Žižek and Emergency Capitalism
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- Опубликовано: 6 окт 2024
- Douglas Lain and Fabio Vighi explore Slavoj Žižek's influence on the left, the concept of emergency politics, and the ongoing war in Ukraine. Fabio offers a critical perspective on Žižek’s controversial support for NATO, arguing that Žižek misunderstands the true functioning of capitalism. Together, they delve into the contradictions and complexities of Žižek’s stance, questioning the role of intellectuals in shaping leftist politics amidst global crises. This conversation challenges mainstream narratives and digs deep into the philosophical and political underpinnings of our time.
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Immediately he’s just intentionally not getting the joke of capitalism with Asian values. Even in your video Doug zizek says it’s really got nothing to do with being Asian
It’s just that Asia is where the most brutal form of capitalism is starting to appear
It’s not that it may be racist it’s intentionally a racist joke
@@tommy2nes Not just starting to appear. it's been there and brutal for decades now, they are just taking the reigns from us.
I just looked up your guests work. Its a grim read but sounds real to me. Great to get him. Thanks
Great conversation Doug and Fabio. The only thing I would add is that this insubstantial credit that Fabio was talking about is actually grabbing a piece of unrealized value from the future and circulating it. We're trading the labor of people who have not yet been born.
This is discussed in great detail in the important work of the late Robert Kurz, which we are still translating (with Fabio's help): Money Without Value (2012).
Props for Night Moves reference. One of Melanie Griffith's first performances. Mostly a film noir, things end badly for all the main characters. One of Gene Hackman's best performances imho,
The thumbnail indicated something about the "Zizek Left" but didn't follow through, unless that's for Patreon subscribers. Zizek is a philosopher and cultural theorist, working with psychoanalysis and doing ideology critique for the most part. One should perhaps not expect from Zizek what one might expect from an economist and geopolitics analyst, but okay why not. Zizek is not only critical of capitalism with Asian characteristics but almost every instance of actually existing socialism, with, ironically, galvanizing glosses on every aspect of the radical legacy, especially through its intellectual leaders. His concern is not historical materialism, or historicism, and so for example he does not have a good grasp of - does not care to - why the Soviet project turned into Stalinism. In recent times he has had very bad takes on the situation in Ukraine especially, with a pro-NATO, Clash of Civilizations, bias in his discussion, which is something he used to reject. The reason for this is that there is barely any workers' struggle on any side of this conflict, though Zizek can and does write essays like "Class Struggle Against Classism," (Philosophical Salon, 2021). Despite the pile-on against Zizek that started around 2016 and was accelerated by Rockhill, he continues to write incomparably insightful articles on today's politics, for example: "The Impasse of Today's Radical Politics" (C&C #1 2014), "The Hologram of Competing Universalities," (C&C #11 2024), "Divided We Stand, United We Fall," (substack 2024), and the substance of such articles are not discussed by his critics, who cherry pick this or that issue that they disagree about. There are few significant commentators on Zizek, though many commentators, and Vighi with Feldner's book, "Zizek Beyond Foucault," is highly recommended. Beyond this, it's hard to argue that capital does not need labour when today there are more workers performing labour tasks than ever before. The working class, even in the US, is approximately 70 percent of the population. Even if it is not organized or unionized, that does not mean that it does not exist and that capitalism is not exploiting labour or that we have moved beyond production. The fact is that workers need to be better organized and that in no way requires something like the full autonomist spectrum of exodus and emphasis on pleasure leisure etc, which are ideas that are not outside the development of capitalism since the 19th century. Lefebvre had a more practical understanding of this issue, for example. The new vs old rhetoric is somewhat whatever since art and culture, and intellectual production, simply continue, now more than ever, without needing to be ideologized. Re: the Deleuzian take on not reterritorializing labour, Marx and Engels said the same thing and perhaps said it in a better overall intellectual framework than Deleuze's postmodern binaries. As for people not being their real self but becoming avatars, that virtuality is already implicit in subjectivity, and Vighi said it perfectly: the problem is going from bad to worse. So for example, the notion of autonomy that is rejected by post-structuralists because it has a bourgeois legacy is typically used by these same theorists to reject Marxism along with it and lead the left down the postmodern path that has supplemented rather than challenged neoliberalism. The argument seems to be, let's not go back to the pre-postmodern left, let's remain the post-left. I'm not convinced by what is ultimately the Fukuyama-vs-Derrida paradigm. Zizek and Badiou were at least a break with that and theorists like Jodi Dean have the correct orientation. Little wonder she lost her job.
