Communist, conservative, anti-semantic: Slavoj Žižek work attracts a lot of labels, most of them pejorative. This text identifies Žižek’s unique and productive contribution to social and political theory by way of constructing his work as a response to the deadlock imposed by global capitalism. Arguing that Žižek’s work must be considered as a response to this deadlock, I take issue with the critical positioning of Žižek’s work as ‘good theory, bad politics’, suggesting that Žižek’s politics provide a reading of global capitalism that reinvents political subversion.

Highlighting the political consequences of his fundamental concepts – most particularly the Lacanian Real, universality and his most recent references to the communist hypothesis – I suggest that by reference to the new lumpenproletariat, Žižek’s turn to communism represents the ultimate significance of his work for the 21^st century.

Early in 2012, the New York Times[i] released an investigative report into Apple’s manufacturing operations in China. Centred on the tragic death of an ambitious young rural migrant, the Times reported dire conditions in which, according to Apple’s own audits of its subcontractors, two-thirds of employees regularly worked more than 12-hour shifts and occurrences of involuntary labour, under-age workers, sub-standard accommodation and deadly safety violations were standard practice. Conditions were so difficult that their main subcontractor, Foxconn, has had to instigate a range of anti-suicide measures, including installing suicide prevention nets around buildings.

According to Apple’s official standards, these breaches should not be able to occur. Apple, like Microsoft, Nike and other icons of Western capitalism, are becoming increasingly open about their manufacturing processes, freely displaying ‘Supplier Codes of Conduct’ alongside photos of smiling sub-contracted workers. Whilst it allows for 15-year old employees labouring through 60-hour shifts paid at the national minimum wage, Apple’s code notes that they are ‘committed to the highest standards of social responsibility across our worldwide supply chain’[ii]. Audit reports, although noting regular breaches (at half of all suppliers, according to Apple’s latest report), give the impression that the brands are working tirelessly to rid consumers of any concerns they might have about their purchases, presenting interested readers with an overwhelming impression of ethically driven organisations.

Yet, as more than one commentator noted, if ‘iProducts’ were found to be malfunctioning subcontractors would be required to instantly remedy the issue. Instead, whilst Apple constructs the impression that it is working on the problem, the underlying operation of its manufacturing process is to push suppliers into a position where breaches in labour standards are inevitable. Apple, who had earlier reported a profit of over US$13 billion, requires suppliers to calculate the exact costs of production, including the size of the workforce and their wages, before determining the cost per part and demanding suppliers accept only the tightest of margins. These conditions, along with stringent fulfilment deadlines and the sheer scale of the orders, produce pressures that force suppliers to cut corners – on safety and worker rights, of course; Apple could never accept inferior materials. As a former executive of an Apple supplier notes in the Times report, ‘The only way you make money working for Apple is figuring out how to do things more efficiently or cheaper…and then they’ll come back the next year and force a 10 percent price cut’.

A number of critics defended Apple’s methods, suggesting that whilst conditions might be grim they must be seen in context. The workers desire the jobs; bringing outsourcing to countries like China has produced rapid economic growth; Apple is not going to pull out of China or drop its manufacturers as this is just how it is done in the electronics industry. The critics are right – we do need to view these conditions in context: What is the context in which they are considered normal, or even desirable, for workers outside of the Western world?

Putting it in Context

Capitalism is capable of producing great wealth and substantial advances in living standards. The material surpluses derived from the dynamic circulation of capital have educated and improved the life spans of many. Indeed, centuries of economic expansion in the industrialised North has stimulated technological advances that are beginning to fundamentally alter what we understand as reality, along with offering the prospect of a trans-human future where some will have access to virtual immortality through continuous medical advances. Moreover, the substantial market-led growth of the likes of China and India has led to significant reductions in poverty, for some – and that is the rub of capitalism.

The World Bank’s 2008 Development Indicators report[iii] estimates that 80% of people earn below US$10 a day, 40% exist on less than US$2 per day and 1.4 billion on less than US$1.25. Whilst statistical measurements of poverty are a troublesome business, being both unreliable and uneven, it is clear that the vast majority of the world labour under conditions wholly unpalatable to the West. Moreover, whilst global GDP capita increased by 55% in the first decade of the 21^st century[iv], because little of this growth trickled down to the poor, global inequality has risen rapidly to reach an absurd point at which the income of the richest 1% is equal to that of the poorest 57% of the world[v].

Consequently, the world economy is structured in a way that the vast majority are in desperate need of development, not only amongst the 80% of the world struggling to get by, and especially the 1.4 billion people who will go to bed desperately hungry tonight, but also within the Western world in which decades of highly unequal growth has led to significantly reduced life-chances for large portions of the population – inequality in Great Britain, for example, is being compared to that of the Victorian era[vi], with 50% of black youths  now officially unemployed[vii] and many struggling to maintain access to food and shelter. Whilst their suffering is in a different category to that of the majority in sub-Saharan African, their lives remain perilously dominated by the interests of capital.

It is these circumstances of want and injustice that provide the ultimate context for Apple manufacturing: employment in a sub-contracted Western manufacturing operation is better than the deprived alternative – indeed conditions like these are largely responsible for the much-celebrated fall in absolute poverty in the region. Chinese labourers clamour to be employed and exploited by the likes of Foxconn simply because of their vulnerability in circumstances where selling their labour for someone else’s profit is the only way to survive. As one factory poster ominously warns Foxconn workers: ‘Work hard today or work hard to find a job tomorrow’. This is the context for our way of life and the next generation of iPad.

Conversely, many development theorists argue we should not fret about the presence of sweatshops but, like a palliative nurse, try to make conditions as comfortable as possible. Couched in the notion of a ‘development ladder’ that all economies must climb, sweatshops and exploitation are necessary steps to greater wealth. The poor have a right to the same material standards of the elite but they have to pay their penance, just as we did. This idea provides a wonderful comfort for those at the head of the food chain, but little respite for those workers sleeping on the floor of their shanty in preparation for another grinding 12-hour shift. If only they knew that history was on their side, or how capitalism might get by without the vulnerable poor willing to be exploited in the name of lower production costs.

Unfortunately, a significant snag appears on the path to development, or rather in the carbon emissions above it. Measured in terms of parts per million (ppm), these emissions have risen from 280ppm at the beginning of the industrial revolution (circa. 1850) to 388ppm, according the latest (but potentially significantly outdated) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report (IPCC) report. Further, our carbons emissions continue to rise, now at approximately 3ppm a year, with twice as many emissions in the past 25 years as in the previous 100. Scarily, both emissions and their effects, such as the melting of Arctic sea-ice, are occurring at a much faster rate than even the most pessimistic IPCC scenarios[viii].

 Carbon dioxide emissions, 70% of which are produced in the burning of carbon ‘fossils fuels’, are intimately related to economic development; not only have the majority of historical emissions been produced by the industrial ‘North’, but their recent rapid growth has been concurrent with that of the major developing economies. Indeed, a 2012 Environmental Outlook to 2050 [ix] report from OECD suggests the likely quadrupling of the global economy would increase world energy demand by 80% to 2050.

At the same time, however, organisations like the OECD continue to press the need for global economic growth, a desire shared by the elite and bereft alike. This need produces a significant contradiction between the consequences of development and the kinds of action needed to ensure our ecological salvation. The lurking dangers of the global ecological crisis mean that the extensive development required to bring billions out of poverty immediately clashes with the restrictions upon the growth of capital currently required to prevent the breakdown of global eco-systems. A ‘business as usual’ approach to carbon emissions would not lead to a literal end of the world, but it would bring with it a significant geographical change that traps much of the world within unviable material conditions and drastically reduces the ecological carrying capacity of our planet. Consequently, capitalism is not simply the ‘Enemy of Nature’ as in the title of Joel Kovel’s wonderfully insightful text but, in trying to subvert ecological destruction, capitalism is the enemy for the vast majority of humanity. For capitalism to be sustainable for its elite, the majority must be prevented from ‘developing’. This requirement inevitably leads to a kind of ‘anti-politics’ that relies on energy, food and water inequality and the prevention of ‘them’ crossing borders and attempting to latch onto the benefits of being near ‘us’. Divisions, walls and the kind of authoritarian measures only seen in dystopian sci-fi features are the necessary result.

At this point it will be of no surprise to the reader that the firm position taken in this book is that ecologically sustainable widespread global prosperity, or even sufficiency, for all is constitutively impossible within all variants of capitalism. Moreover, we cannot but help reproduce this injustice in our everyday actions – our way of life leads to the necessary destruction of the lives of others.

What is to be done?

If capitalism produces this traumatic contradiction, it has also generated a deadlock that even our most well meaning actions reproduce. Take the options facing an ethically orientated consumer considering the purchase of a car. If they seek to avoid sweatshop exploitation and buy ‘local’ (if this is even possible), they inadvertently reduce the demand for production that off-shore exploited labourers rely on for their livelihoods. Equally, not buying the car as part of a rejection of consumerist ideals does help to reduce our ecological impact, but again risks slowing down the economy and affecting most those on the bottom of the production chain. Events like ‘Buy Nothing Day’ have a genuine ecological concern and value, but the prospect of a ‘Produce Nothing Day’ might not be as rosy. Again, the ethical shopper is reduced to buying from those multi-nationals who make their workers ‘as comfortable as possible’, often with the smiling photos of corporate websites as their only guide.

This economic deadlock is reproduced on a political scale, where it is sustained by the notion of ‘sustainable development’, a catch-all phrase that can be mobilised to meet both developmental and ecological demands.

Where organisations such as Greenpeace and or prominent individuals like Al Gore focus on ecological demands – the key idea being that ‘saving the planet is not optional’ – poverty-orientated organisations such as Oxfam or the ‘Make Poverty History’ campaign implicitly demand a massive programme of economic growth to feed the hungry without paying serious attention to how this growth in economic activity might be sustainable. The children of India’s slums must be given the rights to achieve a Western standard of living, but where will the energy be found? Africa should certainly be put on the path to development, but what about the carbon emitted through the mass expansion of the production process? It is little wonder that international co-operation breaks down at climate conferences – it is not for a lack of ‘political will’, but genuine ideological debate around the right to cheap energy and economic development.

What can we make of this apparent blindness? It is not necessarily a matter of bunkered thinking on behalf of these organisations, or a simple lack of concern; that Greenpeace cares for oceans but not orphans or Oxfam is hell bent on the destruction of the Amazon. Instead, they work under the myth of sustainable development, a term that can be mobilised in a variety of circumstances to focus on either side of the phrase and is utilised by everyone from China to Exxon and Greenpeace.

The myth of sustainable development covers up the deadlock in political action faced when responding to the symptoms of capitalism. Not only does capitalism produce an economic deadlock in which neither further economic development, nor a reduction in economic growth are sustainable, but it produces a political deadlock that prevents the kind of radical action required. Even radical movements such as ‘Occupy’ face the disturbing question of what can be done – all actions within the contemporary political space are sucked into the logic of capitalism such that a solution is only said to ‘work’ if it fits with the interests of capitalism. Take the situation faced by the Greek people in 2012. Faced with ‘bail-out’ conditions that required vastly reduced state spending that will condemn generations of Greeks to suffering, the obvious populist solution was simply to say no – this was the defiant demand from the enraged masses on the street. Yet, the consequences of this rejection will almost certainly have been worse than the alternative. A rejection of debt objections would have resulted in both the rapid withdrawal of capital investment and expulsion from the European Union. The only solutions that would ‘work’ here are the ones the suit the demands of capital, the only measurement available.

Nonetheless, the over-riding illusion of contemporary politics is that democracy contains the space for all political views. This is the demand facing the ‘Occupy’ movement, who are regularly derided for failing to utilised democratic opportunities or make concrete demands. Of course, as soon as these apparently radical movements produce specific demand they will collapse – any genuinely radical idea, the kind that would actually be able to address both global poverty and our ecological overload, would immediately be dismissed as unfeasible.

But what of more traditional forms of Leftism? Not only do they face the same problem of a lack of space, but also of a lack of inspiration. No longer can we consider the horrors of Stalinism innocently, nor evoke the utopia of a Marxist orientated communism. Whilst Marxism continues to haunt the political Left, it exists more strongly in the corridors of academic than the streets of poor cities. Nonetheless, the Marxist tradition, which asserts that the symptoms of capitalist political economy are inherent to the system, must still be our horizon in re-asserting the critique of political economy.

 It is these difficulties that shall be debated in this book: I will argue that because of the current impossibility of political activity, a different kind of Marxist politics is required, such as that practiced by Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, in which the focus is not on producing a blue-print for a future utopia to come, but on identifying the impossibility of the present. This approach recognises that the representation of the problem is the problem – we all know the facts of poverty and climate change, it is how we know it that counts. Moreover, enjoyment is a central element of politics and is the motivating drive behind the structuring myths that allow for the ongoing tolerance of capital. Consequently, politics becomes the act of representing symptoms in a way that disrupts these myths.

This book then attempts to practice this form of politics by producing a different kind of representation of the relationship between capitalism and its symptoms, a theoretical endeavour that argues death, suffering and repression are at the core of ‘our way of life’ and that we labour under a number of mollifying illusions that soften this blow, namely the development ladder, sustainable development and democratic participation. To expand upon this argument, we shall move through three debates, evoking both Zizek and Marxism to consider the structure of capitalism, the relationship between inequality, poverty and capitalism, along with ecology and capitalism. Each stage shall focus on the way in which we come to understand these debates, pausing to consider the myths that structure our understandings, before evoking the necessary ramifications of capitalism: the refugees who will be on our doorstep and the inevitable politics of repression and division that will threaten our very notions of ourselves.

This is a complicated and multi-faceted tale, one with many easily dismissed subtleties. It is a story of the repetition of individual actions under enforcing and enticing structures rather than one of mass conspiracy or evil acts. Understanding the truth of capitalism requires a different perception of the necessary consequences of ‘our way of life’ through which the everyday lives of the Western masses have produced incredible wealth for a slim elite, whilst the majority suffer – a suffering that will only get worse. It is high time we held ourselves to account for these everyday actions.

The conference is free to participants, and will take place at Birkbeck College, June 29th and 30th, 2012. It is supported in its inaugural year by the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.

Streams and Panels that you may propose a paper for include:

Please see http://londonconferenceincriticalthought.wordpress.com/ for further information, or contact londoncriticalconference@gmail.com

While everyone ‘knows’ that capitalism is both unjust and increasingly untenable, we continue to act as if it is not. More than that, capitalism continues to be enjoyable, inducing compliance not through restrictive barriers, but by structuring the very horizon of our desires. Not only have the agents of capital commodified desire such that enjoyment, identity and indeed the Western way of life come to be defined by consumption, but capital has colonised political imagination such that, to repeat Fredric Jameson’s oft-cited quip ‘It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’.

Yet, if both capitalism and our political imagination have reached a deadlock, so, it appears, has Marxism. Following the breakdown of strict determinist/scientific interpretations of the progress of history and the inevitable collapse of capitalism, cultural explanations dominated by critical theory, the Frankfurt School and psychoanalysis came to the fore. Whilst these movements offered productive explanations as to the continued dominance of capitalism by allowing greater prominence to Marx’s notion of superstructure, they largely lost sight of the economic base upon which Marxism, and its critique of political economy, was founded. As a consequence, recent Leftist political practice has been predominately focused around explorations of social and cultural identity and the redistribution of surplus, as opposed to the production of that surplus itself[1]. It is as a result of the demise of the critique of political economy that Marxism has joined the deadlock of our times, unable to move from ‘knowing’ that capitalism is doomed to a form of political action.

It is from within these deadlocked circumstances that Colin Cremin’s Capitalism’s New Clothes begins. Cremin, a Marxist sociologist at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, examines the mechanisms through which capitalism is reproduced. Identifying primarily with the critical theoretical tradition and Slavoj Žižek’s psychoanalytic interpretation of Marxism, Cremin argues that the subjective and ideological processes of enterprise, ethics and enjoyment are the 21^st century injunctions through which capital continues to enslave bodies and minds despite increasingly apparent alienation, exploitation, crisis and failure.

Cremin supplements this ideological interpretation with a desire to return to the critique of political economy occupied by more traditional Marxist theory, suggesting that if Marxism has tended to neglect subjectivity and ideology, ‘disillusioned Marxists have neglected political economy’ (p.2). Ultimately, the value of his analysis for Marxist theory and practice rests upon the possibility for renewing the ideological critique of the capitalist super-structure in the 21^st century, whilst remaining committed to classical Marxist concerns about the ‘objectivity’ of the economy. This is a particularly difficult task and Cremin’s reference points – particularly the use of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Žižekian theory – are riddled with controversy in their adoption of the Marxist narrative.

Although Cremin’s analysis appears to require strong theoretical backing, Capitalism’s New Clothes attempts to walk a tight line between the necessity of these debates and the text’s accessibility to a wider audience that has not been introduced to either the Lacanian or Marxist lexicon. Whilst this approach is largely to be admired, in catering to a more popular audience Cremin omits or fails to do justice to some of the complex theoretical issues at the heart of the difficult interaction between Marxism, psychoanalysis and 21^st century capitalism.

