Changes

<blockquote>Our [[message ]] today should be: do not be afraid, join us, come back! You’ve had your anti-communist fun, and you are pardoned for it – [[time ]] to get serious once again! (Žižek, ''[[First as Tragedy, Then as Farce|First as Tragedy]]'': 157)</blockquote>The impact of [[living ]] under communist rule in [[Yugoslavia ]] is [[apparent ]] in much of Žižek’s [[writing]], but only recently has the [[idea ]] of communism been raised to the level of an authentic [[project ]] in his [[political ]] [[philosophy]]. Deemed a dissident in ex-Yugoslavia, Žižek nearly failed the [[defence ]] of his [[doctoral dissertation ]] because it was [[thought ]] not to be [[Marxist ]] enough, and he was prohibited from lecturing at the [[University ]] of [[Ljubljana ]] out of [[fear ]] that he might lead students away from the [[official ]] Party [[doctrine]]. Although moving closer to democracy by the late 1980s, running as the candidate for the [[Liberal ]] [[Democratic Party|Democratic party ]] during the first [[post-Communist ]] elections in [[Slovenia ]] in 1990, Žižek’s [[politics ]] have shifted over time from the “radical democracy” of [[Ernesto Laclau|Laclau]] and [[Chantal Mouffe|Mouffe]] – the influence of which is noticeable in his earliest [[English ]] books, particularly [[The Sublime Object of Ideology|''The Sublime Object of Ideology'']] – towards a renewed interest in [[Lenin]] in the late 1990s (see [[Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917|''Revolution at the Gates'']]); and finally, more recently, Žižek has started [[identifying ]] himself not only as a Marxist, but also as a communist. It is his new [[identification ]] as a communist, and his own [[recent ]] writing on the renewal of [[the communist hypothesis]], that led Žižek to co-organize the conference “[[The Idea of Communism]]” at Birkbeck, University of [[London]], in 2009, and a second conference in New York City in 2012.

Žižek’s identification as a communist began shortly after [[Alain Badiou|Badiou]]’s call for a [[return ]] to [[The Communist Hypothesis|the communist hypothesis ]] at the end of his book ''[[The Meaning of Sarkozy]]'' (2008). Badiou’s influence can be seen in the way that Žižek continues to take up the idea of communism in his recent writings, especially at the end of ''[[First as Tragedy, Then as Farce]]''. In this book, Žižek responds to Badiou’s [[statement ]] that:<blockquote>The communist hypothesis remains the [[right ]] hypothesis … If this hypothesis should have to be abandoned, then it is not worth doing anything in the [[order ]] of collective [[action ]] … Holding on to the Idea [of communism]… does not mean that its first [[form ]] of presentation, focused on property and the [[state]], must be maintained just as it is; in fact, what we are ascribed as a [[philosophical ]] task … is to [[help ]] a new modality of [[existence ]] of the hypothesis to come into [[being]]. ([[Badiou ]] 2008: 115)</blockquote>Badiou, according to Žižek, does not propose a [[vision ]] of communism as some kind of transhistorical [[utopian]] [[ideal]]. Rather, communism must be historicized in relation to actual historical problems and [[antagonisms]]. Conceiving communism as an “eternal idea” or ideal implies as well that the problems that give rise to this Idea are no less eternal. If we conceive the communist Idea as eternal, then the [[impossibility ]] of ever overcoming actual historical antagonisms can be perceived as equally eternal.

For Žižek, the actuality of communism requires making reference to the crises and antagonisms within [[global ]] [[capitalism ]] that prevent indefinite production. These antagonisms are, according to Žižek, crises of “[[the commons]]”. Žižek describes the latter as “the shared substance of our being” (''FT'': 91) – that is, the actual [[material ]] and [[intellectual ]] resources upon which humanity as a [[whole ]] is dependent. Žižek distinguishes [[three ]] primary domains of the commons:* the commons of [[culture]]: socialized forms of “cognitive” capitalism, such as [[language]], means of [[communication]], education, as well as infrastructural commons, such as [[public ]] transport, electricity, the postal [[system]], and so on;* the commons of [[external ]] [[nature]]: the [[threat ]] of pollution, ecological damage, exploitation of [[natural ]] resources (from oil to rain forests and the “natural habitat”); and* the commons of [[internal ]] nature: the [[Biogenetics|biogenetic]] inheritance of humanity, creation of new “humanity”, the changing form of “human “[[human]] nature”, and so on.

* the [[ethical ]] implications of the new biogenetic [[technology]]; and* the creation of new forms of apartheid – that is, the [[antagonism ]] between the included and the excluded.