regarding Z and use of 'asian values'
as another wrote (from decent reddit thread, i copy and paste here cause they say it totally fine. to put it another way: I approve this message>>)
"...."Asian Values" is NOT Zizek's term. He is parodying a term used by others (mostly capitalists). Here Zizek calls the idea ridiculous: "Something genuinely new is emerging today in the guise of what are ridiculously called "Asian values", authoritarian capitalism." Orientalist, probably; but blame the neoliberals scared shitless by China that use the word sincerely, not Zizek..."
furthermore :
"...I can't get past the two obvious problems with this argument:
Zizek obviously was not saying that Western capitalism is good and Asian values corrupted it. His entire thesis is that capitalism in any context is problematic. He has written literally hundreds of pages criticizing the idea that Western capitalism is inherently democratic or leads to democratic institutions.
The phrase 'Asian values' has been used by the leaders of China, Indonesia, Singapore and many other East Asian countries to which Zizek was alluding. He is not making an Orientalist argument that capitalism went bad when them Asians infected it with their non-Western values. He's simply referring to a specific system of authoritarian capitalism with the language used by that system's ruling elites.
Like almost every critique of Zizek I've read by someone other than a Lacanian or Marxist theorist, the author seems to have latched onto a misinterpretation of one turn of phrase in one interview, and constructed a rather warped understanding of Zizek's arguments based on said misinterpretation.
Zizek is one of the most famous modern academic critics of identity politics. Accusing him of holding a worldview that boils down to "West is best and all those other primitive cultures keep ruining our good ideas" is patently absurd...."
***
now in terms of Vighi's work recently: indeed Vighi explores what i will call the world system macro level of how international finance capital (the "elite" as hot takers on twitter like to put it) are indeed working to re-organize etc. many diff aspects of society, around the world (to manage and maintain certain flows of profit, exploitation, etc.) .
Zizek is not so oriented in this approach and when he has in the past he tends to be cursory and journalistic/punchy (superficial) in style. That dont mean he is some kind of liberal globalist! lol... it just means its def not an area that Zizek analyzes with much persistence or extensive focus.
Vighi has published a number of incisive essays since the start of covid, that look hard at how this is all working on a "world system" level.. in dynamic and dialectical action. A collection of essays of his recent work is overdue. Furthermore solid reflection on his recent work is also long overdue
Bumping Chris to the Thursday slot is proof that the capitalist subject embodies contradiction.
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The charge that China is inherently authoritarian, a common one in Western Marxism, reflects a lack of understanding of the country’s historical and material conditions. By adopting a liberal democratic perspective, these critics fail to understand the role of the state in building socialism and in confronting both internal and external challenges. The Chinese model, far from being an authoritarian tyranny, is a pragmatic and adaptive way of applying Marxism to China’s specific context, ensuring both economic development and national sovereignty while promoting a distinctive form of popular participation. Generally, it comes with utopian visions of the way socialism is supposed to work.
I'm still trying to figure out how party leaders becoming middlemen between the Chinese workers and Capitalist consumer countries (namely the US) is Socialism.
@@SolaVirtusNobilitat socialism is not a check list. It is about create political power of comunists, and only after it recreate economy
@@SolaVirtusNobilitatBecause 1) “Socialism in one country” is impossible to the point of being an oxymoron but 2) more importantly, Marxism is not anti-Capitalist.
China is in an impossible position; it’s either a shining light in the worst of all possible worlds or a travesty in the best of all possible worlds. But in reality, it just exists despite what I might think about it. I’m just glad I don’t have to live there.
Its a one party dictatorship by definition. It supports and promotes free trade and bourgeois values (consumerism etc). Its suffering from the same issues US is facing. For example the recent massive quantitative easing.
The truth is that China is the greatest country on the face of the earth. It makes all other countries look insignificant and contemptible. It is the most brilliant, most industrious, most ambitious, most educated, meritocratic and technocratic, most modern, sophisticated, and civilised, and best-governed by far. .
It is the first non-white, non-Western country to reach this status since the 1600s. The determination of this country is indescribable. Supernatural. There is no force that can stop it from accomplishing anything it wants to do.
