Class Struggle or Postmodernism? Repeat Lenin!

Review of “Revolution at the Gates”

Between Zizek’s eight-page introduction and his 144-page Afterword are the pages of Vladimir Lenin’s most important writings from 1917, the radical kernel from which the meaning of Zizek’s project is derived.

The situation that confronted Lenin and the Bolsheviks a hundred years ago, in which they are faced with a dilemma between political options that actually do nothing more than an attempt to reduce the working-class struggle to reform politics, is in fact the same situation that challenges the left of today: between postmodernism and liberal culturalism, the left is locked between these two dominant discourses which appears as the only opposed alternatives but really constitute as a strategy of the capitalist system. Instead of consenting to the prevailing choices, Lenin rejected and redefined the very meaning of these choices and opened the “third term” from which the working class can truly assert their struggle. This formula from Lenin's "What is to be done?" is the same formula Zizek resurrects, which is aimed to the contemporary opportunists and those who disguise themselves as Marxists. After the demise of the Socialist regimes in 1989, the Third Way discourse emerged in response to it. This theory insists that we have approached the "end of history and ideology" and, thus, the end of class struggle, and that the socialist imaginaries can no longer be pushed forward. No more ideologies; no more proletarians. Hence, the left is reduced in a dilemma: either to assert the old socialist ideology or to accept capitalism as "the only game in town." Those previous left who accepted the latter turned into conservative Third Way theorists, or what Zizek calls "the knaves"; the other reds who still assert their "progressiveness," are the so-called "fools", the partisans advancing postmodern political subjectivities – race, class, ethnicity, ecology, etc. Though the latter performs their particular resistances, they actually bear no threat to the whole capitalist system. Their critique of the system only strengthens its ruling discourse preached by the knaves. Hence, in reality, these two figures serve as supplements of the existing order.

In this post-political era of society, the sphere of the economy is depoliticized, naturalizing class antagonism, and translating it to tolerance of differences instead, the ethical gesture of respecting the right of others to their specific enjoyments. Other domains formerly considered as non-political become politicized. Analysis shifted from class politics to identity politics; struggles changed from ideological to cultural. However, in the series of particular contradictions, class antagonism remains as the structuring principle that allows other series of struggles to be articulated. It is not one among the chain of equivalences. All other particular struggles in the series will always refer to class. These are the partial resistances that capitalism tolerates. The real contradiction is always located through the horizon of class which carries the real threat to the capitalist system.

This celebrated “end of history and ideology” and the emergence of contingent postpolitics are what Zizek asserts as leading to the “prohibition on thinking” or “Denkverbot”, that any attempt to overcome the existing order will only let the things end up worse and create a new Gulag. One should challenge this by inverting Wittgenstein from “What one cannot speak about, thereof one cannot remain silent” to “what one should not speak about, thereof, one cannot remain silent.”

Instead of giving in to the temptation of false choices which appears as a deadlock between seemingly antagonistic options, in order to formulate a real political alternative, it is necessary to “think outside the box,” to find the “third element,” to take the most radical gesture of authentic Act, i.e. repeat Lenin’s gesture of redefining the very field through which perceived choices are grounded. It is this spirit of Lenin which continues to speak to the left today, which when performed will challenge the established social relations and disturb the phantasmic core, the doxa of the whole capitalist order. The terrain for class struggle remains open to assert its universality.

Review of “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed”

Jared Diamond’s work deals with how man’s intrusion in the environment caused some past civilizations to fall into ruin that used to be flourishing and the impending collapse of today’s societies. The book intends to remind its readers to learn from history to minimize the potential for catastrophic failure both in the developing and developed countries.

Diamond relies on five assumptions when he discusses the collapse of societies: societies fail to survive if they damage their environment, if they are adversely affected by climate change, if they have hostile neighbors, if their support by trade partners declines, and if they fail to respond to its environmental problems. The last one is decisive to all failures. Failures may be on the form of: failure to anticipate or to perceive a problem, failure to attempt to solve it, and failure to succeed in problem-solving.

