Читать книгу A Left that Dares to Speak Its Name - Slavoj Žižek - Страница 10

A quick glance at our imbroglio already makes it clear that we are caught up in multiple social struggles: the tension between the liberal establishment and the new populism, ecological struggle, the struggle for feminism and sexual liberation, ethnic and religious struggles, the struggle for universal human rights, the struggle against the digital control of our lives. How to bring all these struggles together without simply privileging one of them (economic struggle, feminist struggle, anti-racist struggle …) as the “true” struggle provides the key to all other struggles. Half a century ago, when the Maoist wave was at its strongest, Mao Zedong’s distinction between “principal” and “secondary” contradictions (from his treatise “On Contradiction” written in 1937) was common currency in political debates. Perhaps this distinction deserves to be brought back to life.

When Mao talks about “contradictions,” he uses the term in the simple sense of the struggle of opposites, of social and natural antagonisms, not in the strict dialectical sense articulated by Hegel. Mao’s theory of contradictions can be summed up in four points. First, a specific contradiction is what primarily defines a thing, making it what it is: it is not a mistake, a failure, a malfunctioning of a thing, but, in some sense, the very feature that holds a thing together – if this contradiction disappears, a thing loses its identity. A classic Marxist example: hitherto, throughout history, the primary “contradiction” that defined every society was class struggle. Second, a contradiction is never single, it depends on other contradiction(s). Mao’s own example: in a capitalist society, the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is accompanied by other “secondary” contradictions, such as the one between imperialists and their colonies. Third, while this secondary contradiction depends on the first one (colonies exist only in capitalism), the principal contradiction is not always the dominant one: contradictions can trade places of importance. For example, when a country is occupied, it is the ruling class that is usually bribed to collaborate with the occupiers to maintain its privileged position, so that the struggle against the occupiers becomes a priority. The same can go for the struggle against racism: in a state of racial tension and exploitation, the only way to effectively struggle for the working class is to focus on fighting racism (this is why any appeal to the white working class, as in today’s alt-Right populism, betrays class struggle). Fourth, a principal contradiction can also change: one can argue that today, maybe, the ecological struggle designates the “principal contradiction” of our societies, since it deals with a threat to the collective survival of humanity itself. One can, of course, argue that our “principal contradiction” remains the antagonism of the global capitalist system, since ecological problems are the result of the excessive exploitation of natural resources driven by capitalist thirst for profit. However, it is doubtful if our ecological mess can be so easily reduced to an effect of capitalist expansion – there were man-related ecological catastrophes before capitalism, and there is no reason why a thriving postcapitalist society would not also confront the same deadlock.

To resume, while there is always one principal contradiction, contradictions can trade places of importance. Consequently, when we are dealing with a complex series of contradictions, we should locate the superior one, but we should also remember that no contradiction remains static – over time, they transform into one another. This multiplicity of contradictions is not just a contingent empirical fact; it defines the very notion of a (single) contradiction: every contradiction is dependent on the existence of “at least one” (other contradiction), its “life” resides in how it interacts with other contradictions. If a contradiction were to stand alone, it wouldn’t be a “contradiction” (struggle of opposites) but a stable opposition. “Class struggle” resides in how it overdetermines relations between sexes, the struggle with nature in production process, tensions between different cultures and races …

Old-fashioned and hopelessly dated as these ruminations may appear, they acquire a new actuality today. My first “Maoist” point is that, in order to take a correct stance in each of today’s struggles, one should locate each of them into the complex interaction with other struggles. An important principle here is that, contrary to today’s fashion, we should stick to “binary” forms of opposition and translate every appearance of multiple positions to a combination of “binary” opposites. Today, we don’t have three main positions (liberal-centrist hegemony, Rightist populism, and the new Left) but two antagonisms – Rightist populism versus a liberal-centrist establishment – and both of them together (the two sides of the existing capitalist order) face the Leftist challenge.

Let’s begin with a simple example: Macedonia – what’s in a name? Not long ago, the governments of Macedonia and Greece concluded an agreement on how to resolve the problem of the name “Macedonia”: it should be changed to “Northern Macedonia.” This solution was instantly attacked by radicals in both countries. Greek opponents insisted that “Macedonia” is an old Greek name, and Macedonian opponents felt humiliated by being reduced to a “Northern” province, since they are the only people who call themselves “Macedonians.” Imperfect as it was, this solution offered a glimpse of hope toward ending a long and meaningless struggle by a reasonable compromise. But it was caught in another “contradiction”: the struggle between big powers (the US and EU on the one side, Russia on the other). The West put pressure on both sides to accept the compromise so that Macedonia could quickly join the EU and NATO, while, for exactly the same reason (seeing in it the danger of its loss of influence in the Balkans), Russia opposed it, supporting rabid conservative nationalist forces in both countries. So which side should we take here? I think we should decidedly take the side of the compromise, for the simple reason that it is the only realist solution to the problem – Russia opposed it simply because of its geopolitical interests, without offering another solution, so supporting Russia here would have meant sacrificing the reasonable solution of the singular problem of Macedonian and Greek relations to international geopolitical interests.