In particular, although he openly identifies with psychoanalysis and Žižekian theory, regularly utilising concepts of desire and enjoyment, Cremin does not enter into the debate around the difficulties of breaking free from the kind of fantasmatic structures which make social and political change so difficult. Most pertinently, whilst he leans heavily upon psychoanalytic explanations to understand the paradoxical pleasures of capitalism, Cremin does not discuss the other side of the psychoanalytic equation – the Real and exclusion – which are at the core of Žižek’s politics. To some extent this should not be a specific criticism of Cremin’s work, as the explicit task of the text is to examine the mechanisms through which capitalism is reproduced as a precursor to finding ways to halt this reproduction.

Conversely, by offering such a convincing and enlightening reading of the reproduction of capitalism, Capitalism’s New Clothes leaves the reader – Marxist and lay alike – unsure of how we can move from the ‘pseudo-activity’ Cremin righty derides, to the proper activity and the ‘iCommunism’ briefly eluded to in Chapter Five (p.134).  As such, although Capitalism’s New Clothes does well to identify the structure of our illusions today and illustrate the value of a psychoanalytically informed Marxism, because it does not consider how to move past these ideological illusions, it risks inviting ever more cynicism from the reader: we now know very well the illusions through which we are imprisoned, but there is little that can be done about it. Moreover, it risks enhancing the suspicion amongst many critics that psycho-Marxism, and Žižek in particular, has little to say on these matters[2].

Escaping Ideology

While Cremin’s Marxist orientation aligns with the critical theory tradition, his starting notion is that the core of capitalism has not fundamentally changed and, as a consequence, the classical Marxist critique of political economy remains both valid and productive. As such, Cremin seeks to situate his critique within ‘a Marxism that subscribes to the labour theory of value without neglecting the complicated effects of desire and language on the capacity of workers to mount an effective challenge against capitalism’ (pp.5-6).

Because of the emphasis on restoring political economy, much of Cremin’s analysis is directed against left-liberalism and those who suggest that the mode of production is wholly defined by the relations of immaterial production, including sociologists Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck and Antony Giddens, as well as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Here, Cremin (p.18-25) suggests that theorists too readily accept that the increasingly overt super-structural face of capitalism now constitutes the entirely of the system. Whilst acknowledging that Western capitalism has moved away from industrial production to be, ideologically at least, dominated by service industries, Cremin asserts that not only does material production play the key role in capitalism, but that the relationship between immaterial labour and capital is not fundamentally different from other forms of labour.  Here the dialectical tension between base and superstructure remains, although the shape of the super-structure has changed: it is these changes which are the basis of Capitalism’s New Clothes.

Capitalism’s New Clothes argues that the ideological face of capitalism – the mechanisms that direct how we think and feel in reaction to capitalism – has altered to react to the new demands and difficulties of production. This ideological defence of capitalism should not be thought of as a malign conspiracy theory – although the divisions between the super-elite and the masses do push in this direction – but the automated and subjectivised processes through which members of capitalist economies reproduce society in the interest of the agents of capital by fulfilling societal functions, demands and individual desires. Liberal capitalism does not seek to restrict the activities of its subjects, but it does structure the horizon of their desires[3].

The other side of this analysis of the ideological injunctions of capitalism is the construction of what Cremin labels ‘end-capitalism’. End-capitalism has arisen out of the ‘credit-crunch’ and a period of over-accumulation of capital for which all immediate solutions have been previously exhausted (pp.25-9). Moreover, ongoing global ecological degradation, in which the expansion of economic activity is producing environmental depletion and dangerous feedbacks in equal amounts, speaks to the very core of consumptive identity and the constitutive requirement for capital to expand. For Cremin we all ‘know’ that capitalism cannot go on indefinitely.

Nevertheless, it does – and, Capitalism’s New Clothes argues that we are enjoying it more than ever. To analyse this paradoxical situation in which we continue to enjoy capitalism despite it moving us ever quicker into an unknown abyss, Cremin focuses upon super-structure and ideology, ultimately suggesting that capitalist subjectivity is defined by dutiful enjoyment and unconscious cynicism. Here the subject outwardly recognises the naked contradictions of capitalism and our abject impotence in responding to these contradictions, yet is not motivated to act any differently, instead acting upon depoliticised and individualised desires and ethical identifications. The system is collapsing around us, but as long as there appears to be ethical solutions to these problems and political causes are kept at a distance, then there is no reason why individual desires cannot continue to be chased.

Such an analysis of the ‘happy consciousness’ is embedded in the critical theoretical interpretation of Marxism within which Cremin places Capitalism’s New Clothes. In particular, he relies upon psychoanalysis and Žižekian theory to understand the role of desire, enjoyment and ideology, the latter being heavily indebted to Žižek’s re-reading of the traditional Marxist understanding. Here Cremin attempts to avoid the ‘cruder materialism of more dogmatic versions of Marxism’ (p.2) by advancing a theory of ideology from which we cannot escape. Ideology, he argues, ‘is our reality. It enables us to make sense out of non-sense’ (p.1), linguistically binding the subject together.

Nonetheless, in constructing ideology as a linguistic phenomenon, Cremin does not dismiss materialism entirely. Whilst he moves away from the idea of ideology as a mere reflection of the material base, Cremin suggests that ‘Capitalism’s New Clothes subscribes to a form of ideological critique that makes use of materialist, linguistic and psychoanalytic concepts to theorise the individual and society at this critical juncture’ (p.2).

As a result, ideology should not only be understand as the discursive formations through which we make sense out of reality, or, rather through which reality itself is constructed, but has a material edge that binds these formations to the subject. Cremin’s recognition of the materialism of ideology has two vital dimensions, that of the economy and that of the body, reflecting Marxist and psychoanalytic interpretations respectively.

Retaining a sense in which ideology not only reproduces our reality but does so in the image of the ruling classes – principally by excluding the contradictions within the system itself – allows Cremin to retain a reference to the ‘objective limit’ (p.3) provided by the economy and the possibility that ideological critique can be used to unveil the contradictions of the economy itself. Conversely, and vitally for the argument developed in Capitalism’s New Clothes, what prevents the unveiling of the truth of the mode of production is not just the power of class interests, but the other side of materialism, that of the body – an idea informed by psychoanalysis.

Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, particularly that advanced by its most notable contemporary practitioner Žižek, suggests that the subject is constitutively alienated by the forced entry of the body into the symbolic order, an imposition that divides bodily instinct from symbolic-imaginary identifications. As a consequence, subjectivity is constituted by a negativity that cannot be extinguished, leading to an endless and excessive desire to return to the (impossible) wholeness of the body. Lacan called this process of lack and excess jouissance, a condition of bodily pleasure that goes beyond mere enjoyment[4].

Žižek utilises this Lacanian dialectical materialism to turn Marxist ideology on its head. Ideology remains a false form of consciousness, but is not simply a super-structure by which the universal truth of the relations of production is hidden under a particular illusion constructed by those who control the means of production.  Instead, Žižek argues that ideology represents an attempt to provide a totalising illusion that hides the ultimate and traumatic partiality of the human condition: ideological fantasy offers the means to elide the non-identity between individual and society, between the body and the symbolic order[5]. Such a definition is vital, allowing a much greater understanding of the role of subjectivity and ideology in reproducing capitalism. In particular, Žižek’s understanding of ideology inverts Marx’s classical notion that ‘they do not know it, but they are doing it’. Instead, Žižek (and here Cremin is in agreement) argues that the logic of ideology today is ‘they know it, but they are doing it anyway’[6]: the illusion is in the doing, not the knowing[7]. This cynicism allows the subject to consciously distance themselves from the contradictions within ideology, a vital move when ideology is under threat.

Conversely, Žižek’s Marxism, as practiced within Capitalism’s New Clothes, has proven to be a particularly controversial interpretation. Psychoanalysis and Marxism have a long and difficult relationship. First brought together within the Freudian Marxism of the likes of Eric Fromm, psychoanalysis was initially looked at to provide a theory of subjectivity to explain the continual flourishing of capitalism and the seduction of the working class, a tradition continued in Capitalism’s New Clothes. Yet, although long associated with the prospects of political emancipation, the central difficulty with the combination of these discourses is their respective political ambition. From its inception, Marxism has been defined by both the combination of theory and practice, but also a definite political direction. Whilst psychoanalysis shares the same identification with theory and practice in the name of evoking change, since Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontents it has been openly sceptical of normative political ideas.

Cremin’s identification with Žižekian theory defines the text, bringing with it both the strengths and weaknesses of Capitalism’s New Clothes. It offers a renewed conception of ideology, critique and the limitations of political change. Moreover, it offers an explanation of the seemingly paradoxical condition in which we know of the failings of capitalism yet continue to act as if we do not. This new form of what Cremin, following Peter Sloterdijk and Žižek, calls ‘enlightened false consciousness’ (p.25) provides the Marxist problem today: how to evoke the contradictions of capitalism such that the threads of capitalism begin to unravel.

This is the Marxism question of our time – and many would be uneasy with the answers that both Cremin and Žižek provide. As I shall return to later, Žižek’s work is highly controversial in that he does not offer concrete solutions to our political predicament. Instead, he suggests that Marxism must focus on unveiling the contradictions within ideology in such a way that society cannot continue to reproduce itself. In particular Žižek is concerned with the kind of political practices that would subvert cynicism, constructing modes of politics that evoke the destructiveness of the Lacanian Real[8]. Capitalism’s New Clothes does not move to these considerations. Instead, it focuses on the first step in breaking from capitalism: understanding the mechanisms through which capitalism is reproduced and its contradictions disavowed. Cremin sets upon this task by reference to three thematic ‘injunctions’: enterprise, ethics and enjoyment.

Enjoyable Enslavement

Combining the basis tenants of Marxist theories of alienation and exploitation within a Lacanian understanding, Cremin suggests the emmently practical desire to be employable as a notable cause of our implicit daily endorsement of capital. Ironically, as capital fades and drags labour with it, the power of capital over labour has increased such that the pressure to be the object of our present or future boss’s desire – what Cremin labels ‘employability’ – pervades every aspect of the (potential) employee’s life. As the employee seeks employability, they are left to consider how to fulfil their bosses’ desire in order to move towards the ideal job (p.38) Here, not only are workers alienated and exploited by capital, but they are driven to embrace their employability as ‘every stage of exploitation is a stepping stone along the slow march to ideal employment’ (p.43).

Yet, while we may be able to obtain the object of our desire, the lesson of Lacanian psychoanalysis is that the cause of desire can never be fulfilled: as the lack which is constitutive of the human condition remains, we are continually pushed onto the next ideal under the fantasmatic belief that it will fill this lack. Thus, the desire for employability can never be sated. No matter how many skills and experiences are added to our CV or steps are taken up the organisational chain, desire remains. Thus, not only are workers alienated in their employment, but this alienation itself is exploited by enterprise as the desire for employability is actualised as a commodity in the job market.

Here tradition Marxist notions of alienation come into contact with psychoanalytic conceptions of desire and lack. Alienation, at least in the critical theory tradition of the younger Marx, occurs when our creative capacity as humans is channelled into the production of commodities. By contrast, for Lacan the subject is constitutively alienated by its entry into the world of language in which bodily instinct is irrevocably separated from the symbolic-imaginary universe. It is this alienating lack that is commandeered by capital to coerce the desire for employability. Conversely, our constitutive subjective alienation does not mean that Marx’s notion no longer stands, just that there is no non-alienated place to which to return.

The effect of employability, Cremin explains, is that ‘the subject who strives for employability does so only in order to be materially exploited by capital. In this way the capitalist jouissance (for surplus value) is knotted with proletarian jouissance (for material security) (p.56)’. So, while workers are exploited in the name of surplus-value (no matter how immaterial the production process), their alienation is constructed in such a way to suggest that with the next step up the employment ladder this lack will be erased. Thus, Cremin suggests that while the worker remains materially exploited, they are also libidinally exploited as desire is co-opted, managed and focused into extending the interests of capital (ibid.). The key for psychoanalytic interpretations of Marxism, Cremin contends, is to seek to change the former whilst recognising the constitutive elements of the latter.

There is no hidden secret in the operation of employability. As Cremin contends, employees’ actively invest in enterprise and the fate of capital. The downfall of capital is the (short-term) downfall of labour: workers not only need capital to expand, but they seek to be more employable to receive the benefits of this expansion. Employability, Cremin notes (p.69), is entirely unavoidable at this time – it is currently the only feasible mechanism for the worker to materially reproduce themselves. To actively resist is counter-productive: even Marxist academics must play the game.

Instead, a standard reaction to this process has been the active process of disidentifying from our employment roles: when workers identify outside of employment but continue to fulfil their symbolic mandate. The worker knows they have to go along with the terms set by capital, but attempts to distance themselves by mocking their own identification (p.64), a cynical strategy that may allow for a more tolerable identity, but does not alter either the workers’ actions nor the relationship between capital and labour.

This kind of pseudo-activity is the dominant feature of Cremin second theme, ethics. Directing his critique at depoliticised liberal ethics, Cremin argues that capital has been able to appropriate ethical clothing for its own benefit, such that ‘the determinable locus of the crisis is rendered indeterminate by an ideology, promulgated on the left, that decentres the capitalist laws of motion by expanding the circumference of possible causes of crises with all their manifest symptoms’ (p.74).

Here class struggle and the systematic functioning of capitalism are disavowed and instead left-liberal ideologies present the symptoms of capitalism as manageable elements without a central cause or link to the mode of production. Moreover, these ethical elements are converted into commodities through which companies manipulate guilt and enjoyment to induce consumption in the name of a charitable cause: we literally spend our way deeper into capitalism in order to respond to the symptoms it reproduces.

In this way, Cremin suggests, individuals are not faced with the overwhelming collapse of end-capitalism, but manageable symptoms that can be responded to within the system – or so the fantasy goes. Moreover, these ethical responses are to be enjoyed, most particularly through the consumption of commodities that represent our ethical ‘identity’, such as Fairtrade items or Bono’s ‘RED’ range (p.100).

Whilst there is some value in an ethical response that responds to the symptoms of capital or which preaches tolerance, Cremin suggests that the effect is to flatten all demands into an equivalence such that tolerating different lifestyle choices is placed on the same level as the abject material inequality produced in the interests of capital (p.76). The problem is that symptoms that can be easily countered and included within capitalism – matters of identity that can diversify the consumptive base – are favoured over those symptoms that speak to the core of the contradictions of capitalist political economy. These symptoms are necessarily recognised – we all know about the suffering in Africa or the changing global climate – but the cause is particularised and commodified into more manageable elements.

Malaria and AIDS, for instance, can be attended to and vastly reduced through concentrated campaigns involving corporate and political goodwill. These problems are certainly symptoms of capitalism, breeding off the poverty and political insecurity constructed under globalised capital, but there is no reason why they cannot be responded to within capitalism. On the other hand, constitutive symptoms such as absolute poverty, exploitation and inequality, along with ecological degradation, are included within the same category as those particular symptoms that Left-liberals have been able to manage. Without a wider conception of the mode of production, these problems appear entirely manageable within the capitalist horizon.

Although Cremin does not expand on this point in detail, perhaps the foremost fantasy of ethical agency within capital is that of democracy. Democratic ideology suggests that all citizens within expressly democratic states have the opportunity to participate in the process of deciding how the country should be organised. What this fantasy elides is the limits placed on this action: not only the obvious limitations of voter apathy and the dictatorship of the majority, such that most elected governments have the official support of around a quarter of the population, but that the key economic elements involved in the material reproduction of society are outside of democratic control. Through neo-liberal reforms this has become increasingly apparent as the state apparatus is sold-off piece by piece. More pertinently, the demands of financial capital have revealed that, in Žižek’s terms, capital is the Real of our time, placing a hard limit on the kind of action available to elected governments[9]. To attempt to raise taxes, advance workers’ rights, protect the environment or provide health care is only possible if the agents of finance do not object.

And yet, the democrat fantasy continues. The strongest rebuke to the ‘Occupy’ movement that arose in 2011 has been that the activists should utilise the democratic political process. That if the people really believed in their cause – if they were really the 99% – then their political party would be elected to power[10]. Such a position reveals both the overwhelming fantasy of democratic participation and limitations of democracy itself. Moreover, it suggests that democracy is the ultimate ideology of capitalism: an ideology that is seen to be beyond ideology[11].

Cremin’s third injunction is enjoyment. Here he argues that desire and excess are constitutive of the human condition, the issue not being enjoyment, but the form it takes (p.109).  Although desire has no necessary object, it has been all but colonised by capital such that, today, the elementary form of desire is that of consumption. Commodities represent the fantasy of a certain identity or life-style, but when this object is obtained the cause of desire remains and is pushed onto to yet another product that will (supposedly) fulfil our fantasy. In this way, Cremin suggests, we are not forced to comply with the interests of capital. Rather, providing the consumptive desire that capital feeds off is a ‘natural’ process, such is the degree to which identity and ideology are intertwined with the interests of capital. The greatest exemplifier of this process is the idea that restricting our capacity to consume, whether through state regulation or economic scarcity, is considered a constraint on our essential freedom.

This overt co-option of desire has been driven by the almost simultaneous left-liberal drive towards the expression of identity and diversity, and the requirement for over-accumulated capital to find a wider range of markets, shifting the locus of Western identity from the place of production to consumption (p.111). Capitalism, Cremin suggests, has ‘liberated the forces of desire’, but these forces have been commodified to allow their reproduction in a way that allows for capitalism to be expand. Here enjoyment becomes a duty, inter-passive and demanded by society. If the Freudian super-ego demanded restraint, Lacan argued that our societal duty is to enjoy (p.112). As a result, 21^st century Western societies have moved from Herbert Marcuse’s one dimensional culture to what Cremin labels ‘undimensional’ enjoyment, exemplified by the role of celebrity culture (pp.125-30).

