When industrialists and the progressive State want borders to drop (creating a larger, and thus cheaper labour and commodity markets) whilst the subject of the Left -workers -wants territorial and national restrictionism, there is a fine line to walk. That which ostensibly separated socialism from national socialism was the formers adherence to “cosmopolitanism” (with political ramifications which can not be overstated) but this cosmopolitanism itself has become, in material if not spirit, a crux of liberal capitalism.

This is the reason Žižek drops the idea of socialism itself. He posits the future as a battle not between capitalism and socialism, but as one between socialism (or social-democracy, or China’s social-authoritarian capitalism) and communism. Even if Cameron, Brown, Clegg et al are offering cuts, the softening of Sarkozy’s neo-liberalism, Obama’s stuttering attempts to engage social democracy in America, Japan and Greece’s elections of “Leftist” governments, seem to all support Žižek’s assertion.

But this dynamic has been an “unknown known” for a very long time on the Left: does Das Kapital’s middle section on the working day, with its reliance on government sources, and its story of shifting worker-capitalist alliances, not bear absolute testament to this fact? We know that capitalists are structurally idiotic: the laws of coercive competition will always push them to parasitise off the populace, kill off their workers and rape the environment. As the working day chapter of Das Kapital shows, it is progressive struggles themselves which have stabilised capitalism, and allowed its continuance. This enmeshment of State and capital, “public and private,” seen most recently in bailouts, is the pragmatist-socialist assertion against free-marketeering. It is this “two-sides-of-the-coinness,” as so often, which pushes Žižek to assert communism more strongly than he ever previously has.

But as he says: “more than a solution to the problems we are facing today, communism is the name of a problem: a name for the difficult task of breaking out of the confines of the market-and-state framework, a task for which no quick formula is at hand” (129).

This being a manifesto, what, then, is the upshot of all this? What ought we to now rush into the streets to do? Let us recall the hard sell Marx and Engels wrote in their Manifesto of the Communist Party, because it is worth noting that document was as much about explanation and recruitment as it was theorising and providing a handy academic source. Programmatically they required:

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.
2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
5. Centralization of credit in the banks of the state, by means of a national bank with state capital and an exclusive monopoly.
6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the state.
7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state; the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
8. Equal obligation of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.
10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labour in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production, etc. (Manifesto, 20-21)

Several things jump out: firstly that the bourgeois State has ostensibly met all of these demands, but essentially in order that it does not have to meet the first one: an alternative notion of private-public property. Another thing that jumps out is the very concrete nature of the text. These battles were all fought and, and most were won in capitalist countries (although what exactly has been won must be asked); in addition is is quite clear what various Soviet policies owed to the Marx-Engels programme. As a manifesto Marx’s works because it tells us what to think and what we need; this might sound horrendous to generations weaned on fear of totalitarianism, and every day enjoined to create their (unique) identities through consumer choices, but in Das Kapital Marx would later talk of “industrial pathology,” that is, the way in which everyday life tends to busy us and blind us to thought and analysis. With the wife, kids, and boss breathing down my neck what time do I have for theorising and gaining class consciousness?

As a manifesto then, Žižek’s falls a little short. We have no list of demands; we have no advocacy of one thing or another, other than communism, which is (as stated above) not actually an answer but the name of the problem which must confront capitalism. Having said this, Žižek does tell us in part what to do:

He approvingly cites Ghandi’s mantra: “be the change you wish to see in the world” (which coincidentally Oxfam has written on a fridge magnet). Žižek also promotes a mentalité which is argued to be key to action and thought: we must assume that the worst is our fate. We must think from the future as if the worst has come to pass, and consider what interventions we would make in order to change this fate; in this way, ironically, our free act to intervene in history must, argues Žižek, be premised precisely on our future circumscribed free will. This may sound a little strange, but its targets are clear: hopeful Fabian solutions (like Al Gore’s to environmental disaster) and wild, impotent flails such as the anti-Iraq War protests back in 2002-2003 (which were then cited by Bush and Blair as examples of the freedom and democracy they were trying to spread).

Critchley will be unhappy to have no rabbit from Žižek’s hat, but compared to his earlier writings we can at least glimpse a pair of ears. Whether defensible or not, Žižek has said for a long time that it is not up to philosophers to come up with answers; conveniently he is a politician when posing questions and a philosopher when asked for answers. But what could on the one hand be read, as it is by Critchley, as ultimately empty posturing, could be read on the other hand as a very trusting injunction: do as you please, but do it carefully and with thought. Many on the Left are taken aback that Žižek’s main tirades are against the Left, of which he counts himself as being; they are then even more frustrated when, having deconstructed their positions and actions, he posits nothing in replacement. Maybe this is, though, precisely the point. Žižek is a polemicist, yes, but he is categorically not an authoritarian (as anybody who has seen him deal with a silly question after a presentation will attest). Žižek appears not to particularly be galvanising us into action, but to be galvanising us into thought. If Marx’s target was the industrial, then Žižek’s is the pathology. Žižek would probably not care if we joined a new social movement, began a LETS group, organised a protest or turned our house into a commune; what he would care about is that we thought it all through: that we looked at it from the future of a terrible fate and decided, yes, that is the intervention I must make.

via @SubMedina