346. Žižek: The crisis of capitalism

Žižek tells us that he appreciates capitalism, as even Marx and Stalin did, as ‘the most productive, welfare producing, dynamic force in human history’. However, as Marx did in his way, and many others do now, Žižek sees a looming crisis of capitalism.

Some people see light at the end of the tunnel, in some correction on capitalism, but Žižek joked that this light may be an oncoming train.  

Multinational corporations pressure governments to provide tax breaks, allow for deteriorating conditions of labour, and give subsidies for settling in a country and for cheap energy. This is yielding a ‘race to the bottom’, with governments competing among each other to attract or keep multinationals.

Banks were bailed out after incurring excessive risks, hiving the losses off onto the public, leading to the 2008 crisis. Measures were taken to re-regulate banking to prevent such crises from occurring again, but in the US those are being abolished again by president Trump, and the next crisis is brewing.

These developments have been accompanied by the emergence of what is called a ‘precariat’ (a contraction of ‘precarious’ and ‘proletariat’). There, workers have no lasting jobs, hop from one project or temporary employment to another, often with bad labour conditions, poor perspectives for housing, proper health care and pension. This is not only undermining their economic position, but is eating away their self-respect and hope.

Extremes occur, for example, in mines in Congo, factories in Bangladesh, services in India, and building projects in Arab gulf states, just to name a few. In China, many millions have been uprooted from their rural communities, to migrate to factories in the large cities, dumped in poor and filthy housing, meeting discrimination from the settled middle class that enjoys rising prosperity and cultural facilities.

In Western countries conditions are less dire, but serious enough to breed discontent and resentment, yielding political upheaval in populist movements in the US and Europe.

Žižek said, in one of those one-liners he throws out, that he supported Trump. When challenged on this, he said that what he ‘really meant’ was that Trump helps to carry the system to a crisis, unearthing the ugly truths of neoconservatism.

What will the precariat do when they find out that the populists also have no adequate answer, giving promises they cannot keep?

Marx predicted that the proletariat would form a class and would grab political power in a revolutionary overthrow, which they did. What will the present precariat do? An obstacle here is that the workers compete with each other in getting work, and do not have a shared workplace as a platform for banding together. Or will the new media offer the means to do so?

In one of his lectures, Žižek recalled how communism and Nazism also had guilty dreams of the submission of labour to higher purposes. In late capitalism that higher purpose lies in the supremacy of markets. An end of human submission in labour may lie in the emergence of androids, robots, who will not clamour for food, freedom or happiness.

Karl Polanyi, in his Great transformation (1944) proposed that unchecked markets lead to fascism. That happened in the rise of Hitler and is happening now.

Žižek offers the Hegelian thought that every system contains its contradictions and anomalies. Capitalism inevitably entails unemployment, exclusion. Poverty of the drop-outs is the price to be paid for prosperity. Means to a declared aim become aims for themselves. In capitalism markets and production systems were aims for prosperity, but now they have become aims in themselves.

A case in point is Chili, which under Pinochet was the pioneer of extreme neoliberalism. It wins in both the best and the worst. After some years it had the highest rate of investment, economic growth and per capita income in Latin America, and the lowest murder rate. The inequality of capital ownership is among the highest in the world: the top 1% owns 1/3. Among the rest of the population 3/4 has debts, one third of which is behind in payment. The depression rate is the highest in the world, suicide rates are among the highest in the world, and next to North Korea it is the only country with rising suicide among minors. Only the rich can afford good health care and education.[i]  

Then, for another dimension, Žižek also notes, like many others, that the emerging ‘platforms’ such as those of Google, Facebook, Amazon and Uber, with their use of algorithms that employ ‘big data’ on choices of consumers and voters are now getting to know them ‘better than they know themselves’, manipulate their subconscious choices and thereby dehumanize them.

As Žižek says, this is privatization and monopolization of intellectual capital, yielding rent, not profit as a margin on costs, but as unrelated to costs, thus going against the main argument of market efficiency and liberty that capitalism proclaims.

This is one of the cases of ideology that Žižek loves to expose, where dark reality is hidden behind the shining official lore.  

Capitalism still legitimizes itself as being based on liberal democracy, but it is presently in important ways becoming similar to the authoritarianism that it condemns. How different will authoritarian capitalism of present China, Russia, Malaysia, etc. be from the new-capitalist monopolies and manipulations of economic, social, intellectual and symbolic capital?          

Žižek claims that, even more deeply dark, capitalist competition is not only joy in winning but also, but hidden, joy at others losing, which is now increasingly becoming manifest in indifference to the increasing exclusion of the losers from employment. I am not yet sure what to think of this.   

This is one of the cases Žižek exposes of excess enjoyment, or ‘jouissance’, in transgression of morals. Also, feelings of guilt about consumerism, global injustice and ruin of nature, are assuaged, paid off, by firms (Žižek gives Starbucks as an example) that include in the high price of a product percentages they transfer for protection of the destitute, the suppressed, and nature. One can also think of airlines giving the opportunity to plant trees to fight pollution. Commodification of conscience.    

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[i] Source: Volkskrant, 16-17 december 2017.