As progressives are moving further and further to the left, some are not stopping at socialism or even at the identity politics of post-Marxism. Some are embracing old-fashioned Cold-War-era, Soviet-style communism.
Slovenian thinker Slavoj Žižek is such a communist. He is described as an author of “sheer brilliance” with a big following in Western academic circles. The Chronicle of Higher Education described him as “the Elvis of cultural theory.” The New Republic calls him “the most dangerous philosopher in the West.” He writes in English and has nearly 50 titles on his Amazon author page.
Christian Alejandro Gonzalez reviews his new book The Courage of Hopelessness in National Review. The review, entitled Slavoj Žižek, Fashionable Revolutionary, shows how the author makes the case that virtually all problems can be blamed on global capitalism:
Like much of Žižek’s work, The Courage of Hopelessness seeks above all to convince us that the neoliberal world order is fatally deficient. In Žižek’s view it allows “politicians, bankers, and managers” to “realize their greed” by stashing their ill-earned wealth in offshore tax havens. It creates false scarcity and exacerbates already-savage income inequalities. It destabilizes the lives of working people. It establishes sweatshops (in Asia), resuscitates slavery (in Qatar), and necessitates oppressive policies of social control. The way to overcome these troubles, Žižek argues, is by reinvigorating the politics of the radical left, unabashedly embracing Communism, and confronting the behemoth of the capitalist economy.
And Žižek does not shrink from the Marxist-Leninist prescription for revolutionary violence.
“Our task today,” Žižek writes in that essay, “is to reinvent emancipatory terror.” One cannot achieve true liberation without wanton violence, because “as Saint-Just put it succinctly: ‘That which produces the general good is always terrible.’” When Žižek elaborates on this idea his language is uncharacteristically lucid. He believes there come points in human history (France 1789, Russia 1917) when the masses awaken to their status as brutalized and degraded creatures, when extraordinary leaders (Robespierre, Lenin) recognize the critical importance of the times and take charge of said masses, when there arises an opportunity, at last, to shatter the systems that oppress us (feudalism, capitalism), and in those moments — in thoseprecise moments — we must decide: Should we embrace “revolutionary-democratic terror?”
Žižek argues that we should, and that we must: During the moment of revolutionary fervor, passivity is tantamount to complicity with the forces of reaction. Anyone who does not participate in the terror is fit for elimination. To create a better world, destroy capitalism, and bring about liberation, one should not be reluctant to employ pitiless methods of political action. Those unwilling to inflict slaughter on behalf of revolution are “sensitive liberals” who long for “revolutions which don’t smell of revolution.” Such people want freedom without violent struggle, and for Žižek such a position is morally bankrupt: One must accept terror “as a bitter truth to be fully endorsed.”
As Gonzalez observes, Žižek advocates “slaughter” to achieve utopia, even though he acknowledges–in perhaps a deviation from Marxist orthodoxy–that utopias are not really possible. Such cynicism renders his “emancipatory terror” even more abhorrent, since he knows that the end which justifies his “pitiless” means is an illusion.
Read the review in its entirety. And realize that the violence of the antifa movement, the violations of free speech and academic freedom on university campuses, the use of coercion and physical intimidation on the left are not aberrations or lapses of the liberal ideal. They are a reversion to a revolutionary ethos that predates the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
After communism was toppled in Russia and Eastern Europe, including Slovenia, by a different kind of popular revolution, I went to our university library to browse through the academic journals to see how the Marxist scholars were taking it. The consensus was that the collapse of the Soviet Union was a good thing because its excesses brought communism into disrepute. Now, went the gist of their arguments, we can pursue communism on a purer level, as an ideal, without the embarrassing realities of gulags and mass executions.
But now we have Marxist scholars who are embracing the gulags and mass executions. With such hard-core true-believers, we can expect this sentiment to grow. With perhaps a new Cold War.
Photo of Slavoj Žižek on Russian Wikipedia: Автор Amrei-Marie [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], с Викисклада
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