The psychoanalytic question, one upon which Cremin’s argument rests, is what to do with the excess in enjoyment. It is also here that Cremin gets closer to identifying an alternative mode of politics[12], both in suggesting that the cause of our desire needs to be decoupled from the commodity that is identified as the object of the our desire to produce what he labels ‘iCommunism’ (p.134), and that it would be dominated by a revolutionary excess, which he referred to earlier in terms of the psychoanalytic concept of transgression and the Lacanian act (pp.73-5), to which I shall soon return.

Whilst the former identification can be referenced to the early Marx and his insistence upon freedom as the basis of a mode of communism freed from the demands of material surplus, there is precious little consideration of how to get to this point. Moreover, the complex psychoanalytic debates around the status of surplus/excess are not given an airing[13]. Such an omission is symptomatic of the more popular and condensed style of the text, and here Cremin admits that ‘Scholars of Marx, or for that matter Lacan, will no doubt find shortcomings in the way concepts are appropriated. Sacrifices are made and liberties are taken with the theories used, but the end result hopefully justifies the means’ (p.6).

To some degree we should agree with Cremin on this score, as too often these disciplines disappear into deep theoretical debates that lose sight of the overall purpose of widespread political and psychological emancipation. Capitalism’s New Clothes is both an excellent introduction to the value of a psychoanalytic or Žižekian approach to Marxist analysis and provides a particularly convincing reading into the operation of capitalism, one that considers super-structural interpretations of ideology and subjectivity whilst insisting upon the primacy of more classical Marxist notions of base and the mode of production. The ultimate value of this approach for Marxist analysis is to provide a renewed sense of the operation of ideology in the 21^st century, both in terms of the contextual mechanisms of that ideology, identifying, for instance the role of ethical management, unbridled yet commodified enjoyment and cynicism in reproducing capitalism in the face of its increasingly apparent contradictions, as well as providing a rehabilitated notion of ideology itself, one that is neither a direct representation of class interests nor a moment of discursive contingency. Indeed, this is the central strength of Cremin’s analysis – the ability to combine Marxist and psychoanalytic materialism into an ideological critique of capitalism.

At the same time, the underlying effect of this analysis – exemplified by the penultimate chapter on ecology – is strong pessimism. The natural Marxist question to stem from Cremin’s (psycho)analysis is ‘What can be done – how can we break from the enjoyment that binds ideology and subjectivity to the interests of capital?’  Moreover, given Cremin’s insistence upon the continued salience of the labour theory of value and political economy, do the more traditional notions of class struggle and the proletariat still hold political traction?

Whilst each chapter of Capitalism’s New Clothes concludes with a brief reflection on the possibilities for breaking with the identified mechanism, this is certainly not the main thrust of the text. Instead, Cremin is intent of revealing why capitalism is able to reproduce itself – it is unclear whether he holds any real sense in which ideology could be broken. This might not be a specific criticism of the text, given its stated aim to understand why capitalism remains so seductive, not how to break from its grasp. Nonetheless, it is necessary to consider the consequences of the content and style of Cremin’s analysis, particularly in regards to the practice of psychoanalytic/Žižekian Marxism.

The Prospects for Practicing Psycho-Marxist Politics

The strengths and weaknesses of Capitalism’s New Clothes are reflected in Cremin’s analysis of ecology in the penultimate chapter. Cremin productively reflect upon the constitutive inability to respond to the global ecological crisis within a mode of production that demands and requires ever increasingly economic growth and offers a psychoanalytic reading of the pleasures of ignoring such a crisis in the name of commodified enjoyment and ethical management. Not only has ‘Green’ become the ethical code word for much of left-liberalism, but it has become big business as well with companies seeking to appropriate some of the ethical value in the signifier. Naturally, none of this is part of an effective response to the global ecological crisis.

Indeed, ecology operates as the ultimate impossible limit of capitalism, as economic growth is unable to solve the problem, nor are we able to repress the jouissance of consumption. As Cremin quotes Beck in suggesting (p.153), any politics that wishes to remain within the parameters of capital and respond to ecology must become an ‘anti’ politics, creating ‘a kind of international case system in which the poor of the developing world are consigned to (energy) poverty in perpetuity’.

Yet, Capitalism’s New Clothes offers no particular response to either the crisis of ecology or Leftist political practice, leaving itself almost in a place of cynicism – psychoanalytic inclined Marxists know that the world is doomed, but there is nothing that can be done about it as the depoliticisation of ecological degradation has left it without a political subject who is either responsible for the mess or is capable of providing a solution.  In this sense, the ideological identification and critique of cynicism is no more effective than the left-liberal pseudo-activity that Cremin so heartily rejects. If the problem presented in Capitalism’s New Clothes is that knowledge about the failure of the system does not lead to change in the system, then it is also doubtful that knowledge about this kind of cynicism will make a direct difference either. Instead, and perhaps this is what should be taken from Cremin’s work, ideological analysis and critique can provide an opportunity to reconsider the possibilities for political action today.

There is much more to be said, however, on the relationship between psychoanalysis, Marxism and political action. Although Lacan was critical of the prospects for utilising psychoanalysis for political ends, an extensive political discourse has developed around his work[14]. This discourse has two sides: the analysis of ideological attempts to move past the constitutive lack around which sociality is riven and the analysis of the necessary failure of these attempts and the presence of the Real. Based around the concepts of jouissance, fantasy and desire, the first form of analysis provides both a commonplace and effective mode of ideological critique, which Cremin has used to great effect in this text, although his notion of the non-commodified enjoyment of ‘iCommunism’ appears under-developed.

Conversely, the other side of psychoanalysis holds a more destructive power, one at which Cremin only hints. For Lacan, humanity is inherently alienated through our entry into language, which creates an incompleteness that we strive to overcome throughout our existence. This striving is defined by desire and framed by ideological fantasies through which we make sense out of the non-sense of reality. In order to create this coherent framework, however, something must be lost or excluded. Lacan suggests that this point of failure marks the presence of the Real, that impossible point within a discourse that is only visible in its effects[15]. As a consequence, the Real holds with it a political destructiveness that Cremin hints at in his reference to the ‘psychoanalytic notion of transgression’ (p.73) and Žižek’s ‘politics of the impossible’, which Capitalism’s New Clothes ‘openly endorses’ (p.3).

These politics, however, are in no way straightforward, bringing with them a number of controversies and interpretations, particularly around the destructiveness of the political approach and the difficulty of instituting ‘the politics of the Real’ within the Marxist tradition that relies upon a normative understanding. This review is not the place to consider these objections, but it is worth noting both that Žižek’s interpretation of Marxism moves beyond that presented in Capitalism’s New Clothes and that these politics have proven troublesome.

Nonetheless, there is a strong value in Žižek’s approach – particularly given the corner into which Cremin paints himself. The implicit conclusion of Capitalism’s New Clothes is that capitalism has reached a stage in which its contradictions are without political traction. If knowledge of the symptoms and contradictions of capitalism have not proved any political traction, as Cremin suggests, it is also doubtful whether an awareness of this cynicism will prove any more effective. Thus, whilst Cremin strongly suggests that we have reached a stage of end-capitalism in which the ‘twin crises of economy and ecology present us with the objective limits of [the] system’ (p.3) and that we need to enter into the politics of end capitalism, he gives no indication as to how this might occur and the implied conclusion is that only capitalism can decide when it is finished.

Žižek makes a similar conclusion in the sense that capitalism is collapsing upon itself and no alternative currently exists[16]. Yet, his are not a politics of patience, but an overtly Marxism consideration of the evoking the revolutionary overhaul of political economy by reference to the Real aspects that it excludes from itself, most pertinently the excluded masses of the new lumpenproletariat, to whom Cremin makes brief reference (p.26) but does not consider any further consequences. It is these excluded masses – the central contradiction within the capitalist mode of production and the point of exclusion within its ideological image – that provides the strongest political traction.

If Capitalism’s New Clothes ends with the conclusion that there is no subject of climate change and thus no prospect of driving revolutionary change other than the contradictions of capitalism itself,  Žižek begs to differ. Certainly, capitalism remains ideologically seductive, but it also continues to produce the germs of its own demise. While Cremin was keen to assert that 21^st century capitalism should not be considered only as super-structure, as if the ideological mechanisms he uncovers were the totality of capital, and draws our attention back to the economic foundations of capital, those economic foundations played only a small role in his analysis.

There is considerable value in the critical theory tradition of ideological critique, and Cremin adds much to this in his analysis of the ideological mechanisms that dominate capitalism today. Ideology seduces bodies and minds not through repression but through structural mechanisms that make the reproduction of capitalism appear to be entirely ‘natural’, whether through injunctions of ethics, employability or enjoyment. Conversely, Marxism should be careful to move away from the contradictions that define capitalism. This is the ultimate value of Žižek’s Marxism: the ability to both engage with ideology and reveal the structural contradictions that continue to haunt Marxism.

Nonetheless, these contradictions should not be considered in isolation from ideology. If capitalism is to be taken as naked, ideology itself must come to grips with the Real. Whilst Capitalism’s New Clothes reasserts the value of psychoanalytic Marxism for understanding capitalism, enjoyment and the subsequent limits of critique, it goes no further in advancing the valid concerns that psychoanalysis constructs a discursive prison from which it cannot escape. More than that, by not asserting any psychoanalytic possibility for breaking free of these limits, Cremin advances the suspicion that psychoanalysis has nothing more to say on these matters.

Bibliography

Critchley, Simon 2007, ‘Forward: Why Žižek must be Defended’. Edited by Bowman, Paul & Stamp, Richard, The Truth of Žižek, London: Continuum.

Economist, The 2011, ‘Time to Participate in Democracy’, available at: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/11/occupy-wall-street-0

Fink, Bruce 1995, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Homer, Sean 2001, It’s the Political Economy, Stupid! On Žižek’s Marxism. Radical Philosophy, 108.

Johnston, A. (2005). Time Drive: Metapsychology and the Splitting of the Drive. Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press.

Kay, Sarah 2003, Žižek: A Critical Introduction, Cambridge: Polity Press.

Laclau, Ernesto 2000, ‘Constructing Universality’ in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, edited by Butler, Judith, Laclau, Ernesto & Žižek, Slavoj. London: Verso.

Özselcuk, Ceren, & Madra, Yahya 2005. Psychoanalysis and Marxism: From Capitalist-All to Communist Non-All. Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society , 10, 79-97.

Stavrakakis, Yannis 1999, Lacan and the Political. London: Routledge.

Stavrakakis, Yannis 2007,  The Lacanian Left. Albany: SUNY.

Žižek, Slavoj 1989, The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso.

Žižek, Slavoj 2000, ‘Holding the Place’ in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, edited by  Butler, Judith, Laclau, Ernesto & Žižek, Slavoj. London: Verso.

Žižek, Slavoj 2004, ‘The Spectre of Ideology’ in Mapping Ideology, edited by Žižek, Slavoj. London: Verso.

Žižek, Slavoj 2006, The Parallax View. Cambridge, Massachusetts, MA.: MIT Press.

At first glance there appears nothing remarkable about Žižek’s response to the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement. Full of bluster and familiar anecdotes, Žižek’s intervention at the New York site has all the elements of a Žižekian encounter, urging the protestors to hold onto the moment of impossibility in their demands. Moreover, despite his critics, Žižek is not entirely foreign to political interventions and this movement, or at least one interpretation of a rapidly evolving beast, fits with his general position that we are moving towards what Colin Cremin calls ‘End-Capitalism’. What is interesting is the strategy he evokes, one that moves away with his evolving association with communism qua class struggle. Directing his remarks more towards the failing Western middle
classes, Žižek’s response provokes questions of the directions of the movement:
if the ‘99%’ is  against the top 1%, what does it have to say about the bottom 1%?

Inherent in the inclusive identification as the 99%, the occupy protests are Laclauian movements, developing a broad populist coalition based move upon what it is against rather than for any particular demand.  99% acts as an empty signifier, occupying the point of universality that binds together a number of movements from those against corporate ‘greed’ to those who do not distinguish between corporate and greed.  By leaving the implied 1% as teleologically
controlled by neo-liberalism, the movements allows for any number of
identifications against contemporary politics without establishing any specific
demands.

For its critics, this lack of clarity represents both its fault and future downfall. Speculating on the future of the Occupy movement in comparison with the Tea Party, the Economist suggests that the occupiers must put forth concrete proposals and work through the established political system, or they will be dismissed as irrelevant.

For those familiar with Žižek’s work, it is not surprising that his New York address maintained the need to avoid trying to rejig the current system, trying to reign in corporate greed or move from neo-liberal capitalism to social democratic capitalism. Instead, as Žižek states ‘The problem is not corruption or greed. The problem is the system. It forces you to be corrupt. Beware not only of the enemies, but also of false friends who are already working to dilute this process.’

Insisting that we demand what appears impossible within capitalism (and these impossibilities are growing increasing mundane, particularly compared to the amazing scientific advances accessible to the elite), Žižek makes reference to the commons of nature, intellectual property and of biogenetics, suggesting that this is what we should be fighting for.

Interestingly, however, he avoids a direct association with communism, suggesting only that we are not communists in the sense of the system that collapsed in 1990, evoking Hardt and Negri and the tragedy of middle class unemployment rather than global slums and environmental collapse. Instead, Žižek’s appeals appear much more democratic, appealing much more to his earlier work, although there is no doubt a strong strategic demand in his appeals.

Nonetheless, it is necessary to consider the exclusion from Žižek’s address, that of the ‘new forms of apartheid’ and global slum populations that he had suggested demands we focus our imagination on communism (see In Defense of Lost Causes, First as Tragedy, then as Farce and Living in the End Times).

Rather than this ‘hidden’ symptom of capitalism, that which acts as the
universal element of the system and acts as a ‘Real’ social antagonism, Žižek
appears to be suggesting that a revolutionary imagination can be developed from
the injustices suffered by the increasingly proletarianised middle-classes.

The decision to exclude the association with global slums in order to appeal to the Occupy movement makes me wonder what direction the 99% are heading. Will they be a pressure group, shifting the balance of political power currently held by the Western Right and unthreatened by a corporatised political Leftist bereft of economic ideas now that there is apparently no surplus left to redirect.

It is possible that the movement will allow for a rethinking of Western Capitalism along social democratic lines, changing the debate about the tax burden and focusing on job growth rather than the paper growth of financial markets. Barack Obama will certainly hope it will aid his jobs plan, although whether it at all speaks to the Euro crisis is worryingly unclear.

Alternatively, there a potential to evoke a more radical global revolutionary stance that widens the current association between Wall Street greed and unemployment, to the systematic requirements of global capitalism and the plight of both the global poor – that surplus of labour which both cannot be included within capitalism and has allowed for the outsourcing of production by anchoring urban wage demands – and the failing environment.

My question to those involved in the movement (or the actual 99% to whom it appeals) is whether they still want to live like the 1%, focusing on aspiring middle class desires – the heart of theprotest being that political policy has prevented social mobility such that the position of the 1% is unjust – or whether they are able to reject the capitalist system altogether because of its global consequences.

My heart is definitely with the movement and the possible utopian imagination that is emerging from those who dare to ask whether the impossible really is, but there is a long way to go in this struggle, and the system remains both seductive and destructively powerful. To capture the imagination of the widest public, and to direct that imagination at the constitutive and global ills of capitalism must be the aim. It is only when we lose all hope in Capital that true political imagination can occur.

The plan, essentially, remains to highlight the plight of those members of the global polis who die and suffer for the continuation and growth of profit and capital. My initial hypothesis, developed during my thesis, is that there exists an abstracted yet material grouping which directly suffers for the ‘success’ of global capital and the wealth required for the continuation of our ‘way of life’. Through an theoretical examination I wish to evoke the violence of this exclusion within the security of the ideological imagination of the global West. The central change from my thesis to this new project is that I plan to be more specific in regards to the excess population who suffers from capitalism and to focus more critical attention to both theories around this excess and geopolitical developments.

Centrally, I argue that such a group is suffers, necessarily, through the functioning of capital because;

1. A reserve army of labour is required for capital to reproduce the wage-labour system;
2. Environmental limits mean that capital cannot expand for everyone.

To paraphrase Zygmunt Bauman’s Wasted Lives, this is a concern for human waste (the consequences of production and consumption) and wasted humans.

Whilst capitalism is an entirely man-made, modernist and contingent production, I argue that it has taken on a necessity of its own. That is, the axiomatic structures of capital requires certain functionalities, the most central of which – its symptom or element of universality – is the extimate exclusion of a ‘part with no part’, a reserve army of labour which maintains the pressure of supply necessary for workers to submit their labour to the wage system: material and ideological exclusion, and most certainly inequality, is constitutive of capital.

