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Only Communism can save Liberal Democracy

Slavoj Zizek ABC 3 Oct 2011

1989 marked not only the defeat of the Communist State-Socialism, but also thedefeat of the Western Social Democracy.

Nowhere is the misery of today's Left more palpable than in its "principled" defenceof the Social-Democratic Welfare State: the idea is that, in the absence of a feasibleradical Leftist project, all that the Left can do is to bombard the state with demandsfor the expansion of the Welfare State, knowing well that the State will not be able todeliver.

This necessary disappointment serves as a reminder of the basic impotence of thesocial-democratic Left and thus push the people towards a new radical revolutionaryLeft.

Needless to say, such a politics of cynical "pedagogy" is destined to fail, since itfights a lost battle: in the present politico-ideological constellation, the reaction to theinability of the Welfare State to deliver will be Rightist populism. In order to avoid thisreaction, the Left will have to propose its own positive project beyond the confines ofthe Social-Democratic Welfare State.

This is why it is totally erroneous to pin our hopes on strong Nation-States, whichcan defend the acquisitions of the Welfare State, against trans-national bodies likethe European Union, which, so the story goes, serve as the instruments of the globalcapital to dismantle whatever remained of the Welfare State. From here, it is only ashort step to accept the "strategic alliance" with the nationalist Right worried about

the dilution of national identity in trans-national Europe.

(One of the crazy consequences of this stance is that some Leftists support theCzech liberal-conservative President Vaclav Klaus, a staunch Euro-sceptic: hisferocious anti-Communism and opposition to the "totalitarian" Welfare State isdismissed as a cunning strategy to render acceptable his anti-Europeanism ...)

So where does the Left stand today? Alain Badiou wonderfully characterized thepost-Socialist situation as "this troubled situation, in which we see Evil dancing onthe ruins of Evil": there is no question of any nostalgia, the Communist regimes were"evil" - the problem is that what replaced them is also "evil," albeit in a different way.

In what way?

Back in 1991, Badiou gave a more theoretical formulation to the old quip from thetimes of Really Existing Socialism about the difference between the democratic Westand the Communist East.

In the East, the public word of intellectuals is eagerly awaited and has a greatresonance, but they are prohibited to speak and write freely; while in the West, theycan say and write whatever they want, but their word is ignored by the wide public.

Badiou opposes the West and the East with regard to the different way the (rule ofthe) Law is located between the two extremes of State and philosophy (thinking).


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In the East, philosophy is asserted in its importance, but as a State-philosophy,directly subordinated to the State, so that there is no rule of Law: the reference tophilosophy justifies the State as working directly on behalf of the Truth of History,and this higher Truth allows it to dispense with the rule of Law and its formalfreedom.

In the West, the State is not legitimized by the higher Truth of History, but by

democratic elections guaranteed by the rule of Law, and the consequence is that theState as well as the public are indifferent to philosophy:

"The submission of politics to the theme of Law in parliamentary societies... leads tothe impossibility of discerning the philosopher from the sophist... Inversely, inbureaucratic societies it is impossible to distinguish the philosopher from thefunctionary or the policeman. In the last instance, philosophy is generally nothingother than the word of the tyrant."

In both cases, philosophy is denied its truth and autonomy because:

"the inherent adversaries of the identity of philosophy, the sophist and the tyrant, oreven the journalist and the policeman, declare themselves philosophers."

One should add here that Badiou in no way secretly or openly prefers the policeparty-State to the State of Law: he states that it is fully legitimate to prefer the Stateof Law to the police party-State; he draws here another key distinction:

"The trap would be to imagine that this preference, which concerns the objectivehistory of the State, is really a subjective political decision."

What he means by "subjective political decision" is the authentic collectiveengagement along the Communist lines: such an engagement is not "opposed" toparliamentary democracy, it simply moves at a radically different level - that is, in itpolitical engagement is not limited to the singular act of voting, but implies a muchmore radical continuous "fidelity" to a Cause, a patient collective "work of love."

Today, when the democratic honeymoon is definitely over, this lesson is more actualthan ever: what Badiou put in theoretical terms is confirmed by daily experience ofthe majority of ordinary people: the collapse of Communist regimes in 1989 was noEvent in the sense of a historical break, of giving birth to something New in thehistory of emancipation.

