Slavoj Žižek’s article, “It’s the Political Economy, Stupid”, is taken from a collection of works by authors and artists based around a touring exhibition of the same title. It offers a range of views and a critique of the ongoing ramifications of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, and examines how they relate to current artistic practice and social theory, with reference to artworks throughout (Žižek et als 2013). Žižek offers a clear and concise overview of several key points of the 2008 global financial crisis, and offers a critique from a neo-Marxist perspective referencing both antagonistic and supportive perspectives. However, he falls into the trap of a dualistic world view, that of capitalism and communism/Marxism as polar opposites, which I feel limits the scope of his dialogue by excluding other alternatives to these two relatively recent historical developments.
His opening paragraph draws a link between the events of September 11, 2001 and the 2008 financial meltdown using then-US President George W. Bush’s responses, remarking on the way he used both crises to enact “the partial suspension of core US values – guarantees to individual freedom and market capitalism – to save these very values” (Žižek 2013, p16). It is an effective parallel, stating that he feels the two events serve to bookend the first decade of the 21st Century. Jean Baudrillard called the terrorist attacks on September 11 “The ‘mother’ of events, the pure event which is the essence of all the events that never happened” (Baudrillard 2002). Were Baudrillard still alive it would have been interesting to hear his thoughts on the GFC, which has many of the same tropes of a terrorist plot; a gang of conspirators, a singular obsession with their own ends and a blatant disregard for the lives of those affected (Hare 2009, Baudrillard 2002).
Žižek goes on to pick through the wreckage left by Wall St, stopping to examine the proposed bailout and the potential bankruptcy of General Motors before expanding on his observations on the nature of capitalist markets and their increasingly complicated machinations. Paraphrasing Alain Badiou he discusses how “the fundamental lesson of globalization is precisely that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilizations, from Christian to Hindu and Buddhist” (Žižek 2013, p21). Again using Badiou he engages in a critique of Guy Sorman’s views of capitalism as a benevolent force, without ideology or intrinsic meaning. He points out several key contradictions within Sorman’s narrative to build his own, specifically setting up capitalism as a seductive force that politicians and society are reluctant to blame for its own collapse, instead seeking out “secondary, accidental deviations” that are to blame for the crisis (Žižek 2013, p17).
Having set up his critique of capitalism, from here he engages abstract ideas of Marxist revolution. He raises the idea of Leftist organisations as “banks of rage”, remarking that this rage is never enough to “truly finish the emancipatory work” and must be supplemented by other sources, “national or cultural” (Žižek 2013, p 26). He then rejects this status quo, and suggests we “shift this perspective totally, and break the circle of such patient waiting for the unpredictable opportunity of a social disintegration opening up a brief chance of grabbing power”, and that “waiting for another to do the job for us is a way of rationalizing our inactivity” (Žižek 2013, p26-27). The rhetorical call to arms is a time-honored tradition in radical literature, however I feel his point of view is too deeply entrenched in classical Marxism to be either practical or relevant. His allusion to seizing power from this perspective is almost offensive, in that it fails to acknowledge the horrors of totalitarian communism under Stalin and Mao. While it is unclear from Žižek’s article exactly how much and what kind of power would be seized, and by whom, I believe this communism/capitalism dualist worldview to be unimaginative and limited by ideas of false necessities (Unger 2004).
He goes on to outline four antagonisms he sees arrayed against the continued global dominance of the capitalist mode of production that could serve as challenges to its current hegemony. He lists them as “ecological catastrophe, the inappropriateness of private property for so-called ‘intellectual property’, the socioethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics), and last but not least, new forms of apartheid, new walls and slums” (Žižek 2013, p28). While these are all serious concerns, once again I believe it is a lack of imagination on the author’s part that deflates his attack on capitalism. While these four “antagonisms” are certainly broad enough to cover a whole range of scenarios and eventualities, I would argue that momentum for change is better served by being open to unthought-of of possibilities, exploring avenues for change as they appear instead of forming bullet-point lists of problems and isolating them from interrelationships, in the way that climate change is beginning to affect populations and forcing people from their homes into “new walls and slums” (UNHCR 2009). In this same vein of unimagined possibilities and interrelationships, the events of 2008 and September 11, 2001 stand out as examples. This is a key point, I feel, that it is not that these events were, self-evidently, impossibilities, but that they were merely beyond the scope of our imagination, with perhaps the exception of certain disaster film (Baudrillard 2002, Armageddon 1998).
Žižek offers us several interesting observations on the changing face of capitalism in the 21st century, particularly in the way he uses a parallel between the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. However, it is a reliance on a classical Capitalism/Marxism dichotomy for the basis of his rhetoric that I feel limits some of the points he makes. I believe reducing incredibly complex and interdependent world systems to four ‘antagonisms’ is a gross oversimplification and vastly understates the challenges and problems any wholesale revolution would face, cause and would have to overcome. I feel Roberto Unger as a theorist offers a deeper critique of the capitalism world system in its current form, and does a better job of picking up on the themes and problems of Baudrillard’s later work, while also offering an alternative to a dualistic world view in his anti-necessitarian theories of social organisation (Unger 2004).
- Armageddon, 1998, motion picture, Bay, M, Bruckheimer, J, Hurd, G.A, USA
- Baudrillard, J 2002, The Spirit of Terrorism, Verso, London, UK
- Hare, A 2009, “A Shift Realised: The Banking Crisis as the First Postmodern Event”, Gnovis Journal, Vol 9, Issue 2
- Sholette G & Ressler O 2013, It’s the Political Economy, Stupid, 1st edn, Pluto Press, London, UK
- Unger, R.M 2004, False Necessity: Anti-Necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy, Revised Edition (Politics, Volume 1), Verso, London, UK
- UNHCR, 2009, Climate change, migration, and displacement: impacts, vulnerability, and adaptation options, United Nations High Commission for Refugees, 5th session of the Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-Term Cooperative Action under the Convention (AWG-LCA 5)
- Žižek, 2013, “It’s the Political Economy, Stupid”, in Sholette G & Ressler O 2013, It’s the Political Economy, Stupid, 1st edn, Pluto Press, London, UK, pp 15-31
Shaun Thatcher ~ Photography & Illustration 