Those most apologetic for capital, principally the United Nations and the likes of development economist Jeffery Sachs, like to promote the image of a development ‘ladder’ which excuses inequality as progress towards a universal standard of living.  If the ‘West’ is developed, than Brazil, China, India, Russia and South Africa, amongst others, can be classified as developing: the assumption being that they will reach the point of being developed. Moreover, the ladder metaphor assumes that once other national economies attain a position on the ladder (it is assumed that this position is obtained by capitalistic structural reform) they too will be able to live like the West. Under this ideological imagination, the exportation of Western manufacturing to the ‘sweatshops’ of the developing world is a positive advance, as is the Bretton Woods inspired restructuring of subsistence farming into what Fredric Jameson has described as ‘agricultural fieldwork’ that has created such a large surplus of labour as out of work and out of land rural populations have begun to swamp urban slums in undeveloped areas.

What this notion omits, however, is that for sweatshops to operate efficiently –that is, profitably – they have to pay very low – generally subsistence or below (the subsistence of the worker being of no concern for the employer in conditions of strong labour supply) – wages in order to justify the movement of production away from the main areas of consumption. Workers, disposed of the means of production by what David Harvey has described as ‘accumulation by dispossession’ have no choice but to accept these conditions because of the presence of  a surplus of workers who are able to take their place. Whilst this is excellent for the profitability of production in developing countries, it ignores the fate of those in the position of excess. If sweatshops wages are at the level of subsistence, those who provide a reserve of labour are reduced to the status of human waste, living a marginal existence of suffering and premature death.

The presence of a reserve army of labour is a well-developed Marxist concept  and has been generally accepted within neo-liberal economics, in a more palpable and abstract conception, as the structural unemployment and the ‘flexibility’ of the labour market. It has also been expanded upon by world systems theorists who have viewed the global economy as interconnected, suggesting that labour supply is not only linked to local markets but the ever present possibility of relocating production to cheaper markets. As such ‘surplus’ labour should not be considered a local phenomena but, rather, considered as part of a globalised economy. Much of my work in the following months is to consider whose labour (or lack thereof) fits this category.

I wish to extend upon these considerations in regards to both my own particular theoretical perspective and existing geopolitical conditions. Essentially, I wish to develop the exclusion of this reserve army in terms of a necessary exception from capitalism using Slavoj Žižek’s notion of universality, in combination with a number of other continental philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben and  Hannah Arendt. In addition, I seek to understand the plight of these wasted humans in terms of material developments, principally climate change.

It is climate change which provides the second limitation to the emancipation of the reserve army within capitalism. Without developing the science of climate change, carbon emissions and the associated with production at this point, it is clear that the global population cannot continue to consume at current levels. By most estimates if all were to reach the top end of the development ladder (which now becomes a ceiling?), another four-five planets worth of resources would be required. Moreover, with the global population predicted to rise from six to nine billion by 2050, the vast majority of which occurring in urban slums of developing countries, it is exceptionally clear that the level of global economic activity will rise to put extra-ordinary pressure upon the supporting environment. This rise may be offset to a degree by advances in technological efficiency but not nearly enough to stop the growth of carbon emissions, distribution of pollutants and exploitation of natural resources.

This is not an abstract or speculative proposition; that the poor cannot develop because of future environmental limits. Rather, the poor are beginning to feel the effect of global warming. Primarily this effect will be felt in reduction in food production caused by both the effect of increased temperatures upon crops and the consequences of these increases on water availability; as temperatures rise and snowy mountains melt, rivers dry and irrigation becomes increasingly difficult. In effect the consequence of rising temperatures is a narrower range of fertile food production areas.

Naturally, the availability of these areas does not favour the already poor and hungry and the powerful have nuclear weapons to settle any dispute that might arise.

Although we must be careful not to reduce the environmental degradation caused by capital to  global warming and the ‘greenhouse effect’, it remains the most apparent and wide-ranging environmental issue.  Measured in terms of carbon parts per million (ppm), the industrial era began at 280ppm and the consensus is that we have reached a level of 380ppm. If 350ppm is considered a sustainable level for human reproduction then 450ppm is considered the absolute tipping point. This point is considered to be the level at which the global temperature would have risen by 2° (with more substantial changes in the extremes), producing a number of hazardous feedback effects.  Such a rise would, amongst other effects, cut food production in India by 25%, a catastrophe for the wasted populations of the world and a consequence of global capitalism. With the amount of carbon rising more quickly than previously expected, it is more than likely that we will pass this 450ppm mark before the mid point of this century.

Through the environmental damage caused by economic activity under capitalism, we can see the central contradiction of the capitalist mode of production in the 21st century  -admittedly a contradiction only if capitalism is considered to reference itself to justice in any way – in order for the poor to develop their standard of living, substantial economic growth is required, increasing both the standards of the poor and the rich, whose wealth ‘trickles’ down. In order to maintain a climate which is conducive to human civilisation – what is known as the Holocene epoch – it is clear that economic activity must strongly decrease (as well as technological advances increasing). Such a decrease, however, can only have negative effects upon the poor.

As a consequence of both the growing number of the excess human population and the growing stresses upon this population,  it is highly likely that undocumented population movements from poorer to wealthier areas will be a notable and highly debated feature of the 21^st century as the West comes to face its disavowed foundations. As has been seen in the fate of ‘boat people’ across the world, most notably in Australia and in and around North Africa and the Mediterranean, the consequences can be disturbing.

Growing urban slum populations, decreased food production and water availability does not project a positive future for those in the red zone of capitalist exploitation.  Clearly, barring a black swan technological event our only chance of surviving in any form of civilisation similar to the past lies in either radical geo-engineering with humanity playing the part of a planetary life-system machine or a transformation in the mode of production such that the poorest can develop an adequate standard of living.

My planned research seeks to understand and evoke these conditions by way of a theoretical investigation. Whilst often using empirical scientific evidence and constantly founded in geopolitical conditions, the heart of my enquiry remains theoretical.  Specifically, I seek to use a Marxist-psychoanalytic framework to suggest that the fate of the poorest member of humanity is not a distant tragedy but is rather intimately linked the ‘way of life’ of the Western world. It is a natural consequence of the capitalist mode of production.

So, that is my stream of consciousness, entirely unverified research project for the foreseeable future.

Badiou has subsequently produced a more focused text, explicitly titled ‘The Communist Hypothesis’ (2010)^[1] and the International Journal of Žižek Studies published a special edition, entitled ‘On Žižek’s Communism’. The latter, however, focused more upon Žižek’s 2008 text, In Defense of Lost Causes, in which he sought to rehabilitate totalitarian positions, such as ‘revolutionary terror’ as a potential response to capitalism and the hegemony of liberalism amongst the Left. Nonetheless the critical and often polemic contributions to this special edition signalled the difficulty of Žižek’s evocation of communism in any form: historically, critics’ central rebuke of Žižek’s politics is that his Lacanian orientation prevents the development or acceptance of political positions that are alternative to capitalism. Moreover, because of this refusal Žižek’s politics are often conceived to have an all-or-nothing logic that ultimately leads to a refusal to act indistinguishable from the most stubborn modes of conservatism.

Nonetheless, Žižek’s reluctance to venture into ideological waters cannot be solely attributed to the limitations of Lacanian theory but, rather, has been based upon his ontological grasp of the historical limits of subversion within capitalism. That is, Žižek has been reluctant to posit or support any particular ideological platform not so much because of the limitations of these positions – not that Žižek has been recalcitrant in examining these limitations – but because they will inevitably be caught up in the logic of capital, a logic which has hegemonised hegemony, becoming the consistent background of all shared social life, or, what Žižek has labelled the ‘symbolic Real’ (Žižek, 2000: 223).

As such, Žižek’s primary mode of engagement has been, in Glyn Daly’s terms (2010: 15), to ‘subvert the logic of subversion’ within capitalism through his own dialectical triangulation of Hegel, Marx and Lacan. Thus, Žižek’s overt support for communism – an apparent ideological form of politics – marks a step-change from his form of political practice. Yet,  having unequivocally quoted Badiou on the communist hypothesis in First as Farce, then as Tragedy (2009a) Žižek’s next major work Living in End Times (2010) comes to critique Badiou’s Idea as if it were entirely foreign to his own work (2010: 182-185).  We must consider, therefore, both the significance of the communist hypothesis for the practice of Žižekian theory and its value as a form of politics.

In that regard, in this paper I will seek to consider this communist moment within Žižek’s work, from its Badiouian origins to the apparent distance Žižek has established from the latter’s ‘Idea of Communism’, arguing that although ‘the communist hypothesis’ marks a development within Žižekian theory it can be considered confluent with his previous work in the sense that it proceeds only on the basis of an identification with points of antagonism within capitalism. Moreover, I contend that, despite Žižek’s apparent ambivalence, his reading of communism can be productively extended via a utopian demand around the very limitations of capitalism, an extension that is quite distinct from the ideological contortions of Badiou’s Idea.

This response will have cause to move through three considerations. The first pertains to Žižek’s initial entry into the field of communism. Here, following Badiou, Žižek considers communism as a hypothesis and one that can only be understood as a response to the contradictions of global capitalism. In this manner, suggesting no ideological content, Žižek’s communism appears entirely congruent with his earlier work; an attempt to evoke the disavowed foundations of capital. Yet, despite this development, in his latest text Living in End Times (2010), Žižek does not seek to further his own reading of communism and is critical of Badiou’s own elaboration.

Badiou has gone on to produce The Communist Hypothesis, a collection of essays of which only one directly considers communism. In this section – a reproduction of his paper presented the Idea of Communism conference – he details what he means by a communist Idea in a manner which goes beyond Žižek’s work. Badiou’s Idea, taken to be a political procedure in which a subject becomes activated by its embodiment in a political truth within a historical state, attempts to mobilise the tension of the Lacanian Real within the capitalist state. Conversely, Badiou’s intervention involves an ideological mediation that lies in contradistinction with both the anxiety embodied by the Real and Žižek’s mode of engagement. This contrast speaks to diverging perspectives on our ability to perform subversive politics within capitalism; notably, we must consider whether an alternative ideological platform can be developed within capitalism without being subsumed into capital itself.

Here, although suggesting that Badiou’s work usefully extends our understanding of Žižek’s communism, I contend that the presence of such an Idea risks being caught up with the ‘facts’ of capitalism, as opposed to the Real tension provided by the truth that both Badiou and Žižek seek to evoke. In this manner, I posit that it is useful to distinguish between Badiou’s Idea and Žižek’s hypothesis. Moreover, I come to argue that rather than attempting to attribute any positive value to communism, Žižek’s consideration of the hypothesis can be best understood as a utopian demand; the third and final consideration.

In this regard, by way of a Lacanian interpretation of Jameson’s work on utopia I suggest two alternate readings of utopia, both of which resonate with a Lacanian conception of jouissance. The first and most common conception is the utopia of the ideal, a demand which can be considered homologous with surplus-jouissance. An alternative mode of utopia, however, occurs at the limits of the imaginary. This utopian demand is produced when conditions are deadlocked to a degree that symptoms cannot be resolved within existing co-ordinates, such that new space must be invented. As such, a utopian demand can be located in the position of the ‘part with no part’ within capitalism, the surplus or reserve army of labour which Žižek’s suggests both form the element of universality within capitalism and is the justification for the communist hypothesis. Before developing the link between utopia, jouissance and universality in relation to communism, however, I will begin by considering Žižek’s initial work on the communist hypothesis.

Žižek’s Communism: The Communist Hypothesis

Whilst Žižek’s work is transparently directed as a response to global capitalism, his theoretical interventions have never settled upon an ideological platform from which to stage this critique. Žižek’s commitment to the theoretical tenets of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian dialectics are readily apparent, as is his positioning within the Marxist tradition, yet the ultimate location of his political commitments has remained a point of academic speculation (see Boucher & Sharpe, 2010; Bowman & Stamp, 2007). Whilst some critics, such as Ernesto Laclau, have come to suggest that Žižek’s work is without political outlook because of his commitment to Lacanian analysis (Laclau, 2000: 289), others have come to argue that Žižek’s work is replete with an implicit totalitarianism. The latter position was the predominant thrust of a special edition of the International Journal of Žižek Studies entitled ‘Žižek’s Communism’, in which a familiar collection of Žižek’s critics^[2] rounded on his intervention into totalitarianism in the 2008 text, In Defense of Lost Causes.

Here Žižek provocatively flaunted his support for a number of ‘lost causes’ primarily totalitarian politics, from Mao to Stalin and Heidegger, but, also, the theoretical lost causes of Marxism and psychoanalysis themselves. Yet, although he seeks to rehabilitate the ‘kernel of truth’ in totalitarian regimes, the central argument of the text is a rethinking of the limitations of liberalism and the end of global ambitions rather than in detailed support for any ideological formation. The text produces a certain style of Žižekian politics; provocative, polemic and aimed largely at destabilising hegemonic assumptions in the name of enabling more radical forms of subversion. Nowhere, however, does Žižek specifically refer to a communist hypothesis or engage in a direct endorsement of communism. Nonetheless, although Žižek does not directly associating terror, or indeed egalitarianism, with communism, Geoff Boucher and Matthew Sharpe’s editorial introduction to the special edition states;

In this edition of the IJZS, the contributors investigate Žižek’s claim that his intervention is not a flamboyant posture masking the lack of a definite programme, but a serious contribution to the renewal of the emancipatory project of “egalitarian communism”. (2010: 2).

Moreover, these conclusions are further stretched in the editors’ contention that;

Žižek’s program of egalitarian communism is to be actualized by a group dictatorship that will represent the interests of the radically disenfranchised worldwide and will implement policies aiming at material equality in the context of ecological sustainability (ibid.: 3).

It appears that, for his critics, Žižek’s communism lies in his apparent embrace of totalitarian values at the expense of liberal politics. This reading of Žižek’s communism is not, however, at all congruent with Žižek’s later and more direct consideration of communism, which specifically seeks to subvert any attempt to positively locate communism. Indeed, to suggest that Žižek’s positions in In Defense of Lost Causes are communist is a retrospective reading, taking the emphasis of his later work and imposing it upon earlier arguments. Nonetheless, In Defense of Lost Causes does establish the basis for Žižek’s embrace of communism in the identification of four antagonisms which currently threaten global capitalism; Ecological degradation; the inadequacy of private property to response to digital technology and the intellectual commons; new scientific-technological developments; new global divisions or forms of ‘apartheid’^[3].

It is on the basis of these antagonisms that Žižek’s reference to the communist hypothesis begins in earnest in both How to Begin from the Beginning (Žižek, 2009b) and First as Tragedy, then as Farce (Žižek, 2009a). Whilst in In Defense of Lost Causes Žižek ends his discussion of these antagonisms by suggesting the first three designate the domain of the commons and thus justify a reference to communism, in How to Begin from the Beginning, he goes further, arguing;

It is, however, only the fourth antagonism, the reference to the excluded that justifies the term communism. There is nothing more private than a state community which perceives the excluded as a threat and worries how to keep them at a proper distance. In other words, in the series of the four antagonisms, the one between the included and the excluded is the crucial one: without it, all the others lose their subversive edge (2009b: 44).

It is only, however, with the publication of First as Tragedy, then as Farce (following Badiou’s use of the term) that Žižek begins to specifically refer to communism as a hypothesis. Here Žižek introduces the hypothesis by way of reference to Badiou, who has argued that;

The communist hypothesis remains the right hypothesis and I see no other … if this hypothesis is to be abandoned, then it is not worth doing anything in the field of collective action. Without the perspective of communism, without this kind of idea, nothing in the historical and political future is of such a kind of interest to the philosopher. Each individual can pursue their private business and we won’t mention it again … (Badiou, 2008: 115).

Žižek (2009b) repeats Badiou’s argument without contention, adding that one should not read the hypothesis as a ‘regulative idea’ of the kind that might lead to an ethical socialism with an a priori norm^[4]. Rather the communist hypothesis must be referenced to actual contradictions within capitalism. As Žižek states;

To treat communism as an eternal Idea implies that the situation which generates it is no less eternal that the antagonism to which communism reacts will always be here. From which it is only one step to a deconstructive reading of communism as a dream of presence, of abolishing all alienating representation; a dream which thrives on its own impossibility (Žižek, 2009a: 88).

As such, Žižek comes to suggest that the communist hypothesis comes into being specifically on the basis of one antagonism; the “gap which separates the excluded from the included” (ibid.:97). Without this antagonism, Žižek suggests, the remainder of the set lose all subversive potential, becoming challenges and opportunities for the development of new markets; ecological degradation and the Green dollar being the emblematic example. Instead, Žižek insists upon a rehabilitation of the Marxist problematic – abet with a characteristic twist – of locating a grouping which, precisely because it lacks a place in the social order, stands for the universal Truth of that order itself. As such, attempts to exclude the part with no part (as exemplified by the excessive slums populations of the world) whether through ideological mystification, the laws of private property or indeed physical walls themselves, constitutes the struggle for universality within global capitalism. On account of the ontological location of this disparate and desperate grouping, the universal exception holds the place of a palpable tension that is capable of productively disrupting capitalism, not so much through the kind of revolutionary action that some Marxists might have envisioned but, rather, through the fatal disruption of ideological coherence within Western capital itself. Through this disruption the prospect for reimagining new forms of being, modes of production and political action becomes a distinct possibility.

