Slavoj Zizek, Trouble in Paradise, 2014
There is something very hypocritical in the formula ‘forgive but do not forget’ which I deeply manipulative as it means: I forgive you, but by not forgetting your misdeed, I will make sure that you will for ever feel guilty about it.
One of the main danger of capitalism: although it is global and encompass the whole world, it sustains a stricto sensu worldless ideological constellation, depriving the large majority of people of any meaningful cognitive mapping. Capitalism is the first socio-economic order which de-totalizes meaning: it is not global at the level of meaning. There is no global ‘capitalist world view’: the fundamental lesson of globalization is precisely that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilisations.
While modernization in Europe was spread over centuries, the Muslim world has been exposed to this impact directly, without temporal delay, so their symbolic universe has been perturbed much more brutally – they have lost their symbolic ground with no time left to establish a new balance. No wonder, then, that the only way for some of these societies to avoid total breakdown was to erect in panic the shield of fundamentalism.
People do no rebel when things are bad but when their expectations are disappointed (the French revolution, 1956 revolt in Hungary, Egypt in 2011).
Willy Brandt knew that the capitalist system is ready to make considerable concessions to the workers and the poor only if there is a serious threat of an alternative, of a different mode of production which promises workers their rights. The moment this alternative vanishes, one can proceed to dismantle the welfare state.
Fareed Zakaria has pointed out that if developing countries are prematurely democratized, the result is a populism which ends in economic catastrophe and political despotism. No wonder that today’s economically most successful third world countries (Taiwan, South Korea, Chile) embraced full democracy only after a period of authoritarian regime. Does this line of thinking not provide the best argument for the authoritarian regime in China?
Austerity politics is not really a science, not even in a minimal sense. It is much closer to a contemporary form of superstition – a kind of gut reaction to an impenetrably complex situation. Austerity is not ‘too radical’, as some leftist critics claim, but, on the contrary, too superficial: an act of avoiding the true roots of the crisis.
The ultimate triumph of capitalism comes about when each worker becomes his or her own capitalist, the ‘entrepreneur of the self’ who decides to invest in his or her own future (education, health) paying for these investment by becoming indebted. What were formally rights (to education, to health, to housing) thus become free decision to invest.
Philanthropic colonialism (by Peter Buffett, Warren’s son): As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to give back. But this just keeps the existing structure of inequality in place. With more business minded folks getting into the act, business principles are trumpeted as an important element to add to the philanthropic sector….micro-lending and financial literacy: doesn’t all of this just feed the beast?
The work of charity (of Gates, Soros etc.) is not a personal idiosyncrasy, whether sincere or hypocritical, it is the logical concluding point of capitalist circulation, necessary from the strictly econonomic stand point since it allows the capitalist system to postpone its crisis.
Velle bonum alicui : charity is the past-time of those who are indifferent.
Jean Claude Milner – the stabilising class: the class of those who, even when they call for change, do so only to enforce changes that will make the system more efficient and ensure that nothing will really change.
Zardoz (1974) – post apocalyptic, a world radically divided along class line.
Peter Sloterdijk – the world interior of capitalism which is inhabited by one and a half billion winners of globalisation. Three times this number are left standing outside the door. After the process that transformed the world into the globe, social life could only take place in an extended interior. As cultural capitalism rules, all world-forming upheavals are contained: no historic event could take place, only domestic accident.
One of the terrifying effects of the non-contemporaneity of different level of social life is the rise of violence against women – not just random violence, but systemic violence, violence specific to a certain social context, follows a pattern, and transmit a clear message (e.g. gang rape in India by poor people)
The social dislocation due to fast industrialisation and modernisation (in Canada, Mexico, India) provokes a brutal reaction of men who experience this development as a threat.
The Pope to Napoleon: I know your aim is to destroy Christianity. But believe me, Sire, you will fail – the Church has been trying to do this for 2000 years and still hasn’t succeeded.
T.S. Eliot : there are moment when the only choice is the one between heresy and non-belief, when the only way to keep a religion alive is to perform a sectarian split from its main corpus.
Kant : all actions relating to the right of other men are unjust if their maxim is not consistent with being rendered public. A secret law would legitimise the arbitrary despotism of those who exercise it. Compared this to title of a recent report on China : ‘Even what’s secret is a secret in China.’
The ideological stakes of such individualisation (of the efforts to save the planet through recycling, use of different transport system etc.) are easily discernible: I get lost in my own self-examination instead of raising much more pertinent global questions about the entire industrial civilisation.
Fukuyama: the protest movement that toppled Mubarak was predominantly the revolt of the educated middle class, with the poor workers and farmers reduced to the role of observers. But once the gates of democracy were open, the Muslim Brotherhood, whose social base is the poor majority, won the elections. The core of secular protester understandably turn against them and was ready to endorse even a military coup.
Jean Pierre Taguieff: Islam is turning out to be the Marxism of the twenty first century, prolonging, after communism, its violent anti-capitalism.
Is the rise of radical Islam correlative to the disappearance of the secular Left in Muslim countries?
Arab countries were all more or less authoritarian, so that the demand for social and economic justice was spontaneously integrated into the demand for democracy, as if poverty was the result of the greed and corruption of those in power, and it was enough to get rid of them. What happens is that we get democracy, but poverty remains – What to do then?
Badiou: a true idea is something that divides, in a true idea, universality and division are two sides of the same coin.
IN hindsight, we can now see that the original trouble in paradise was the Khomeini revolution in Iran, a country which was officially thriving, on the fast track to pro-western modernization, and the West staunchest ally in the region.
Turkey : the protesters intuitively sensed that market freedom and religious fundamentalism are not mutually exclusive, that they can work hand in hand – a clear sign that the eternal marriage between democracy and capitalism is nearing divorce.
Sometimes, because it lacks legitimacy, an authoritarian regime can be more responsible towards its subjects than a democratically elected one. On the contrary a democratically elected government can fully exert its power for the narrow private interest of its members.
It is crucial to see this ethical regression (racism, protest against gay marriage etc.) as the obverse of the explosive development of global capitalism – they are two sides of the same coin.
Aid resemble the case of domestic social welfare policies within those (donor) countries: in both cases, redistribution simply functions as another link in the process of capitalist accumulation. Far from eliminating inequality, redistributive justice actually proliferates inequality.
Incentives may be useful in getting people to accomplish boring routing work, but with more intellectually demanding tasks, the success increasingly depends on being nimble and innovative, so there is more need for people to find intrinsic value in their work.
The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table.
The stabilization under the reign of Putin mostly amounts to the newly established transparency of these unwritten rules: now, again, people mostly know how to act or react in the complex cobweb of social interaction.
In the 1990s, a silent pact regulated the relationship between the Western power and Russia: Western states treated Russia as a great power on condition that Russia effectively didn’t act as one.
The British colonization of India created the conditions for the double liberation of India: from the constraints of its own tradition as well as from colonization itself.
Steve Jobs: a lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.
The French revolution offered the promise of a state founded on a set of principles as opposed to one based upon a nation or a people.
China: As an organization, the Party sits outside, and above the law. It should have a legal entity, in other word, a person to sue, but it is not even registered as an organization. The Party exists outside the legal system itself.