After this supposed break, things just returned to their capitalist normality, so that wehave the same passage from the enthusiasm of freedom to the rule of profit andegotism described already by Marx in his analysis of the French Revolution.

Exemplary here is the case of Vaclav Havel: his followers were shocked to learn thatthis highly ethical fighter for "living in truth" later engaged in shady business dealswith suspicious real estate companies dominated by the ex-members of theCommunist secret police.

And so, how naive did Timothy Garton Ash appear on his visit to Poland in 2009 to

mark the 20th anniversary of the fall of Communism: blind to the vulgar grey reality


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around him, he tried to convince the Poles that they should feel glorious, as if theirland is still the noble land of Solidarity.

The ruling ideology is, of course, well aware of this gap, and its reply is "maturity":one should get rid of utopian hopes which can only end up in totalitarianism andaccept the new capitalist reality. The tragedy is that some Leftists subscribe to thisjudgment.

Alain Badiou described three distinct ways for a revolutionary - or radicalemancipatory - movements to fail.

First, there is, of course, a direct defeat: one is simply crushed by the enemy forces.

Second, there is defeat in the victory itself: one wins over the enemy (temporarily, atleast) by way of taking over the main power-agenda of the enemy (the goal is simplyto seize state power, either in the parliamentary-democratic way or in a directidentification of the Party with the State).

On the top of these two versions, there is a third, perhaps most authentic, but alsomost terrifying, form of failure: guided by the correct instinct that every attempt toconsolidate the revolution into a form of State power represents a betrayal of therevolution, but unable to invent and impose on social reality a truly alternative socialorder, the revolutionary movement engages in a desperate strategy of protecting itspurity by the "ultra-leftist" resort to destructive terror.

Badiou aptly calls this last version the "sacrificial temptation of the void":

"One of the great Maoist slogans from the red years was 'Dare to fight, dare to win'.But we know that, if it is not easy to follow this slogan, if subjectivity is afraid not somuch to fight but to win, it is because struggle exposes it to a simple failure (theattack didn't succeed), while victory exposes it to the most fearsome form of failure:the awareness that one won in vain, that victory prepares repetition, restauration.That a revolution is never more than a between-two-States. It is from here that thesacrificial temptation of the void comes. The most fearsome enemy of the politics ofemancipation is not the repression by the established order. It is the interiority ofnihilism, and the cruelty without limits which can accompany its void."

What Badiou is effectively saying here is the exact opposite of Mao's "Dare to win!" -one should be afraid to win (to take power, to establish a new socio-political reality),

because the lesson of the twentieth century is that victory either ends in restoration(return to the logic of State power) or gets caught in the infernal cycle of self-destructive purification.

This is why Badiou proposes to replace purification with subtraction: instead of"winning" (taking over power) one maintains a distance towards state power, onecreates spaces subtracted from State. But does this not represent a kind of divisionof labour between the radical and the pragmatic Left?

Subtracting itself from State politics, the radical Left limits itself to assumingprincipled positions and bombarding the State with impossible demands, while the

pragmatic Left makes a pact with the devil in the sense of Peter Mandelson'sadmission that, when it comes to the economy, we are all Thatcherites.


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Is Communism then simply "impossible" in the sense that it cannot be stabilized intoa new order? Even Badiou presents the eternal "Idea of Communism" as somethingwhich returns again and again, from Spartacus and Thomas Munzer to RosaLuxemburg and the Maoist Cultural Revolution - in other words, as something thatfails again and again.

The term "impossible" should make us stop and think. Today, impossible and

possible are distributed in a strange way, both simultaneously exploding into anexcess.

On the one hand, in the domains of personal freedoms and scientific technology, theimpossible is more and more possible (or so we are told): "nothing is impossible."We can enjoy sex in all its perverse variations, entire archives of music, films and TVseries are available for download. There is even now the prospect of enhancing ourphysical and mental abilities, of manipulating our basic properties throughinterventions into genome, up to the tech-gnostic dream achieving immortality byway of fully transforming our identity into a software which can be downloaded fromone to another hardware ...

On the other hand, especially in the domain of socio-economic relations, our eraperceives itself as the era of maturity in which, with the collapse of Communiststates, humanity has abandoned the old millenarian utopian dreams and acceptedthe constraints of reality (namely, the capitalist socio-economic reality) with all itsimpossibilities.