It is the necessity of maintaining barriers against the excluded within capitalism that justifies a specific reference to communism rather than to democracy or to fascism. Communism is not an innocent or arbitrary signifier but, rather – even if this conclusion has to be explicated from Žižek’s position rather than directly read – signals a commitment to egalitarianism and equality not possible under capitalism. The question, Žižek asks, is if the demand of the part with no part cannot be answered within capitalism, is democracy “an appropriate name for this egalitarian explosion[?]” (ibid.: 99). Ultimately, the Žižek’s evocation of the communist hypothesis is a rejection of the democratic horizon, suggesting that it is only a return to communism that would do justice to this demand. Yet, this form of communism is not guaranteed by history, rationalism, or the big Other to be the form of political being but, rather, signals the point of impossibility within capitalism.

In this sense, Žižek’s exposition of the communist hypothesis appears to be another iteration of the Lacanian dialectic in a Marxist context; an attempt to reinvent the communist mode of subversion within capitalism in a manner which cannot be captured by capital. Despite the mass of publications he has produced since his initial breakthrough in 1989, The Sublime Object of Ideology, the only element that has altered since the opening chapter of that text (in which Žižek extends on Lacan’s assertion that it was Marx who invented Lacanian symptom by detecting a fundamental imbalance within capitalism whereby a specific instance that appears heterogeneous to operation of capital – selling one’s labour – is universal to the operation of capital (1989: 21-22)) is the addition of the communist signifier.

Yet, this addition produces notable theoretical complications, as is witnessed by both the recent publication of Living in End Times (2010) and Badiou’s elaboration of his initial reading of the hypothesis. In the former, not only did Žižek not elaborate on communism as a hypothesis, returning instead to further analysis of the antagonisms which haunt late capitalism, but he also sought to distance himself from Badiou’s ‘Idea of communism’, a proposition that has extended beyond its initial formulation.  Badiou’s Idea can be contrasted with Žižek’s hypothesis in the sense that the former has sought to develop the ideological basis upon which it stands; ideology being in firm contrast to Žižek’s evocation of the Real antagonisms of capital. Such a distinction signals the difficulty of Žižek’s reference to communism. If Žižek’s attempts to evoke the Real tension evident in the antagonisms of capitalism, the identification of this tension in a positive signifier threatens to undermine the disruptive effect of the Real within capital. The difficulties between representation and the Real are at the heart of Badiou’s work around communism; it is to this Idea that I now turn.

The Idea of Communism

Badiou first introduces communism as a hypothesis towards the end of his polemic text, The Meaning of Sarkozy (2008). Here he is less evasive as to the value of communism and the potential content of the communist hypothesis than Žižek, claiming that there have been two previous sequences of the hypothesis: the first from the French revolution to the Paris commune (its establishment) and the second – its first attempt at realisation – running from the Russian revolution to the end of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. For Badiou, our task today is to determine the yet to be constructed content of the third sequence. There is, however, an ideological background to these sequences. Communism, Badiou suggests, would eliminate both inequality of wealth and the division of labour. Moreover, distinctions between manual and intellectual labour will disappear, along with differences between town and country. Naturally, the state itself will become unnecessary (ibid.: 115-117). Thus, although Badiou does not specifically identify the shape of the programme that will come to embody this hypothesis, his initial emphasis had been upon the value of the signifier ‘communism’ and its relationship to equality and economy rather than the epistemological and ontological of the concerns that have pre-occupied the Left after the discursive turn.

Nonetheless, in Badiou’s follow-up exposition of the hypothesis in The Communist Hypothesis (2010) the hypothesis of the title is now distinguished as an Idea and a number of ontological concerns are reintroduced. In the chapter The Idea of Communism, Badiou seeks to develop what it means to hold to an Idea, attributing greater value to the form of the Idea than to content of communism (ibid.: 254). Whilst this development gives greater consideration to the difficulties of representation in a manner confluent with the ontological basis of Badiou’s previous work, it also provides addition concerns in regard to political practice within capitalism.

For Badiou, an Idea is generated by what he terms a Truth procedure. A Truth procedure comes into being in relation to a subject (in an abstract sense) who becomes a ‘militant of this Truth’ (ibid.: 234) in achieving subjectivation. An Idea is thus the operation of a Truth procedure embodied by a subject within a historical state. In these terms, an Idea is the interplay of between the singularity of a Truth procedure and a representation of history. Nonetheless, for Badiou an Idea remains ideological in the sense that it not only imagines the emergence of a political Truth within a historical situation but seeks to project that political Truth onto another historical situation (ibid.: 238). If revolutionary politics is ultimately a victory for those with no names – the part with no part – Badiou still insists upon the need for the finitude of proper names in politics (ibid.: 249-252). That is, while a political Truth is by definition excluded from the ‘state’ the vehicle through which that Truth becomes an event is an idea based upon the nodal point of a proper name, whether that of an messianic individual or ideological movement.

For Žižek, Badiou’s insistence upon the necessity of ideology and thus ideological illusion is evidence of his reliance upon a transcendental illusion and subsequent hidden Kantianism based upon a mis-reading of Hegel. In this regard, Žižek has argued;

One could also say that the Idea of communism schematizes the Real of the political        Event, providing it with a narrative coating and thereby making it a part of our experience of historical reality – another indication of Badiou’s hidden Kantianism    (2010: 185).

Without wishing to enter into discussion over Badiou and Žižek’s respective understandings of Kant and Hegel, pertinently Žižek argues that political practice organised around the tension of the Real yet mediated by the narrative of the Idea and ideological solidification around a proper name, as in Badiou’s form of communism, risks a short-circuit between the Real and ideology, thus intervening against the anxiety of the Real and the possibility of a rupture within capitalism.  Thus, as much as the differences between Badiou and Žižek’s communism can be identified as ahistorically ontological, the primary distinction relates to political strategy in regards to the ontic parameters of ontology within capitalism and subsequent opportunities for radical subversion. Where Badiou contends that change can only come from a collective subject embodying the excluded truth of capitalism in the name of the Idea of communism, Žižek insists that there is no outside to capitalism within which an alternative node of ideology could flourish in a truly disruptive sense. Whilst Badiou’s subject of communism is not specifically outside of capital in the sense that it emerges from the internal failure of capital, any positive ideological movement stemming from this position becomes inherently linked with the structure of capital. In Badiouian terms, the ideological grip of capital is such that ideas only come to make sense in terms of the ‘facts’ of capitalism. Certainly, Badiou’s Idea offers the prospect of a powerful political movement, entailing a collective subjectivication around the antagonistic points of capitalism. Yet, severe doubts must be held over the efficiency of such a movement. A movement of the part with no part, the universal exception, if successfully evoked in the manner Badiou’s suggests, holds the possibility of providing substantive ideological disruption and anxiety.

Are we at a point, however, where capital would simply collapse into revolutionary fervour, or, are the material and ideological powers of capital such that a revolutionary movement would inevitably be crushed? For Žižek, not only is capital largely able to integrate its own  symptoms into opportunities for profit, and create a self-fulfilling matrix of understanding such that ideas only ‘work’ according to the logic of capital but, beyond all theoretical considerations, the material might of the officers of capital is beyond direct confrontation. Capitalism cannot be defeated from the outside. Instead, it must be induced to implode upon its own antagonisms. The question is how to achieve this internal combustion without evoking a transcendental faith in history or a pathetic political quietism.

In response to this problematic, in this paper I propose that, today, communism is best read through a utopian lens that resists the production of imaginary coherence and instead insists upon the drive of impossibility inherent in global capital. This lens, which involves a psychoanalytic re-reading of utopia as well as communism, seeks to move Žižek’s use of communism beyond the identification of the antagonisms of capitalism without establishing an alternative ideological fantasy. In order to properly consider this possibility, I will first turn to the concept of utopia itself, one that may appear entirely divorced from the psychoanalytic thrust developed thus far.

Utopia: Demand the Impossible!

At its most basic utopia can be conceived as an impulse or desire for something different from the existing. In this sense, utopianism has been referenced to the prospect of radical political change in the name of a perfect future society. The utopian urge, however, does not necessarily take the form of a desire for a radically different form of being. Today the elementary utopian demand is embodied in the conservative hope that, ultimately, society does exist; that life could be managed in such a manner that the fullness of presence is possible within existing structures. We see this utopianism played out in discussion around environmental issues in which the threat of overwhelming ecological degradation is placated by the prospect of technological innovation, responsive markets and ‘political will’ (see Sachs, 2008).

The utopian demand can be regarded as the desire for jouissance. At first glance, utopia – despite its radical pretensions – is a counter-intuitive position for any form of politics taking its orientation from a Lacanian-inspired psychoanalysis that has emphasised themes of lack, finitude and excess. Conversely, an alternate modality of utopia can be constituted around the impossible, rather than the jouissance of the ideal. This mode retains the demand for a better world but finds the drive for change in the limitation of imagination rather than its location in a specific ideal. If, for example, a dominant mode of contemporary environmentalism displays the tragic utopianism of the ideal harmony with nature, an alternative mode could momentarily exist in a discombobulation of ideology stemming from a collective and traumatic realisation that existing devices cannot prevent ecological disaster. This realisation – an evocation of the Real – has the potential to disrupt the consistently of capitalism in a way that new modes of understanding can flourish.

Utopia, considered in both these modes, is thus not to be divorced from the everyday but, rather, is at the heart of the human experience. It is a response to the operation that Ruth Levitas (2007: 290), following Ernst Bloch (1986), identifies as the fundamental utopian expression: that utopia is at its core an expression of the desire for a better way of being, a principle that Bloch designated as ‘hope’; a desire for something that is missing. In this sense utopian thought does not require the wholesale imagination of new worlds, although this construction is an articulation of the utopian desire. Instead, these constructions are an expression of a larger demand for jouissance.

Indexing utopia to jouissance suggests that, rather than taking the form of elaborate visions, a utopian urge appears in the everyday performance of social life. In this sense, utopia cannot be juxtaposed against ideology – utopia seeking to change society, ideology to maintain it – as Karl Mannheim contended (Mannheim cited in Levitas, 2007: 289). Instead, this sense of utopia is entirely ideological; utopia is an expression of jouissance that lies at the heart of ideology. The everyday performance of utopia, therefore, is the performance of jouissance in its many forms; the elementary demand of the utopian/ideological position is that, contra-Laclau, ‘society does exist’.

It is the critique of this mantra that forms the basis of psychoanalytic criticism of utopianism. Suggesting that attempts to attain the fullness of jouissance or utopia must violently exclude a dystopian element that cannot be named, for many – and not limited to psychoanalytic theorists – utopian politics can be deemed idealistically unrealistic at best, dangerous at worst (c.f. Gray, 2008).  If a utopian imagination can develops politics of the ideal with little reference to political circumstances and consequentially little influential, than these ideological formations are equally likely to postulate an ‘enemy’ as the cause of the failure to achieve such an imagination. Barack Obama’s presidential campaign and subsequent administration is one example of both these processes, operating on both sides of the (narrow) American political spectrum. Obama’s campaign imagery of ‘change’ and ‘hope’ brought with it a wholesale imagination of a different kind of society. Yet, at the moment of his election, from his inaguration speech to the widespread restoration of Bill Clinton’s political advisors, the desire and jouissance behind the Obama utopia collapsed. This collapse, despite being embodied by specific events, was not contingent upon these events but, rather, necessary; the utopian ideal collapses as soon as imagination is put into action. Equally, since this collapse a more potent movement has emerged, based largely around the ultra-conservative Tea-Party, which seeks to restore the utopia of ‘America’ largely by way of associating Obama with an otherness which is threatening this imaginary.

The alternative mode of utopia, based around the impossibility of its instantiation is more akin to the impulse of the Lacanian dialectic. Rather than seeking to extend or fulfil a utopian imagination, this modality locates the utopian moment at the very limits of ideology. Such a utopian does not lie in the content of ideology but, rather, the impulse for change that occurs when the symptoms of an order become overly traumatic such that they cannot be contained within ideology. The utopia of the Real – as opposed to the ideal – occurs when, unable to contain the trauma caused by exposure to the Real, new modes of being emerge.

As Žižek states in the documentary Žižek! when discussing the lack of alternatives to capitalism;

We should reinvent utopia, but in what sense? There are two false meanings of utopia; one is this old notion of imaging an ideal society which we know will never be realised. The other is the capitalist utopia in the sense of new perverse desires that you are not only allowed but even solicited to realise. The true utopia is when the situation is so without issue, without a way to resolve it within the coordinates of the possible that out of the pure urge of survival you have to invent a new space. Utopia is not kind of a free imagination, utopia is a matter of inner-most urgency, you are forced to imagine it is the only way out, and this is the utopia we need today (Taylor, 2007).

In this regard, a utopian drive lies in the impossibility of imagining an alternative future to capitalism despite the inability to resolve its great horrors: such a demand is in embodied in Jameson’s oft-repeated remark that capital limits our imagination such that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than a change in the mode of production (see Jameson, 2003).  Rather than attempting to suture the contradictions of capital, a utopian demand occurs when the subjects of capital are compelled to imagine a new mode of being in order to avoid the trauma of the breakdown of the ideological frameworks which have contained the horrors of capital.

The distinction between the two modes of utopia can be found in Thomas More’s original conception, using Greek terms to bring together ‘no place’ and ‘good place’. This suggests both a tragic and comedic face to utopia. Utopia can be tragic – a place we will never reach – or comedic; utopia lies in the very impossibility of its realisation. This latter form does not cling to an alternative conception of society but, rather, relies upon the build up of energy around the very limits to our imagination. Imagination, of course, is not limited to the fancy of the individual. Rather, imagination is always a social creation; the limitations of our imagination are always the limitations of the ideological terrain, what Badiou calls the ‘state of the situation’.

A profound difficulty presents itself at this point: of finding a way to imagine the prospect of an alternative future without foreclosing the possibility of it coming into being.  What we require is not a utopian urge to fill out the failure of capitalism, either through capitalism itself or its cultural supplements but, rather, a desire to move beyond capitalism on the basis of the traumatic impossibility of capital itself. This desire constitutes not only an approach to the Real but the jouissance of impossibility itself. That is, the impossibility of imagining utopia does not bring an end to jouissance but, instead, persists in the form of jouissance. This form of utopia does not dismiss jouissance as an illusion but, instead, suggests that jouissance drives every attempt to imagine utopia. The vital difference between the forms of utopia is that the positive mode attempts to locate this utopian place whereas the impossible utopia plays upon the urge to go beyond the existing. The key difference here is between the fantasy of full jouissance provided by utopia-as-content, and the subversion of alternative political imaginaries through utopia-as-form.

Whilst this form of utopianism leads itself to accusations of negativity and political quietism, positive forms are easily subverted. In relation to his reservations around the extension of imagination, Jameson argues that the designation of specific points of protest is contrary to the effectiveness of utopianism. It is for this reason that Jameson has previously suggested that utopia is at its most effective when it cannot be imagined;

Its function lies not in helping us to imagine a better future but, rather, in      demonstrating our utter incapacity to imagine such a future – our imprisonment in a      non-utopian present without historicity of futurity – so as to reveal the ideological closure of the system in which we are somehow trapped and confined (2004: 46).

When the specific contradictions become apparent, the tendency is to focus political demands upon these points. At this point the utopian imagination becomes limited and what might have been a revolutionary demand gives way to practical political programmes (Jameson, 2004: 45). Just as Badiou’s Idea risks mediating against the tension embodied in the Truth of any given constellation, the utopian moment occurs when the limits of ideology cannot be sutured and thus the identification of this moment risks a positivisation of the Real and a subsequent reactionary appeal to jouissance. That is, if the trauma of the Real opens up a wound within ideology, this wound can equally and effectively be sutured by a renewed ideological movement which displaces the cause of trauma. A salient example of this process in these times is the Green movement. Although Green ideology at times suggests energy for widespread change that might be considered utopian, it has become too easy to divert this enthusiasm into smaller scale processes that only serve to supplement the interests of capital and escalate ecological collapse.

Yet, if the Žižekian sense of utopianism – interpreted here through the communist hypothesis – takes its form from the expression of actually occurring antagonisms with capitalism, how does it avoid becoming particularised in singular demands? Whilst acknowledging that capital is able to include and pacify most of its symptoms, Žižek designates the ‘part-with-no-part as the specific contradiction which holds a vital, universal, status and thus cannot be subject to direct political demands. That is, whilst the utopian demand inherent in this necessary exclusion can be subverted in various ideological measures, such as charitable aid or the displacement of the antagonism to an exterior cause, the universality of surplus labour cannot be integrated within capitalism and for this reason remains the impossible point of a utopian demand.

Nonetheless, as Jameson might suggest, indexing communism in relation to utopia is to mediate against the utopian demand by providing an object for the imagination, an imagination that will inevitably become caught up in the facts and consequences of capital. This is ultimately a question of the representation of impossibility and the signification of the Real. Jameson and Badiou, as presented here, represent two sides of this debate. Where Badiou attempts to animate an idea with an overwhelming ideological component, Jameson resists any temptation to suture the limitation of our political imagination. Žižek’s brief evocation of the communist hypothesis, however, suggests a third alternative. Here the reference to communism does not seek to develop a new imagination but, instead, insists upon thrusting open the trauma in ideology. This occurs, however, by identifying this trauma with both a specific antagonism – surplus labour – and with communism. The later is read not through the positivity of ideology but rather, as an opportunity to insist upon the impossibility of capital and direct the interpretation of its collapse.