It doesn’t matter who we are. Egyptians, Syrians, Pakistanis, Indians, Africans, even Americans. Next to the Chinese, we are pathetic. We can’t do what they do. We would have a mountain, an Everest of changes to make, and we would whine and bicker and fail at every one of them. China’s story since the 1980s has been one of an almost divine metamorphosis.
Next to China the entire Western world from Alaska to New Zealand has stagnated. Next to China the entire developing world from Brazil to Madagascar has progressed only at a crawl.
China is the mother of all gargantuan bullet trains. Every day it manages to create something new and astonishing. And unlike the United States, unlike the British Empire, unlike the French, Dutch, Germans, Spanish, Portuguese or any other Western nation that had its turn at being a superpower in the past four centuries, China doesn’t need to run anybody over or take something from somebody else, to rise majestically.
China is also standing up to the West all by herself. The West can’t believe their four-hundred-year-old global supremacy is being challenged. They hoped that the more China developed, the more it would submit to their influence, interests, and leadership. That didn’t happen. So now they will do anything possible, short of a nuclear war, to make China end.
Their goal is to destroy this country. That’s why, although the United States has killed several million people and turned several regions of the earth into hellscapes.
China is the worst fear of our planet’s Western masters. They want you to despise and dread a country that’s done nothing to you, that hasn’t invaded anyone, bombed or sanctioned anyone, that hasn’t overthrown any foreign government, or used its military on anything since 1979.
China is the only major country in the nonwhite developing world, to stand up to the West. To look it in the eye when challenged or threatened.
The Global South are simply Western puppets who submitted long ago. Even the most powerful ones. Saudi Arabia, Brazil, India.
The 1500s-1000s BC were Egypt’s time. Antiquity belonged to the Greeks and Romans. The 1700s belonged to France, and the 1800s to Britain. From 1945 to the present, the world has been under American overlordship. And they call it the Pax Americana but there isn’t much Pax in it.
There’s plenty of Pax if you’re in Europe or Australia. But the Middle East? Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Iran and Yemen in the past 20 years. Latin America? They’ve destroyed that part of the world beyond any hope of recovery. Africa? It’s only been spared because of disinterest. The US sees Africa as nothing. The whole West does.
But in the twenty-first century, we are witnessing the rise of China. We are decades away from China becoming the greatest power on earth. This will be China’s time, and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Attack China all you want, curse her and monger rumours and hysteria - but the truth is that none of your accusations are backed up by evidence. The Western press is under the thumb of Western governments that want to stay on top of the world for eternity. And the truth is that China is not affected by the noise and maneuvers of her enemies.
For her first thirty years, from 1949 to 1979, China was basically blockaded and isolated economically and politically by the West. It didn’t even have a seat in the UN General Assembly. And it was dirt-poor in those days, barely a speck of the global economy, a tiny fraction of Japan’s or Germany’s GDP - not even able to prevent famine. And it still didn’t submit to pressure or take any orders. Why on earth would it do that now?
China will be the next global power. There’s nothing that can be done about that. The first stage is that its economy only needs to grow at 4.7 percent per year to become the world’s largest by 2035. That means the usual, historical bare-minimum of 6 percent is already overkill. The US can build as many bases as it wants, slap as many sanctions as it wants, recognise whatever bogus genocides it wants. That’s what it’s been doing all along. Has any of it made a difference? China can adapt to any situation. It took China a mere ten years to go from being barred by the US Congress from participating in the “International” Space Station, to building its own Space Station from zero.
Essentialism obscures, by proposing false solutions to real problems because it “never addresses the material basis of colonization, racism, gender oppression and overall resource scarcity” (Analysis of Free Speech in 21st century society - Proquest Magazine).Take the case of Slavoj Žiźek, reknowned cultural theorist and public intellectual. His bizarre and often meaningless propositions aside, he mirrors the same euro-centric chauvinism of Samuel Huntington, viz a viz a ‘clash of civilizations’ when he declared that “it is a simple fact that most of the refugees come from a culture that is incompatible and hostile with Western European notions of human rights.” Torchbearer of the European bourgeois cultural apparatus, all be it Slavoj is “Discursive Sausage for the Uneducated” (Gabriel Rockhill). Of all the ‘Hegelian Hogwash’ that Žiźek has come to symbolize, he can never utter a word about the CIA, about Samuel Huntington’s long involvement with the US Govt in framing globalist imperial policies. The disasters of which, are visible from Iran to Nicaragua to Indonesia. For this reason, Žiźek is an outstanding example of devotion to imperialism and the current world order.