Now let’s take the arrest of Meng Wanzhou, Huawei’s chief financial officer and daughter of the firm’s founder, in Vancouver. She is accused of breaking US sanctions on Iran and faces extradition to the US, where she could be jailed for up to 30 years if found guilty. What is true here? In all probability, one way or another, all big corporations discreetly break the laws. But it’s more than evident that this is just a “secondary contradiction” and that another battle is actually being fought here: it’s not about trade with Iran, it’s about the big struggle for domination in the production of digital hardware and software. What Huawei symbolizes is a China that is no longer the Foxconn China, the place of half-slave labor assembling machines developed elsewhere, but a place where software and hardware are also conceived. China has the potential to become a much stronger agent in the digital market than Japan with Sony or South Korea with Samsung. Reports abound now in our media on grueling work conditions in Huawei factories in China, and there are even suggestions that the sanctions against Huawei will really help these workers – but no one called for a boycott when the same (or even worse) appalling conditions were discovered in Foxconn factories.

But enough of particular examples – things get more complex with the “contradiction” between the alt-Right descent into racist/sexist vulgarity and the politically correct stiff regulatory moralism. It is crucial, from the standpoint of progressive struggle for emancipation, not to accept this “contradiction” as primary, but to unravel in it the displaced and distorted echoes of class struggle. As in fascist ideology, the Rightist populist figure of the Enemy (the combination of financial elites and invading immigrants) combines both extremes of the social hierarchy, thereby blurring the class struggle; on the opposite end, and in an almost symmetrical way, politically correct antiracism and antisexism barely conceal the fact that their ultimate target is white working-class racism and sexism, thereby also neutralizing class struggle. That’s why the designation of political correctness as “cultural Marxism” is false: political correctness, in all its pseudo-radicality, is, on the contrary, the last defense of “bourgeois” liberalism against the Marxism concept, obfuscating/displacing class struggle as the “principal contradiction.”

Things get more complex with the struggle for universal human rights. Here, there is a “contradiction” between proponents of these rights and those who warn that, in their standard version, universal human rights are not truly universal but implicitly privilege Western values (individuals have primacy over collectives, etc.) and are thereby a form of ideological neocolonialism – it is no wonder that the reference to human rights served as a justification for many military interventions, from Iraq to Libya. Partisans of universal human rights counter that their rejection often serves to justify local forms of authoritarian rule and repression as elements of a particular way of life. How to decide here? A middle-of-the-road compromise is not enough; one should give preference to universal human rights for a very precise reason: a dimension of universality has to serve as a medium in which multiple ways of life can coexist, and the Western notion of universality of human rights contains the self-critical dimension that makes visible its own limitations. When the standard Western notion of universal human rights is criticized for its particular bias, this critique itself has to refer to some notion of more authentic universality, which makes us see the distortion of a false universality. But some form of universality is always here, even a modest vision of the coexistence of different and ultimately incompatible ways of life has to rely on it. In short, what this means is that the “principal contradiction” is not that of the tension(s) between different ways of life, but the “contradiction” within each way of life (“culture,” organization of its jouissance) between its particularity and its universal claim – to use a technical term, each particular way of life is by definition caught in “pragmatic contradiction,” its claim to validity is undermined not by the presence of other ways of life but by its own inconsistency.

The ultimate example of the importance of secondary contradictions were the European elections of 2019 – are there any lessons to be learned from them? The sometimes spectacular details (like the crushing defeat of both main parties in the UK) should not blind us to the basic fact that nothing really big and surprising happened. Yes, the populist new Right did make progress, but it remains far from prevailing. The phrase, repeated like a mantra, that people demanded change, is deeply deceptive – yes, but what kind of change? It was basically the variation on the old motto “some things have to change so that all remains the same.”