Communism and Utopia

Thinking communism in terms of utopia produces two alternative positions. Firstly, there is the fantasmatic utopia of communism without antagonism, a position Žižek has subject to sustained critique, regarding it as the ultimate Marxist fantasy of capitalism without antagonism (see Žižek, 1989: 49-53). This is the tragedy inherent in utopia as the image of the good place; an imaginary ideal that must fail and in doing so attributes this failure to an exterior cause. By contrast, the communist hypothesis lies in the utopian demand that the contradictions of capitalism mean that it cannot continue indefinitely. Specifically, the utopia of the communist hypothesis lies in capitalism’s very failure to account for its own exclusions in the walls it is developing against the excess of humanity that builds around the globe: the universality of capital exists in this battle.

Badiou’s Idea of communism has much in common with both readings of utopia. Read through the Jamesonian lens of utopianism suggested here, the utopian moment in Badiou’s work occurs when the subject is grasped by a Truth such that become a militant evangelist for this Truth, forcing the Idea into being in the face of the facts of the situation. Nonetheless, the ‘Road to Damascus’ moment of Badiou’s subject of Truth includes not only this moment but, also, the ideological path which provides the moment of Truth with political substance.  Although the emphasis lies upon the truth of a situation, such that it embodies the impossibility of capitalism, the mobilisation of this truth requires the subject commits to an ideology. The Badiouian procedure thus enlists two utopian moments for its political power; one of the impossibility of the ‘no place’, the other of the ‘good place’ of the 3^rd sequence of the Idea of communism.

Yet, Badiou’s insistence upon the stabilising presence of proper names means we must wonder how this Idea could come into place without a reactionary jouissance and the fantasy of the utopian ideal. Indeed, Žižek contends that Badiou’s notion of ‘sequences’ of communism signals the difficulty in his conception of communism. Such an image of communism postulates the presence of an empty, universal frame which is altered under differing concrete circumstances. Instead of this abstract universality, Žižek’s communism lies in the concrete universality of the failure of global capital (2010: 20).

Nonetheless, by contrast to Žižek’s conception, Badiou’s reading of the role of communism is clear in his notion of the Idea. Communism becomes both the interpretative procedure identifying Truth within facts and the ideology of a new world order; vitally, communism acts as a point of identification for the newly subjectivised individual. Žižek’s communism remains more ambivalent. If his previous political positions have identified the tension and political power of those who are the ‘part with no part’, then we must consider how the addition of the communist signifier alters his politics. Through the reference to an impossible sense of utopia I have suggested that the traction provided by the utopian demand comes from an identification with the impossibility of capitalism. This identification owes itself to Žižek’s Lacanian reading of Marxism, rather than any historical reading of communist discourse. Although Žižek appears to designate communism as embodied only in the contradictions of capitalism, communism inevitably becomes a point of identification for the flourishing of ideas and jouissance.

Nonetheless, the difference between Badiou and Žižek on this point is subtle and much less marked than the contrast with Jameson. Where the latter insists upon the limitations of imagination as the place of utopia, both Žižek and Badiou seek to overtly politicise the moment of failure. The vital difference, however, is that where Badiou argues that an ideological platform is required for the subjects of Truth, Žižek seeks to politicise a potential rupture within capitalism by insisting upon its communist potential. This potential lies in the very impossibility of capitalism and is thus a utopian demand. Yet, even if Žižek does not himself postulate a consequential communist ideology, it is inevitable that the very spectre of communism would evoke images of the shape of the communist future. In this sense, we must insist on the vital distinction between Žižek’s focus upon Truth and the Real and Badiou’s collective subject. This distinction relates not so much to an abstraction of theory but, rather, an ontological reading of the conditions of possibility for subversion within capitalism. Where Badiou conceives of hope for a collective movement against capitalism, Žižek insists that capitalism can only be bought to its knees through an awareness of its own limits.

Thus, a Žižekian interpretation of communism is able to postulate this signifier without a corresponding ideological manifesto because it is not an abstract or ideal formulation but, rather, a reaction to existing conditions. That is, by identifying the exclusion of surplus labour as essential to the operation of capitalism – the point of concrete universality within capitalism – because it speaks to the system as a totality. In regards to Jameson’s concerns around the possible subversion of utopian energy caused by the naming of this point, the communist hypothesis does not suggest a ‘filling’ out of the utopian space but, rather, signifies that point which cannot be filled out. In this sense, through the impossibility of including surplus labour, the communist hypothesis does open up a new horizon for the Left but not one that will please many of Žižek’s critics – it does not produce a new point of imaginary identification but, instead, opens up new space for these identifications to be formed.

As such, Žižek’s communism is not an empty treatise on political strategy but, instead, is dedicated to moving beyond capitalism. This commitment forms the basis of the ‘communist’ hypothesis rather than any reference to democracy as the driver of the future. Žižek justifies the use of communism as the named signifier of the transition from capitalism to the future by reference to the surplus labour within capitalism itself. This identifies not only a belief that those extimately excluded within capitalism who do not enjoy the benefits of this system but, also, that this is a problem in itself. That is, by utilising communism and surplus labour as the primary reference point to the end of capitalism, Žižek is signaling more than just a strategic intent to move beyond capitalism. He is implicitly suggesting an ethical commitment to egalitarian justice to which there is no requirement for further justification. Inherent in this is a minimal demand, most beautifully articulated by Adorno in his Mimma Moralia (1974: 155): “There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand; that no one should go hungry any more”.

NOTES:

This opening statement by Jeffery Sachs in his seminal text, Common Wealth (2008), unwittingly reveals far more than he desires. Intending to argue that a number of alterations are required in order to make the global economy sustainable, Sachs symptomatically announces that in order to produce a truly globally sustainable economy, global capitalism cannot continue. The logical consequence of both Sachs’ work and the contradictions of global capitalism are such that anything less than radical political change will produce an environmental and political catastrophe. Either way, our assumptions about economic life will certainly be over-turned but not in the manner that Sachs intends. Amongst the economic ‘assumptions’ that Sachs believes will be evoked in this century are the end of American hegemony, the emergence of new technologies and an end to the notion of competing nation-states as a new era of global co-operation comes to dominate humanity. These changes will come on the back of enlightened reflection as capitalism, once drunk on its own excesses, peers into the mirror Sachs provides and emerges clean and triumphant. Ultimately, however, Sachs’ work is unsympathetic towards the kind of overturning of economic life that would be necessary to respond to his own problematic[1] – which he defines as the challenge of global sustainability; “protecting the environment, stabilising the world’s population, narrowing the gaps between rich and poor, and ending extreme poverty” (ibid.: 3) – he is apparently unwilling to consider his own assumptions about economic life.

Sachs is no marginal figure and his identification of the material deprivations and contradictions which currently plague humanity are the problems of today. Sachs is head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and director of the United Nations (UN) Millennium Project, which announced the setting of 15 ‘Millennium Development Goals’ to be achieved by 2015 (United Nations, 2000). Amongst these goals are targets to “Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger”, “Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programs and reverse the loss of environmental resources” and “Have achieved by 2020 a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers” (Sachs, 2005b: xvii-xix)[2].

Sachs suggests that progress towards these goals is obstructed by four demands: human pressures on ecosystems and the climate, world population growth, extreme poverty and global problem solving processes (Sachs, 2008: 6). These problems do not exist in isolation. Increases in population and economic growth multiply global economic activity, placing unsustainable pressure upon the environment. Sustained economic growth, both from the Western world and from the developing world – primarily China and India but also Brazil and Russia – combined with continued growth of the world economy has meant that global economic production has risen by eight times between 1950-2008 (ibid.: 19). Given further economic growth and population increases, gross world product is predicted to rise by 6.3 times over the period 2005-2050 (ibid.: 23).

Mainstream economists reduce these pressures to a simple economic equation used to determine environment impact: total population (P), income per person (A) and the environmental impact per dollar of income (T), otherwise known as the level of technology. From this equation, the total impact (I) on the environment can be calculated by the equation I = P x A x T (a high T value signifying a high environment effect) (ibid.: 29). Using this equation, Sachs suggests that as the global population is predicted to rise by 40% and global income to quadruple, the impact on the environment with unchanged technology would be six times that experienced today (ibid.: 29). As a corollary, if the current human impact on the environment is unsustainable, a six fold increase would be ‘devastating’ and lead to certain environmental catastrophe.

The hegemonic Green approach to this problem is to defer to technological developments and assertions of ‘political will’. This promethean discourse holds that improvements in energy and resource efficiency, both in terms of production and consumption, will be sufficient to halt global climate change and mediate against the contradiction between economic growth and environmental degradation. Based on this assumption, one-off increases in resource efficiency produce the change required to hold off environmental collapse. Efficiency increases, however, only ever take the edge off increases in overall economic output. Sachs himself illustrates this point in regards to electricity efficiency, stating that given global economic output is predicted to rise six fold in the years to 2050, even a doubling of efficiency would lead to a tripling of electricity use (Sachs, 2008: 98).

The reliance upon technology discounts what is known as ‘Jevons paradox’. First suggested by William Stanley Jevons in relation to coal consumption in Great Britain (Jevons, 1866), the paradox suggests that increases in efficiency tend to produce an increase in the demand for the resource: as the resource becomes cheaper, consumption tends to rise. As a consequence, technological advancements do not tend to reduce environmental impact because gains in efficiency are mitigated by increases in consumption (Foster, 2000: 4). Economist John Bellamy Foster suggests improvements in automobile efficiency as an example of Jevons paradox in action. Increases in efficiency in the automobile industry in the United States in the 1970s did not reduce the amount of fuel consumed as the number of vehicles on the road doubled as driving became more affordable (ibid.: 5).

Certainly this ‘law’ only holds according to the logic of neoclassical economics; it needs to be viewed critically and does not uniformly apply. In particular, government-mandated efficiency standards tend to increase costs, thus not increasing demand and consumption, although impacting upon private profitability. Nevertheless, technology is not a total solution: it cannot be assumed that technological developments will prevent entirely mediate expansions in economic activity. Technology may expand the range of resources available but cannot do so infinitely. Moreover, technological innovation does not automatically reduce resource consumption.

Perhaps the over-riding point is that capitalism is not an efficient system for the use of resources, as it is assumed to be by its ideologues. Capitalism is not based on production to service human ‘needs’ but, rather, continuous accumulation and growth – the drive of capital is profit for the sake only of profit itself. As such, the central environmental concern in regards to capitalism should not be technology and efficiency but a reduction in the general level of production and consumption.

Conversely, because capitalism is constituted by its own self-revolution and growth, any reduction in economic output sends capital into crisis, further restricting the ‘trickle down’ to those beyond the development ladder. Thus, while the Green demand for reducing the scale of economic activity is a step in the right direction – Western levels of consumption must be reduced in order to halt global environmental collapse and allow the masses to come out of poverty – this move would be disastrous for the hungry populations of the world within the limitations imposed by capitalism. Despite the locally based poverty reduction efforts of trans-governmental agencies such as the United Nations and the World Bank, genuine resolution of poverty can only be achieved within the capitalist ‘development ladder’. That is, for the world’s poorest citizens to bring their standard of living out of extreme poverty, the wealthiest would have had to experience equally large, or larger, economic growth. For this reason, demands from Green discourse and in particular the ‘Affluenza’ movement (see Galbraith, 1958; Hamilton, 2003) to reduce levels of consumption – such as ‘buy nothing day’ – are ill-conceived.

Peter Singer (2009), in his text The Life You Can Save, holds to a similar position, this time by reference to poverty rather than environmental conditions. Arguing that those who consume ‘unnecessarily’ are morally obligated to reduce this consumption and give to the absolute poor, Singer argues that a drastic reduction in consumption is necessary for the wealthy to be considering to be living ‘Good’ lives. What Singer forecloses, and we will have cause to return to the politics of this position later in this chapter and its consequences for the psyche in Chapter Four, is that a reduction in Western consumption necessarily leads to a fall in economic growth that will make the circumstances of the poorest worse off. That is, within the capitalist matrix, these reductions can only lead to further hardship for the poor.

Such a reading of the operation of the ‘market’ appears to be a decidedly neo-liberal or conservative position: that the burden of the Global West is to continue consuming in order for jobs and wealth to trickle down to the poorest inhabits of the Earth. This is certainly not the moral position that will be advocated in this thesis. Instead, we have cause to agree with Singer’s basic contention that for wealthy subjects to consume at current rates whilst so many suffer in abject poverty is morally questionable. The difference lies in the politics of such a position. Whilst Singer, and others of a charitable bent, argue that poverty can be vastly reduced by voluntary redistributions of wealth, in this thesis I shall argue that the disavowal of the political dimension of this position signals the impossibility of enacting widespread change within global capitalism. The ultimate consequence of a reduction of Western demand for consumer items is the fall in the production of these items in the Third World, a decrease which results in unemployment and further suffering for the hungry masses.

Here lies the fundamental material contradiction of capitalism. The environmental capacity of the Earth apparently cannot support the scale of development required to induce a substantial reduction in poverty, even with a significant increase in technological efficiency. Indeed, even without any efforts to reduce poverty, economic growth in the global West is unsustainable. In this regard, the 2008 World Wildlife Fund ‘Living Planet’ report suggests in 2005 the global ecological footprint (the biological capacity required for the material reproduction of society) was 30% higher than supply; the United States footprint-per-capita was four times that of that global supply. Likewise, ‘clean, green’ New Zealand’s footprint was approximately three times that which is currently sustainable, suggesting that if all the citizens of the world lived like New Zealanders – a nation apparently in immediate need of economic growth – another two planets would be required (WWF, 2008: 14-15). Clearly, these ecological footprints are not sustainable, nor can they be allowed to expand. Increasingly open battles for resources are being witnessed on a global scale and ultimately, in the competition for scarce resources, it is the rich and powerful who will win (see Klare, 2001).

This process is compounded by the exponential growth of the world’s population. The 2009 United Nations Population Report (2009b) predicts the world’s population will increase 37% to 9.2 billion by 2050, 85% of which will reside in regions currently classified as ‘less developed’. At the same time, 86% of the global population is predicted to live in these areas. These population pressures invoke the ghost of Thomas Malthus, once banished by the hope of technology. Malthus argued that population pressures on resources were the primary cause of hunger, with various ‘positive checks’ alleviating the pressure. Writing in 1798, his motive here was political; the defence of private property in the face of the French revolution and the enthusiasm for utopian projects that resonated at the time (Ross, 1998: 8). Malthus considered social welfare to be pointless as the increased demand for food would only expand the misery of the poor. Indeed, Eric Ross (ibid.: 22) quotes Malthus as stating:

a man who is born into a world already possessed, if he cannot get subsistence from his parents on whom he has just demand, and if the society do not want his labour, has no claim of right to the smallest portion of food, and, in fact, has no business to be where he is.

 Malthus considered poverty to be a natural occurrence, created because population growth was higher than food production; gains in productivity would be eroded by population growth. What Malthus did not consider, however, was increases in technological efficiency which produced more food per head of population, and restrictions on population growth primarily through improvements in contraception[3].

For many, this debate was decided by the progress made by the Green Revolution in the 1970s, in which the use of technology raised food productivity above that demanded by population growth. Yet, as the possibility of the total exploitation of global resources becomes a possibility and global population rates continue to increase, now is not a time to forget Malthus’ warning, although we may do well to reject his conservative politics. Indeed, these politics – once dismissed by the light of modernism – may also return in the case of quasi-apocalyptic collapse. Perhaps we do not have to go that far. As surplus populations develop in less fortunate areas of the world and the wealthiest nations increasingly look to obtain resources from lands other than their own – China’s purchasing of large plots of land in Africa in order to grow crops for domestic purposes is an example (Smith, 2009) – population pressure upon resources appears to be the most apparent source of misery.

It is this surplus population that is the ultimate rejoinder to the likes of Sachs. If the carrying capacity of the planet provides an external limitation to the progress of capital, then these excessive populations suggest an imminent contradiction, one that shall be at the heart of the argumentation in this thesis. It is this population, a surplus of labour, to which we now turn.

 Surplus Labour

For Marx, exploitation occurs because of the structural relationship between capital and labour, embodied in the wage-labour system. This structure can only operate under the conditions of an excessive over-supply of workers. That is, capitalism operates as a system of private property where the vast majority are not able to own the means of production and thus, without these means – without the ability and resources to materially reproduce their own conditions of living – are forced to sell their labour power[4] (Wood, 2004: 246). Indeed, the worker generally benefits more from employment than the capitalist – within capitalism, the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited (Robinson in Munck, 2000: 142). Where the worker risks starvation, and ultimately death, the capitalist is set to lose only a small amount of profit and can easily replace the worker (Wood, 2004: 135-136). Thus, in order for the capitalist wage-labour system to operate, an excess of workers must exist such that the threat of losing one’s job remains; without the existence of a minimum wage, wages prices are driven down by the excess of willing workers.

Liberal political discourse tends to conceive of the extreme poverty of these excess workers as being caused by their non-inclusion within capitalism. Sachs, for example, particularly in his previous work (2005a), is expressly concerned with the plight of the most materially deprived but does not consider this population to be part of global capitalism. In line with the strictly analytic philosophical logic which informs his work, Sachs argues that because wealthy Western nations have followed a market logic, the same logic will apply to all nations. Poverty is not caused by capitalism but, rather, by exclusion from capitalism. That capitalism could be responsible for both corpulent wealth and miserable poverty is not a conclusion available to Sachs, who misreads Marxism[5] to the extent that the idea of such a ‘reading’ appears far-fetched[6].