And so, today we cannotengage in large collective acts (which necessarily end intotalitarian terror), cling to the old Welfare State (it makes you non-competitive andleads to economic crisis), isolate yourself from the global market, and so on, and soon.

It is crucial clearly to distinguish here between two impossibilities: the impossibility ofa social antagonism and the impossibility on which the predominant ideological fieldfocuses. Impossibility is here re-doubled, it serves as a mask of itself: the ideologicalfunction of the second impossibility is to obfuscate the real of the first impossibility.

Today, the ruling ideology endeavours to make us accept the "impossibility" of aradical change, of abolishing capitalism, of a democracy not constrained toparliamentary game, in order to render invisible the impossible/real of theantagonism which cuts across capitalist societies.

This real is impossible in the sense that it is the impossible of the existing socialorder - which, however, in no way implies that this real/impossible cannot be directlydealt with and radically transformed in a "crazy" act which changes the basic"transcendental" coordinates of a social field, an act which changes the verycoordinates of what is possible and thus retroactively creates its own conditions ofpossibility.

This is why Communism concerns the Real: to act as a Communist means tointervene into the real of the basic antagonism which underlies today's globalcapitalism.


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In authentic Marxism, totality is not an ideal, but a critical notion - to locate aphenomenon in its totality does not mean to see the hidden harmony of the Whole,but to include into a system all its "symptoms," antagonisms, inconsistencies, as itsintegral parts.

In this sense, liberalism and fundamentalism form a "totality": the opposition ofliberalism and fundamentalism is structured so that liberalism itself generates its

opposite. So what about the core values of liberalism: freedom, equality, fraternity?The paradox is that liberalism itself is not strong enough to save them against thefundamentalist onslaught.

Fundamentalism is a reaction - a false, mystifying, reaction, of course - against a realflaw of liberalism, and this is why it is again and again generated by liberalism. Leftto itself, liberalism will slowly undermine itself - the only thing that can save its core isa renewed Left.

In Western and Eastern Europe, there are signs of a long-term re-arrangement of thepolitical space. Until recently, the political space was dominated by two main parties

which addressed the entire electoral body: a Right-of-centre party (Christian-Democrat, or liberal-conservative) and a Left-of-centre party (socialist, social-democratic), with smaller parties addressing a narrow electorate (greens, liberals,etc.).

Now, there is progressively emerging one party which stands for global capitalism assuch, usually with relative tolerance towards abortion, gay rights, religious and ethnicminorities; opposing this party is a stronger and stronger anti-immigrant populistparty which, on its fringes, is accompanied by directly racist neo-Fascist groups.

The exemplary case is here Poland: after the disappearance of the ex-Communists,the main parties are the "anti-ideological" centrist liberal party of the Prime MinisterDonald Dusk, and the conservative Christian party of Kaczynski brothers.

Silvio Berlusconi in Italy is a proof that even this ultimate opposition is notinsurmountable: the same party, his Forza Italia, can be both the global-capitalist-party and integrate the populist anti-immigrant tendency.

In the de-politicized sphere of post-ideological administration, the only way tomobilize people is to awaken fear (from immigrants - that is, from the neighbour). Toquote Gaspar Tamas, we are thus again slowly approaching the situation in which

"there is no one between Tsar and Lenin" - in which the complex situation will bereduced to a simple basic choice: community or collective, Socialism orCommunism.

To put it in the well-known terms from 1968, in order for its key legacy to survive,liberalism needs the brotherly help of the radical Left.

The task is thus to remain faithful to what Badiou calls the eternal Idea ofCommunism: the egalitarian spirit alive for thousands of years in revolts and utopiandreams, in radical movements from Spartacus to Thomas Muntzer up to somereligions (Buddhism versus Hinduism, Daoism or Legalists versus Confucianism, and

so on).


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The problem is how to avoid the alternative of radical social explosions which end indefeat, unable to stabilize themselves in a new order, or of equality, but displaced toa domain outside social reality (in Buddhism we are all equal in nirvana).

It is here that the originality of the Western thought enters, in its three great historicalruptures: Greek philosophy breaking with the mythic universe; Christianity breakingwith the pagan universe; modern democracy breaking with traditional authority.

In all these cases, the egalitarian spirit is transposed into a - limited, but nonethelessactual - new positive order.