The self-perception of Europeans in toto is that they have too much to lose to risk a revolution (a radical upheaval), and that’s why the majority tend to vote for the parties that promise them peace and a calm life (against financial elites, against the “immigrant threat,” …). That’s also why one of the losers of the 2019 European elections was the populist Left, especially in France and Germany: the majority doesn’t want political mobilization. Rightist populists understood this message much better: what they really offer is not active democracy but a strong authoritarian power which would work for (what they present as) the people’s interests. Therein resides also the fatal limitation of former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis’s DIEM (Democracy in Europe Movement): the core of its ideology is the hope of mobilizing the bulk of ordinary people, to give them a voice by way of breaking the hegemony of the ruling elites.

Some years ago, I heard an anecdote from a friend of Willy Brandt. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mikhail Gorbachev – at this time already a private citizen – wanted to visit Brandt, and he appeared unannounced at the door of his house in Berlin, but Brandt (or his servant) ignored the ringing of the bell and refused even to open the door. Brandt later explained to his friend his reaction as being an expression of his rage at Gorbachev: by allowing the disintegration of the Soviet bloc, Gorbachev had ruined the foundations of Western social democracy. It was the constant comparison with the East European communist countries that maintained the pressure on the West to tolerate the social democratic welfare state, and once the communist threat disappeared, exploitation in the West became more open and ruthless and the welfare state also began to disintegrate.

Simplified as this idea is, there is a moment of truth in it: the final result of the fall of communist regimes is the fall (or, rather, the prolonged disintegration) of social democracy itself. The naive expectation that the fall of the bad “totalitarian” Left will open up space for the good “democratic” Left sadly proved wrong. A new division of the political space in Europe is gradually replacing the old opposition between a center-Left party and a center-Right party replacing each other in power: the opposition between a liberal-center party (pro-capitalist and culturally liberal: pro-choice and gay rights, etc.) and a populist Right movement. The paradox is that the new populists, while culturally conservative, often advocate and even enforce, when they are in power, measures that are usually associated with social democracy but which no actual social democratic party dares to impose.

Even the success of Green parties in the 2019 European elections fits this formula: it is not to be taken as the sign of an authentic ecological awakening; it was more an ersatz vote, the preferred vote of all those who clearly perceive the insufficiency of the hegemonic politics of the European establishment and reject the nationalist-populist reaction to it, but are not ready to vote for the social democratic or even more radical Left. It was a vote of those who want to keep their conscience clean without really acting. That is to say, what immediately strikes the eye in today’s European Green parties is the predominant tone of moderation: they largely remain embedded in the “politics as usual” approach; their aim is just capitalism with a green face. We are still far from the much-needed radicalization that can only emerge through the coalition of Greens and the hard-core Left.

But what is really at stake in today’s mess is not primarily the destiny of the social democratic parties as political agents, but the destiny of what Peter Sloterdijk called “objective” social democracy: the true triumph of social democracy occurred when its basic demands (free education and healthcare, etc.) became part of the program accepted by all main parties and inscribed into the functioning of the state institutions themselves. Today’s trend goes rather in the opposite direction: when Margaret Thatcher was asked what she considered to be her greatest success, she snapped back “New Labour,” hinting at the fact that even her Labour Party opponents had adopted her economic politics.

The remaining radical Leftists have a quick answer to this: social democracy is disappearing precisely because it adopted neoliberal economic politics, so the solution is … what? This is where the problems begin. Radical Leftists don’t have a feasible alternative program, and the disappearance of European social democracy is a more complex process. First, one should note its recent electoral successes in Finland, Slovakia, Denmark, and Spain. Second, one should note that, measured by European standards, American “democratic socialists” like Bernie Sanders are not extremists but modest social democrats. In previous decades, the standard radical Leftist stance toward social democracy was one of patronizing distrust: when social democracy is the only Leftist option, we should support it, knowing that it will ultimately fail – this failure will be an important learning experience for the people. Today, however, old-style social democracy is more and more perceived by the establishment as a threat: its traditional demands are no longer acceptable. This new situation demands a new strategy. The lesson for the Left from all this is: abandon the dream of a big popular mobilization and focus on changes in daily life. The real success of a “revolution” can only be measured the day after, when things return to normal. How is the change perceived in the daily lives of ordinary people?

Back in the UK, the Brexit mess is not an exception but just the aggravated explosion of a tension that runs across all of Europe. What the situation in the UK demonstrates is that, as Mao would have put it, secondary contradictions matter. Corbyn’s mistake was to act as if the choice of “Brexit or not” is of no great importance, so (although his heart was with Brexit) he opportunistically navigated between the two sides; trying not to lose votes from either side, he lost them from both. But secondary contradictions do matter: it was crucial to take a clear stance. This is, more generally, the tough question that the European Left is carefully avoiding: how, instead of succumbing to the nationalist populist temptation, to elaborate a new Leftist vision of Europe.