Žižek on Wall Street
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.