In short, the wager of the Western thought is that radical negativity (whose first andimmediate expression is egalitarian terror) is not condemned to remain a shortecstatic outburst after which things have to return to normal; on the contrary, radicalnegativity, this undermining of every traditional hierarchic order, can articulate itselfin a new positive order in which it acquires the stability of a new form of life.

This is the meaning of the Holy Spirit in Christianity: faith can not only be expressed

in, but exists as the collective of believers. This faith is in itself based on "terror"indicated by Christ's words that he brings sword, not peace, that whoever doesn'thate his father and mother is not his true follower - the content of this terror is therejection of all traditional hierarchic community ties, with the wager that anothercollective link is possible based on this terror, an egalitarian link of believersconnected by agape as political love.

Another example of such an egalitarian link based on terror is democracy itself. Oneshould follow Claude Lefort's description of democracy here: the democratic axiom isthat the place of power is empty, that there is no one who is directly qualified for thispost either by tradition, charisma, or his expert and leadership properties.

This is why, before democracy can enter the stage, terror has to do its work, foreverdissociating the place of power from any natural or directly qualified pretender: thegap between this place and those who temporarily occupy it should be maintained atany cost.

But we can well imagine a democratic procedure maintaining the same gap onaccount of the irreducible moment of contingency in every electoral result: far frombeing its limitation, the fact that the elections do not pretend to select the mostqualified person is what protects them from the totalitarian temptation - which is why,

as it was clear already to the Ancient Greeks, the most democratic form of selectingwho will rule us is by a lot.

That is to say, as Lefort has demonstrated, the achievement of democracy is to turnwhat is in traditional authoritarian power the moment of its greatest crisis, themoment of transition from one to another master when, for a moment, "the throne isempty," which causes panic, into the very resort of its strength: democratic electionsare the moment of passing through the zero-point when the complex network ofsocial links is dissolved into purely quantitative multiplicity of individuals whose votesare mechanically counted.

The moment of terror, of the dissolution of all hierarchic links, is thus re-enacted andtransformed into the foundation of a new and stable positive political order. Hegel is


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thus perhaps wrong in his fear of the direct universal democratic vote (see hisnervous rejection of the English Reform Bill in 1831): it is precisely democracy whichaccomplishes the "magic" trick of converting the negativity (the self-destructiveabsolute freedom which coincides with the reign of terror) into a stable new politicalorder: in democracy.

Once upon a time, we called this Communism. Why is its re-actualization so difficult

to imagine today? Because we live in an era of naturalization: political decisions areas a rule presented as matters of pure economic necessity. For instance, whenausterity measures are imposed, we are repeatedly told that this is simply what hasto be done.

In May 2010 and again in June 2011, large demonstrations exploded in Greece afterthe government announced the austerity measures it has to adopt in order to meetthe conditions of the European Union for the bailout money to avoid the state'sfinancial collapse.

One often hears that the true message of the Greek crisis is that not only Euro, but

the project of the united Europe itself is dead. But before endorsing this generalstatement, one should add a Leninist twist to it: Europe is dead, OK, but - whichEurope?

The answer is: the post-political Europe of accomodation to world market, theEurope which was repeatedly rejected at referendums, the Brussels technocratic-expert Europe. The Europe which presents itself as standing for the cold Europeanreason against Greek passion and corruption, for mathematics against pathetics.

But, utopian as it may appear, the space is still open for another Europe, a re-politicized Europe, a Europe founded on a shared emancipatory project, a Europethat gave birth to ancient Greek democracy, to French and October revolutions.

This is why one should avoid the temptation to react to the ongoing financial crisiswith a retreat to fully sovereign nation-states, easy preys of the freely-floatinginternational capital which can play one state against the other.

More than ever, the reply to every crisis should be even moreinternationalist anduniversalist than the universality of global capital. The idea of resisting global capitalon behalf of the defense of particular ethnic identities is more suicidal than ever, withthe spectre of the North Koreanjucheidea lurking behind.

Slavoj Zizek is the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities,University of London, and one of the world's most influential public intellectuals. Hismost recent books areLiving in the End Times(Verso, 2010), and, co-edited withCostas Douzinas,The Idea of Communism(Verso, 2010). He spoke at theFestivalof Dangerous Ideason Sunday, 2 October 2011, and will appear as a panelist onABC'sQ & Aon Monday, 3 October 2011.
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