The idea of “collapse” is initially tracked through a number of historical case studies which include the failed Polynesian cultures on Easter Island and in the southwest Pacific, the Anasazi and Mayan civilizations in the Americas, and the Viking colony on Greenland Norse. Besides attributing collapse to deforestation, resource exhaustion, climate changes, wars, Diamond includes in his analysis on the causality of the collapse of ancient societies the link between the environment and culture (e.g. Norse colony on Greenland). For him, societies’ cultural values can be catastrophic in the decision-making and can impede adaptation, thereby leading to extermination. By contrast, the New Guinea Highlands, Tikopia, and Japan during the Tokugawa period provide examples of premodern societies that avoided collapse and achieved environmental sustainability.

The next part is devoted to modern societies: the cases of Rwanda, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic, in contrast to the cases of China and Australia. The chapter on Rwanda focuses on the genocide of 1994 and offers an example of what can happen to a poorly governed society that is unable to resolve its population and environmental challenges. The chapter on Haiti and Dominican Republic examines a case where two distinct cultures and political entities, coexisting on the same place and facing similar environmental challenges, achieve different outcomes. Haiti’s future remains unpromising, whereas the Dominican Republic’s future is relatively promising.

Today’s rapid advancement of technology and information, the expansion of modernization, and the deepening globalization are producing its own contradictions – increasing deforestation and habitat destruction, disappearance of tropical rainforests, soil erosion, salinization, introduction of harmful species, etc. Diamond also notes other categories that add to the concern: global climate change, buildup of toxic chemicals in food, soil, and water; exhaustion of energy reserves; and full utilization of the earth’s photosynthetic capacity. And compounded with issues such as full utilization of the world’s fresh water supplies, overhunting and overfishing, the ballooning of population and the increased per capita impact of people, according to Diamond, the earth’s capacity in the coming decades may likely not be able to sustain the next generation.

Diamond neither discusses the limitations of global markets nor problematizes the question of capital accumulation by big corporations. In fact, he asserts that the dilemma can be overcome by privatizing resources and giving owners a long-term perspective. For him, big businesses are not at all bad; without them, the environment cannot be saved. Economy, which he notes with little importance, will explain many of the reasons people conduct themselves wastefully these days.

Diamond’s assumption in formulating his analyses for the contemporary society is the same as the supposition of the Third Way theoreticians such as Giddens: that we are now living in a “risk society”. The perceived consequences brought by environmental degradation are such examples of risks to which Giddens’s theory refers. One crucial feature is that these new threats are “manufactured risks”, meaning, they result from economic, technological and scientific interventions into nature, which disrupt natural processes that it is no longer possible to avoid the responsibility by letting nature itself find way to establish again its lost balance.

Today’s notions of ecological threat – from global warming, the hole in the ozone layer, to the accumulation of toxic chemicals in the food we eat – are, for the most part, directly invisible and undetectable without the diagnostic tools of science. They are, in fact, “low probability-high consequence” risks, meaning, no one knows how great the risks are; the probability of the global catastrophe is relatively small; however, if the catastrophe occur, it will really be terminal. Thus, they are not external risks like a huge comet falling on Earth but the unforeseen outcome of individuals’ technological endeavour to increase their productivity.

How are these environmental risks approach the reality of capitalism? The notion of “risk” indicates a precise domain in which these threats are generated: the domain of uncontrolled use of science and technology in the conditions of capitalism. The sample case of “risk” is that of a new technological invention put to use by private corporation without public democratic debate and control, then generating the threat of unforeseen catastrophic consequences. Is not this kind of risk rooted in the fact that the logic of market is driving private corporations to use technological innovations and simply expand their production without taking account of the effects of such activity on the environment, as well as the health of people itself?

The conclusion that can be drawn in the present global situation, in which private corporations outside public control are making decisions which can affect us all, is that the solution lies in a kind of socialization of the productive process. In this kind of society, global decisions about how to develop and use productive capacities at the disposal of society would somehow be made by the entire people affected by such decisions.