That, however, is the exactly the conclusion taken here. Following the brief Marxist analysis suggested above, poverty is considered to be intimately related to market relations. The labouring – or unwanted labouring – populations of the world are not strictly excluded from capitalism. Rather, they constitute the wage-labour system. Nonetheless, this necessary positioning cannot be acknowledged within the ideology of justice that informs the Western world: an ideology that suggests that one’s fate depends on personal effort rather than circumstance. A recognition that Western wealth is openly constituted upon the exploitation, suffering and horrifically slow and regular death of those whose labour is considered to be surplus, is too traumatic a conclusion to be reached for the delicate, if cynical, sensibilities of the post-enlightenment subject. Surplus labour thus speaks to a sense of exclusion that we shall consider to be best understood by a psychoanalytic discourse and, in particular, the Lacanian term ‘extimacy’, and Žižek’s conception of universality.

Surplus labour is thus the principle symptomatic contradiction of global capitalism. This contradiction has been kept at bay through various ideological displacements which either seek to position absolute global poverty as a contingent aberration caused by faulty application of market principles, or a local error produced by corrupt individuals or lazy governance. Mediated by charitable endeavours, the contradiction between wealth and poverty within our increasingly ‘globalised’ society has been kept from the developed mind by geographical distance.

Globally the working class has been subject to a large geographical shift, whereby 80% of what could be regarded as the Marxist Proletariat now exists outside of Western nations (Davis, 2006: 13). Western multi-nationals have moved their production operations to countries whose labour force had previously been regarded as outside of the global economy, relocating in search of reduced costs, lower wages, and more relaxed labour laws. This move has produced an ideological split within capitalism. If much has been made of the move to a different stage of capitalism, from an industrial to a post-industrial society characterised by branding, consumerism and finance capital, the working class has not disappeared – it has merely been placed outside of the hegemonic Western gaze.

It is also worth considering the current capitalist dynamic that is creating a ‘Third world’ underclass within developed western countries, particularly nations that have installed neo-liberal economic policies[7]. Such a dynamic has been explored in detail in developing countries. Here, the economies of Brazil, China and India are developing rapidly but this development is subject to substantial income inequality (Guanghua, 2008; Heshmatic, 2007). While this inequality was already stark, particularly in Brazil and India, differences are becoming more noticeable as the benefits of development accrue to only a portion of the population.

Predominately framed in terms of ‘human-rights’ violations or a failure of welfare systems and development assistance, such stark national inequality has generally been the source of both disdain and pity in the West. However, the same trend of increasing inequality can also be observed in many of the wealthiest nations. The United States is perhaps the strongest such example. Here poverty, particularly if measured in terms of health and education standards rather than consumed calories, is reaching Third World levels (see Burd-Sharps, Lewis, & Borges Martins, 2008).

The outsourcing of the working class, along with other reforms, has generated large pockets of surplus labour located in urban slums within the developing world. This development has occurred following what might be termed the second expansion of capitalism – the first being the colonisation achieved by European empires – occurred via the ‘soft’ colonisation of the Bretton Woods institutions, the IMF and the World Bank. Although established soon after the Second World War, these institutions only turned their interest to the Third world in the mid-late 1970s[8]. During this time, World Bank ‘urban lending’ increased from US$10 million in 1972 to US$2 billion in 1988 (Davis, 2006: 70). The results of these Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) have been mixed in the extreme. Some regions have experienced remarkable economic growth which has brought millions out of poverty. At the same time, however, even within these high-growth nations, inequality and suffering has become more extreme. India, for example, one of the shining lights of the SAPs, achieved 6% growth throughout the 1990s, yet the poor are experiencing arguably the worst conditions since independence, with 56 million new paupers on the streets during this time (ibid.: 171)[9].

Contrary to Sachs’ contention that it is only when agricultural surpluses are high that urban populations develop (2008:26), these urban slums are, in the terms of American urban theorist, Mike Davis, a “surplus-humanity”, built not from economic opportunity but, rather, a lack of it. The most edifying image of this excess humanity is the ‘City of the Dead’, the slum dwellers who have made their home within the tombs of Cairo. This surplus population, what Manual Castells has labelled the ‘Fourth world’ (2000: 68), has developed with the mass urbanisation of the poor. Unlike previous urbanisations, this form has been decoupled from industrialisation. Instead, in a condition in which the US Central Intelligence Agency (2002) reports that a full third of the world’s workforce was unemployed in the 1990s, a massive informal economy has developed that does not create jobs but, rather, subdivides existing opportunities (Davis, 2006: 199).

The nexus of these developments is the political dilemmas provided by illegal immigration. The central geographical centres of the Western world – Europe, North America and Australasia – are increasingly beset by difficulties associated with illegal immigration. Europe has inadvertently encouraged migration as the creation of the European Union, and in particular the admission of poorer Eastern European states, has allowed for the free movement of labour across the continent. Moreover, the development of massive urban slums along the North-Western coast line of Africa has made (illegal) immigration into Southern Europe an increasingly appealing prospect.

North America, too, faces a longstanding battle to define who has the rights to citizenship as illegal immigrants attempt to enter the ‘land of the free’ from Central America and the Caribbean. These ‘aliens’ have become an established sector of the American population, blending in with a healthy legal immigrant population. Indeed, alien labour forms the backdrop of the United States economy as it supplies domestic labour at Third World rates, allowing the US agricultural industry[10] to compete globally. Alien labour also proliferates through the low-skilled service industry.

Australasia, particularly Australia but also New Zealand[11], is beginning to experience its own issues with illegal migration. Australia, certainly since the Second World War, has benefited from large immigrant populations from the Mediterranean and Europe. Increasingly, however, immigrants have attempted to illegally enter Australia from South-Eastern Asia, in particular from Indonesia. Making the treacherous open ocean journey, these ‘boat people’ have created consideration political consternation in Australia as they were first tragically turned away, and then with a change of government, ushered to off-shore islands for ‘processing’ that has been of a troublingly totalitarian variety.

With the dilemmas of illegal immigration, as the Third World comes to the West, the contradictions of capitalism and surplus labour become more apparent. Add to this the cultural anxiety which comes with the obdurate presence of the Other and illegal immigration becomes the hotspot for the disavowed foundations of capitalism – surplus labour – to meet their maker. How this might occur will be the focus of the latter sections of the thesis. For now, however, it is enough to establish that capitalism requires a surplus of labour which is, however, excluded both socially and economically. This analysis suggests that material deprivation is not an innocent consequence of the capitalist empire but an intrinsic characteristic of that empire.

At this point in our introductory treatise, I have established the problem to which this thesis is directed, that of the unsustainability of the global economy and the existence of a materially subjugated surplus of labour. Moreover, I have established two limitations upon the capacity of capital to respond to this problematic. The scale of economic activity as determined by population and economic growth is causing unsustainable pressure upon the environment and produces an external limit to the expansion of capital. In terms of poverty, capital requires an excess of partially excluded labour in order to function efficiently. As such, under the reign of global capitalism, the living standards of the poorest residents of the planet cannot be meaningfully increased because of both environmental restrictions and the nature of the wage-labour system – ergo, poverty and climate change cannot be solved within capitalism. To this end surplus labour, and the economic growth which is the central cause of environmental degradation, are constitutive elements of capitalism. For this reason, any attempt to seriously respond to the challenge of global sustainability must begin to think beyond the horizon of capital. This may not be a utopian society but it does require a utopian demand for change.

Liberal capitalism is unable to conceive of either sense of utopia. Instead, pragmatic and incremental solutions to problems which are beyond partial measures are in vogue. Emblematic here is Singer’s position towards to charity: if you have money to spend on things that you do not strictly require and this money can help others in need, then you are morally obligated to do so. Such solutions may have a positive effect upon the lives of many, as would the development of infrastructure and educational capabilities in the poorer regions of the world. Undoubtedly, for the global economy to operate sustainably within the limitations of the planet, new forms of technology are required if large portions of humanity are going to rise out of the most extreme poverty. Furthermore, if change is to occur, then a radically different attitude to the right to consume and globally equality is required, as Singer advocates. We should not stop recycling because it is not the ultimate cure, although we would do well to understand the ideological side effects of this behaviour[12]. Moreover, reductions in population growth are perhaps the most straight-forward solution to this problematic. Ultimately, however, what is foreclosed by these pragmatic approaches is a consideration of the interconnectedness of politics and economy. As Eagleton suggests in this vein, today it is “hard nosed pragmatists who are the dewy-eyed dreamers, not the wild-haired leftists. They are really just sentimentalists of the status quo” (Eagleton, 2003: 180).

Nonetheless, when it comes to building a just society, change will be material, patient and pragmatic: there is no utopian wand that can renew the world in a week. The problem is not with the solutions, it is with the horizon under which they have arisen, a horizon which means these solutions cannot effect changes of the scale required. It is feasible, for instance, that malaria could be wiped out in developing nations, saving millions of lives. The tragedy, however, is that we are unlikely to be able to support these lives. The ultimate inconvenient truth is that malaria, AIDS and similar plagues upon humanity actually help to manage the global scale of the economy. Ending these diseases would only add to the already bulging surplus of humanity currently suffering on this earth. In facing up to these glum truths about the limitations of the capitalist form of political economy, it is apparent that if we are to continue to have a sense of ourselves as ‘good’ animals, then a move beyond capital is necessary[13].

Politics and the Political

In this thesis, I shall argue that what is required today is a return to history through a fundamental questioning of the horizon of global capitalism and a consideration of the political foundations of politics. This call does not arise abstractly but, rather, from the circumstances in which we find ourselves. It is largely because our current conceptions of the material contradictions facing humanity are inadequate that we simply have no way of responding adequately to the challenges of the global economy within the horizon set by that economy. It is this very impossibility of action which urges us to imagine a new world. This thesis resolves itself to consider the circumstances under which a new world might not only be imagined but that might come into being through a rehabilitation of the disavowed political dimension of global capitalism – that is, surplus labour.

The task of this thesis is not to take issue with the science of global sustainability, nor to construct more feasible policy responses. This is not a ‘How to improve the world one day at a time’ style guide. Instead, our task is to examine how, or rather what, it means to respond to the question of global sustainability under the reign of 21^st century capitalism. My response begins with a number of assumptions. The first is that problems associated with the creation of a genuinely just and reproducible global economy are real and worth responding to. Secondly, as established above, there is no possible solution within capitalism. Instead, the problems to which we respond, in particular environmental degradation and poverty, are constitutive of capitalism. On the other hand, if our response must be other than capitalism, the Left is bereft of ideas: Margaret Thatcher was right, there is no alternative. We cannot innocently reoccupy an old-style essentialism that once characterised Leftist radicalism, nor rely on either the administrative approach that characterises Leftist politics today, as typified by the now out of fashion ‘Third way’.

This thesis will bring back the proper dimension of political economy but not in the sense of any alternative empirical proposal. As such, in rejecting the pragmatism of the likes of Sachs and Singer, we have converted a practical and material problem into a theoretical one. The exigencies of natural science are replaced by the troubles of Western Marxism. What we need now is not a rush to activity, frantically attempting to save the hand that holds us down but, rather, a fundamental reconsideration of our horizon and the opportunities for radical action within it. This thesis seeks to identify a new way of thinking about these problems through a turn to theory. We do not use theory here in a sense divorced from materiality but, rather like Marx, as a political force in itself (Eagleton, 1997: 49). This diagnosis, in turn, will generate the possibilities of different responses quite opposed to those suggested by Sachs, Singer and other such thinkers. It is, in a sense, the return of the repressed of capitalism; the return of political economy.

Returning to Marxism

Today, a restoration of the dimension of history is required to de-naturalise capitalism and its political supplement, liberal democracy. Despite the increasingly apparent material contractions of global capitalism, as well as the breakdown of scarcity through the digitalisation of intellectual private property and the destabilising of existing forms of political authority, the political Left remains impotent. At best, it offers a softening of the injustices of capitalism. If ‘What is to be done?’ was the proto-typical Leftist question, at least for those able to bear the presence of Lenin (see Žižek, 2002b), today those who cannot bear such a presence appear to be reduced to asking ‘How can we help?’

The 20^th century witnessed, first, the theoretical defeat of Marxism, as capitalism continued to flourish, and then its political fall as many actually-existing socialist movements collapsed at the end of the century. This defeat saw the development of a hegemonic movement that focused on culture and language, rather than the economy, seeking at first to expand Marxism’s explanatory appeal but ending up with the dismissal of the idea of emancipation entirely.

In its normative idiom, Marxism expresses a concern for the dispossessed and wretched of this earth. Moreover, it provides a critical explanation of the cause of this suffering beyond mere aberration, meta-physical theism, or personal failings. For this reason, in responding to the plight of those whose labour power is structurally excluded and to the need for an environmentally sustainable form of economy, it is to Marxist discourse that I turn. Marxism, however, as a political cause well divorced from Marx himself[14], has largely been defeated as a political movement. Moreover, Marxist thought has been threatened and over-run by an ontology which suggests that language – the system of signifiers – mediates our access to ‘reality’. Indeed, this reality comes to be constituted in language itself such that the status of the ‘referent’ outside of language becomes a point of debate.

Beyond mere academic quibbling, this move has had overwhelming consequences for Marxism and politics in regards to the social conditions of the dispossessed. If language is differentially referential – it is not tied to an anchor which would fix meaning in some transcendental sense – then the range of possible explanations of our social world change. No longer can we rely upon descriptions of political performance which depend upon essentialist or deterministic readings of causality, at least in the same innocent sense in which they were once deployed. If the determinism evident in the historical materialist conception of the predestined progress of the mode of production is no longer valid, it has been unclear what would take its place both in regards to the description of the economy and the prescription of what would follow (including both the mode of transition from capitalism and the form of society to follow).

Moreover, as global capitalism spread, becoming the unremarked upon background of all social life, totalising expressions became unnecessary as capital filled the (disavowed) place of meta-physical determinism. In a world in which the catch-cry of rebellious youth remains ‘whatever’, the only essentialism required is the assumed solidity of that which appears to exist. For those who cannot find certainty in this ignorance, it is religion rather than political essentialism that often provides the necessary suture. Moreover, if morality is not held absolutely, then the door to relativity is ominously held open. Without a transcendental signifier that provided the basis for normativity, there has appeared to be little reason for anything other than an nihilistic ethics of contingency or a position of administrative accommodation. Western Marxism has became a search for an alternative foundation or a reading of foundationalism that took into account the ontological primacy of the signifier[15]. With this turn, however, came postmodernity and an eventual celebration of the very ethical contingency the cultural rethinking of Marxism had sought to avoid.

The problem of Marxism, as Australian social theorist Matthew Sharpe (2004: 11) suggests, involves an interaction between a prescriptive and descriptive element. Western Marxism, apropos critical theory, has been largely formulated as an attempt to understand both the continuation and expansion of global capitalism and the failure of states that had been orientated by reference to Marxism. In this sense, Western Marxism turned to culture and readings of culture that were being inspired by the turn to language within social theory. In doing so, however, Sharpe suggests that the Critical-Western reading of Marxism has devolved into ‘total critique’ by which Marxism has come to understand capitalism in such a way that any possibility for action is dismissed (ibid.: 12). As part of this process, the political, and prescriptive element of Marxism has been largely abandoned. Without a political home to return to, ‘Marxism after the signifier’ has become decidedly impotent, offering little more than a continual critique of capitalism with only an assumed sense of ethics and politics. If Marxism opposes capitalism on behalf of the worker, without the transcendental anchor provided by historical materialism, both the ethical basis upon which it does so and the political formation which would serve its demands, are unclear.

In response to the disappointments of Marxism the Left has been split – in terms of academia, of politics and ideology – between either the quest for a non-political economy which relies upon administrated devices which are assumed to be neutral (Sachs being the primary embodiment of this position) or a withdrawal from the field of the productive economy altogether, as has been characterised by theoretical concerns with postmodernity. At best, this latter form of political thought remains within the realm of politics as is the case in some of the more critical forms of late modernity. At worst, the withdrawal from the economy leads only to an uncritical form of cultural studies that refuses to come to any evaluative stance on matters of political economy, least it be accused of being universalist in its aspirations. Postmodernity may display a sense of ethics but it is far divorced from the feeble demands of the hungry. It is as if, without Marxism, politics and economy can no longer be held together at the same time; as if there exists an impossible element whose absent presence prevents a fusion[16].

If the Left is to begin to respond to the task of reacting to the contradictions of the global economy then it must begin to return to the question of economy and Marxism. It cannot return innocently, however. Past alternative essentialist attempts to grasp the ‘Truth’ that were based around a utopian fantasy – communist, socialist, and fascist – have resulted in deplorable exclusionary violence in the name of political purity; a violence arguably worse than that experienced today in global capitalism.

