically referred to as 
"Asian values." The virus of this authoritarian capitalism is slowly but 
surely spreading around the globe, nowhere more so than China.

Faced with today's explosion of capitalism in China, analysts often ask 
when political democracy as the "natural" political accompaniment of 
capitalism will enforce itself. But what if the promised democratization 
never arrives? What if China's authoritarian capitalism is not a stop on 
the road to further democratization, but the end state toward which the 
rest of the world is headed?

Leon Trotsky once characterized tsarist Russia as "the vicious 
combination of the Asian knout [whip] and the European stock market," 
but the description applies even better to today's China. In the Chinese 
iteration, the combination may prove to be a more stable one than the 
democratic capitalist model we have come to see as natural.

The main victim of the ongoing crisis is thus not capitalism, which 
appears to be evolving into an even more pervasive and pernicious form, 
but democracy -- not to mention the left, whose inability to offer a 
viable global alternative has again been rendered visible to all. It was 
the left that was effectively caught with its pants down. It is almost 
as if this crisis were staged to demonstrate that the only solution to a 
failure of capitalism is more capitalism.

----

Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian philosopher, is professor at the European 
Graduate School and senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana. 
His most recent book is The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, from which 
this article is adapted.


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