Nonetheless, as Žižek has come to argue, the disavowal of violence is part of the rejection of radical politics itself (Žižek, 2008b). We are no longer willing to get our hands dirty he suggests, refusing to acknowledge that political change itself is a form of violence. Emblematic of this failure is the sanitised protests of the ‘Red Shirts’ in Thailand during 2010. Protesting outside the office of the Prime Minister, the Red Shirts organised themselves to ‘donate’ blood in medical tents before tipping this blood on the steps of the building (Powell, 2010). Such an act was supposed to symbolise the protestors willingness to spill their own blood but inadvertently represents our apparently shared unwillingness to engage in political violence today. Whether the spontaneous spilling of blood would have been beneficial to their particular cause is a moot point – their protest instead stands as an example of political practice today.

As a reaction to the failure of Marxism, the Left has become dominated by a re-reading of Marxism which has sought both to avoid these excesses and restore its explanatory insights in light of the persistence of capitalism. It is in this context that the turn to culture and eventually the question of language has occurred. This integration of Marxism and continental philosophy has led to some interesting theoretical reflections but also to a poverty of politics. Most particularly, it has changed our understanding of what it means to do politics. The move has turned upon a philosophical reflection upon the ‘politics of the political’(see Daly, 2009) rather than any direct intervention on the streets. This loss has come through a turn to culture, rather than the economy, as an explanatory force. Ultimately, it has led to the primacy of the signifier and the postmodern turn. What began as an innocent attempt to rethink Marxism and ended up with the politics of Warhol has meant that both the essentialism of the Marxist class narrative, along with its offer of emancipation, have come to be no longer viable. Lessons were learned but the focus on the particularity of cultural expression is embarrassingly inappropriate in an era of the ‘Star Wars’ defence system, mass famine, and apparent allure of Rodeo drive.

The wilting of the Marxist influence has left capitalism as the only viable form, and interpretation, of political economy. As a consequence of critique of the essentialist leanings of traditional Marxism, the Left has withdrawn from the economic altogether as if the only way one could conceive of economic analysis was through an essentialist lens. Moreover, without the political essentialism that characterised the Marxist project, the idea of Left emancipatory politics has become homeless. Those who still cling to such a mode of analysis ideal appear as either sad veterans unable to keep up with the times or idealistic lunatics.

Although not articulated in these terms, a number of theorists have attempted, against the grain of postmodern plurality, to reconsider the prospects of universality and Truth in relation to Marxism after the turn to language. The most seminal of these attempts stems from Ernesto Laclau, initially in conjunction with Chantal Mouffe. In their breakthrough text Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), Laclau and Mouffe attempt to re-read Marxism and socialism ‘beyond the positivity of the social’ and the turn to language. Here all links to essentialism are dropped – except the primacy of language – as Marxism becomes little more than an interpretative tradition. Nonetheless, by returning to the question of universality in response to the particularism of cultural identity politics, Laclau and Mouffe’s work remains a decisive theoretical event.

This new, post-Marxist, horizon has come at a cost, however, as the materialist politics of class struggle were dropped in favour of the contingency of hegemony and the battle to hold the empty place of the democratic signifier. Whilst Laclau and Mouffe’s work proved to be a significant advance over previous forms of Marxism because of their restoration of the concept of universality[17], it also banished both the question of materialism and class struggle in favour of contingency and democracy. Whilst the title of the text suggested a revival of socialism, it was democracy that held the transcendental position for Laclau and Mouffe[18].

This thesis builds on the same question as that which troubled Laclau and Mouffe: the prospects for Marxism after the turn to language. In a sense[19], this thesis attempts to rework Laclau and Mouffe’s project in light of the material contradictions of capitalism. Here, in responding to the economic problematic mapped out thus far, the thesis has cause to diverge from Laclau and Mouffe’s project in a number of important respects.

First, it turns to psychoanalysis as an explanatory device, arguing that Laclau’s discourse theory does not adequately explain the fixity of language. By reference to psychoanalysis – embodying the discursive turn as being an effect of symbolic castration rather than of differential contingency – and, in particular, the categories of jouissance and the Real, we are better positioned to understand the appeal of capitalism and character of the difficulties associated with bringing about a fatal disruption to its operation. Moreover, I seek to return to the matter of political economy and the question of class struggle. This turn is entirely situated by the positioning of the thesis as a response to contradictions in the global economy; in order to contend with these issues, we must consider the nature of exploitation and the structure of the economy.

The return to materialism and to class struggle in Marxism is informed by Žižek’s reading of psychoanalysis, rather than Laclau. This response – as will evolve from my construction of Žižek’s work throughout the project – is not prescriptive but, rather, challenges our conception of the liberal politics that might be considered to be an adequate response to the challenge of global sustainability. What is required is a restoration of the critical and emancipatory edge of Marxist theory, along with a rethinking of the notion of universality. It is psychoanalysis which has been able to get closest to achieving this task, particularly when psychoanalysis is viewed through a Žižekian lens.

Adopting Žižek’s work in critique of global capitalism and the discourse of the Millennium Goals has not been a straightforward decision. Žižek embodies many of the difficulties associated with both Marxism and postmodernity. That said, salient in this regard is his avoidance of the positivism associated with the likes of Sachs, and his refusal to implicitly accept the horizon provided by capitalism and liberal democracy is highly productive for my purposes. Instead, at a time in which humanity is plagued by horrific problems to which capitalism has but limited responses, Žižek asks that we risk a withdrawal from activity into a theoretical rethinking of our horizon. In this sense, his work appears to fit in the same category as those readings of Western Marxism which have sought to reengage the descriptive dimension of Marxism without reference to a prescriptive politics. Indeed, this is the central critique of Žižek’s work – that he produces a reading of capitalism and politics which, although intriguing, leads to a political deadlock and ultimate conservatism (Robinson & Tormey, 2005: 102).

Whilst this criticism has a certain validity – Žižek offers nothing like a restored sense of normativity or party politics that would revive the saliency of Marxist politics – his work rethinks the entirely of what it means to practice Marxist politics in the 21^st Century. Not only does Žižek’s reject both past Leftist essentialist positions and the contemporary ethics of contingency associated with the likes of Derrida and Laclau but he refuses to posit any substantive alternative. Although his critics argue that Žižek is thereby not far divorced from conservativism – acknowledging the irretractability of the symptoms of capital with positing any alternative – Žižek comes to argue that the shape of his (radical) politics is an historically appropriate response to the deadlock that characterises global capitalism. 

In taking this position, Žižek’s commitment to Lacanian theory defines his politics. Psychoanalysis, first through Freud and then Lacan, has been a major influence in the turn to culture and language which has redefined Marxism and the Left. In doing so, it has come to represent the difficulties with this turn; whilst the Lacanian interpretation of Marxism has reinvented the meaning of epistemological validity within that field, no further sense of politics has developed.

In an associated manner psychoanalytic discussion has been animated by discussion around the collective ethics and/or politics (Bellamy, 1993, Daly, 1999, Glynos, 2001b, Homer, 1996, Robinson and Tormey, 2005, 2006, Stavrakakis, 1999, 2007, Zupančič, 2000). Whilst these discussions have led to several philosophical advances in politics, or what British political theorist Glyn Daly (2009) calls the ‘politics of the political’, no stable political frontier has emerged. Moreover, Žižek’s Lacanian reading of the political rejects any possibility of advancing a Lacanian ideal of shared social life; such an ideal stands in contradistinction to Lacan’s own work on ethics.

Instead, what Žižek’s work offers – through a combination of Lacan, Marx, and German Idealism – is a critical consideration of the political within 21^st century capitalism. Nonetheless, Žižek’s work does not lend itself to a singular approach. Instead it produces a number of strategic alternatives. It does so in relation to a singular conception of ontology based around the operation of the Lacanian Real. It is these alternatives that are the ultimate subject of this thesis, as I come to consider the possibility of a radical Leftist response to the contradictions of the global economy from within Žižek’s work.

Yet, although there are no readily apparent substantive modes of political that stem from Žižek’s work, this does not mean his work is impotent or conservative. Instead, through a strategic approach which seeks to unveil the disavowed foundations of global capitalism – most notably surplus labour – and hold this point in tension with the ideology which excludes it, Žižek’s approach suggests a possible approach to disrupting the progress of capitalism. This disruption is not merely critical or negative, although it does not seek to produce an alternative horizon for shared social life. Instead, by reference to the inherent impossibilities within global capitalism itself, the question of a utopian imaginary – in particular around what Žižek’s calls the ‘communist hypothesis’ – is rejuvenated. The utopia of the communist hypothesis is not a fantasmatic utopia but, rather, the utopian urge that occurs when we are forced to reimagine a new way of being, as has been suggested by literary theorist, Fredric Jameson (2005, 2009). That is, if capitalism is unable to integrate surplus labour within its horizon, nor reduce the scale of economic activity, our response should not be to formally construct new modes of being but, rather, to insist on the embodied presence of this impossibility in order to force open space for a reinvention of shared social life.

The question of this thesis, therefore, can be represented as being; ‘After the turn to language, in what way can Marxist theory respond to the material deprivations and contradictions which are symptomatic of global capitalism?’ In responding to this question, I shall primarily consider the work of Žižek as a post-Marxist, discussing the role of psychoanalysis in the political through an understanding of Lacanian ethics and its translation in political practice. Psychoanalysis shall be analysed as a form of politics, giving consideration to the possibilities of Leftist political practice in the 21^st century.

Ultimately, this thesis presents Žižek’s work as a response to the contradictions of global capitalism. In response to the pragmatism of the likes of Sachs, of Laclau’s post-Marxism, and of critics who have argued that Žižek’s unwillingness or inability to reimagine shared social life outside of capitalism makes his work conservative, I argue that Žižek provides a particularly effective form of politics at this point in history. These politics are formed by a dialectical strategic approach which insists upon the intrusion of the disavowed foundations of global capitalism, as well as a utopian energy for change embodied by the communist hypothesis. This reading of Žižek’s work may not satisfy his critics but it may just provide the most hope for the future and the hungry of this world.

The Shape of Things to Come

This task begins with a reconsideration of the losses and gains in Marxism ‘after the signifier’. In Chapter Two I argue that the move which began with a consideration of culture as a supplement to the determinism of Marx’s conception of the economy has ended with a brand of postmodernity which has lost its critical and emancipatory drive. The critique of essentialism and the universality of the grand narrative has been necessary but has robbed Marxism of its ability to respond to the contradictions of the global economy. Conversely, towards the end of the 20^th century, new thinking emerged around the prospect of an anti-foundationalist politics which was not reduced to the particular. Most prominently, Ernesto Laclau (in initial association with Chantal Mouffe) produced a re-reading of Marxism through the lens of discourse theory. Laclau’s post-Marxism has become a hegemonic point of analysis, in particular around his conception of radical democracy. Yet, whilst Laclau has been able to productively respond to the problem of Marxist essentialism after the turn to language, this has come at the cost of materialism and of class struggle as the kernel of the economy.

In Chapter Three, I will consider how these elements might be restored through a discussion of the foundations of Lacanian psychoanalysis; the dialectics of lack and excess in terms of the Real and jouissance. The purpose of this chapter is to consider the manner in which Lacanian psychoanalysis has produced a response to the turn to language and the challenge of postmodernity. It ends with a discussion of the confluence between psychoanalysis and Marxism in the homology Lacan identified between surplus-jouissance and surplus-value. Such a homology reveals how Lacanian theory constructs the inadequacies of the traditional Marxist approach to politics yet is unable to produce a politics of its own.

Following the overt rejection of Marxist essentialism, in Chapter Four I examine psychoanalytic approaches to politics. This exploration begins with a critique of psychoanalysis and ethics, from Freud’s Civilisation and its Discontents through to the changes in Lacan’s conception of an ethical approach. Through this journey, which includes a discussion of Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič’s re-reading of the Kantian categorical imperative, I come to suggest that psychoanalytic ethics falls prey to many of the dilemmas of the practice of postmodern political practice, offering little hope for the hungry and in apparent contradiction with the positivist vision of Marxist communism.

Like Marxism, however, psychoanalysis cannot simply be dismissed. In Chapter Five I further examine the possibilities of psychoanalytic practice through a discussion of the relationship between (psychoanalytic) ethics and politics. This chapter moves through the work of Greek political theorist Yannis Stavrakakis on radical democracy, rejecting it on the basis that it is not only a mis-reading of Lacanian theory but also over-privileges democracy and ethics. Ultimately psychoanalytic politics in this form does not provide a cogent response to capitalism because it does not consider the shape of the economy itself.

This is the task set in Chapter Six. Here, I posit that capitalism operates as a form of meta-hegemony, determining in advance the political battles against which Laclau’s notion of hegemony is set. Because of this dominance, any possible political activity within the horizon of capitalism can only reproduce that horizon. For this reason, a political response to the contradictions of global capitalism should not posit an alternative mode of production but instead reveal the impossibilities within the current mode. Through a discussion of the ‘impossibility of class struggle’, and the alternatives posited by both Yahya Madra and Ceren Özselcuk, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, I come to suggest that it is the extimate presence of surplus labour which holds the key to disrupting capitalism and producing undetermined political spaces.

In Chapter Seven I consider the various political positions that have emerged through Žižek’s work. These are presented not in terms of chronological development but, rather, as a number of strategic positions each of which has the potential to destabilise existing ideological formations. Critically considering each of these strategies in terms of their capacities to offer a response to the challenge of surplus labour – including ‘the act’, ‘subtractive politics’ and the ‘practice of concrete universality’ – I suggest that it is the practice of concrete universality which proves the most fertile. This strategy – as part of Žižek’s re-reading of universality – is best able to identify and mobilise the disavowed foundation around which global capitalism is founded. Most notably, it is able to restore the dimension of the political and class struggle.

The practice of concrete universality, however, remains a negative position, one that is limited to critique. Chapter Eight expands upon such a strategy by reference to Žižek’s recent reference to Alain Badiou’s notion of a ‘communist hypothesis’(see Badiou, 2008) , along with the utopian demand inherent in this reference. Proceeding through Jameson’s reading of utopia, Žižek’s notion of the communist hypothesis, combined with the practice of concrete universality in class struggle, appears the most productive in the face of the dominance of capitalism. Most importantly it appears to be a feasible and industrious response to the pressing contradictions of the global economy. The question remains, however, of the shape of the future and the relationship between Marxism and political approaches which take reference from the negative ontology which stems from the turn to language.

[2] Unsurprisingly, little progress has been made towards these goals (see United Nations, 2009a)

[3] We can note that Malthus work – and much of that of his time – does not fit under the normative impulse that constitutes this thesis; that we should be concerned with the plight of the hungry.

[4] As British literary theorist Terry Eagleton (2003: 42) reminds us, the pre-Marxist conception of the proletariat was those who were too poor to own property so served the state by way of producing children to add to the labour force; the proletariat are “those who have nothing to give but their bodies”. 

[5]To quote Sachs; ‘Note that the focus on technological improvements is starkly different from the failed Marxist notion that the rich are rich because they successfully exploit the poor. If the rich get rich only because the poor get exploited, then world income would be roughly constant, and all of the economic action would be about the distribution of a given level of economic output. That, indeed, is what Marx had in mind” (2008: 206).

[6] Indeed, Sachs appears entirely reluctant to evoke Marx’s name. He describes Charles Dickens and Friedrich Engels as having best represented the harshness of the first century of industrialisation (Sachs, 2008: 4).

[7] Neo-liberalism has often become the target of otherwise anti-capitalist critique. Certainly, other, more socially democratic forms of capitalism, may domestically mediate more effectively against some of the more damaging elements of capitalism. In terms of global issues, however, such as poverty or climate change, there is little difference between modalities of capitalism.

[8] At the same time, the ‘Green Revolution’ brought technological advances to the third world. Whilst this was ideologically conceived as a means of creating more food, the ultimate result was the creation of a global food system, situating food as a global commodity and securing a food supply for the United States (Ross, 1998:139).

[9] Moreover, the ultimate effects of what the IMF called ‘the great recession’ upon these developing nations are still to be processed

[10] Substantive government subsidies also supplement the supply of cheap labour.

[11] New Zealand, in particular in its largest city of Auckland, has the biggest Polynesian population in the world. This population developed from government policy in the 1950s which strongly encouraged the importation of cheap Pacific Island labour to supplement New Zealand’s almost fully employed workforce. When the economy started to struggle, however, their labour was no longer in supply and a larger underclass began to develop. This underclass remains today although Polynesian culture is well integrated within mainstream urban society.

[12] We might, for example, conceive recycling as the ultimate capitalist fantasty, an attempt to reintegrate its own remainder.

[13] What remains unclear is the kind of mode of production which would not reproduce these difficulties. We shall respond to this omission throughout the thesis.

[14]This is not to suggest that there is a ‘pure’ Marx that we might be able to return to.

[15] As we shall expand upon in the following chapter, the relationship between Marxism and normativity is a difficult one. Whilst Marx held to a deterministic sense of history which assured a communist future, he regarded morality to be little more than an element of the ruling ideology. Nonetheless, subsequent applications of Marxism have held to a more morally absolute interpretation of communism.

[16] As we shall see later, Žižek labels this impossibility ‘class struggle’.

[17] Laclau and Mouffe read the universal not as an a priori essentialism but, rather, an empty placeholder to be held by any number of competing particular elements in the battle for hegemony. The universal is thus necessary but impossible. This debate shall be taken in significant detail in Chapter Two.

[18] As we shall consider in Chapter Four, Laclau himself has diverged from radical democracy in his most recent work, in favour of populism.

[19] Although with a severe sense of humility in regards to the differing scale of the projects.