It is this last [[Class/Antagonism|antagonism]] that, according to Žižek, holds the key to the salvation of the crises of the commons. Th e universality of the [[struggle ]] of the excluded is signalled by the enclosure of the commons – the by-product of which is increased [[proletarianization]] – and it is here that we find the ground upon which [[Emancipatory politics|emancipatory]] struggles must be fought (and won).

Žižek continues to note a significant [[difference ]] between the “[[proletariat]]” and the “working “[[working]] class”: “to be a ‘proletarian’ involves assuming a certain [[subjective ]] stance (of [[class ]] struggle destined to achieve Redemption through [[Revolution]]) which, in [[principle]], can be adopted by any individual” (''TS'': 227), while “working class” designates one’s [[position ]] within the positive order of the relations of production. Žižek adds, though, that proletarianization is defined by the [[loss ]] of subjective substance. Borrowing an expression from [[Marx ]] in the ''[[Grundrisse]]'', Žižek often refers to the proletariat as “[[substanceless subjectivity]]” (see, for example, ''TN'': 10). [[Proletarianization]] must, therefore, be [[understood ]] as a [[process ]] of depriving [[the excluded]] [[subject ]] of the substance of [[the commons]].

Žižek also clearly opposes communism to [[socialism]]. Regarding the latter, he indicates that “the commons can also be restored to collective humanity without communism” (''FT'': 95) in two ways: either through an authoritarian-communitarian [[regime ]] or through the return of the rootless subject to their [[place ]] in a new substantial [[community]]. What he has in [[mind ]] here are the two poles of authoritarian rule in countries like China and in Singapore and emerging forms of racist [[fundamentalism]]. Communism, then, has to be opposed to “socialism”. As he puts it: “While there may be a socialist [[anti-Semitism]] [as in the [[case ]] of National Socialism], there cannot be a communist form” (''ibid.''). In the case of [[Stalinism]], the emergence of [[Anti-semitism|anti-Semitism ]] is, according to Žižek, only an indication of a [[lack ]] of [[fidelity]] to the [[Event|revolutionary event]].

Rather than avoiding the failed [[past ]] of communism, Žižek insists that its resuscitation requires confronting fully past regressions of emancipatory movements into hierarchical rule, from the [[Jacobins]] to [[Napoleon]], from the [[October Revolution]] to [[Stalinism]] and from [[Mao Zedong|Mao]]’s [[Cultural Revolution]] to [[Deng Xiaoping]]’s [[authoritarian capitalism]]. In each of these regressions the communist Idea persists and survives in its failed realization as a [[spectre ]] that haunts. It is in this [[sense ]] that Žižek takes up communism as an [[eternal Idea]] (in some ways contradicting the position he takes earlier on the [[historicization]] of communism), with its own “[[four fundamental concepts]]”: egalitarian justice; disciplinary [[terror]]; political voluntarism; and trust in the [[people ]] (''FT'': 125). However, he still insists that, up until our own historical [[moment]], the Idea of communism persisted as a [[Platonic Idea]]. Today, this idea [[needs ]] to be actualized in the context of [[real ]] historical [[Class/Antagonism|antagonisms]] (''FT'': 126). 

Socialism works towards solving the first three antagonisms, without addressing the final antagonism. By making this [[claim]], Žižek asserts that socialism should no longer be seen as a lower [[phase ]] of communism, but as the only [[other ]] alternative to the crises of global capitalism; an alternative that can [[work ]] only by relying on various forms of [[authoritarianism ]] and [[populism]], again leaving intact the antagonism between the included and the excluded. It is the reference to the excluded from the commons “that justifies the use of the term communism” (''FT'': 97).

Žižek also now rejects “[[democracy]]” (by which he means [[Liberal-democracy|liberal]], [[Bourgeoisie|bourgeois]] democracy) as the status quo alternative to the communist hypothesis. There is a tension in bourgeois democracy: it is exceptional in its capacity to make the values of [[freedom ]] and equality the very [[conditions ]] of possibility for exploitation and domination: “The [[legal]]-[[ideological ]] [[matrix ]] of freedom-equality is not a mere ‘mask’ concealing exploitation-domination, but the very form in which the latter is exercised” (''FT'': 125). For Žižek, “Democracy – in the way this term is used today – concerns, above all, [[formal ]] legalism: its minimal definition is unconditional adherence to a certain set of formal rules which [[guarantee ]] that antagonisms are fully absorbed into the agonistic game” (''LC'': 264). The way to address democracy is to ask how it relates “to the [[dimension ]] of [[universality]] embodied in [[the excluded]]” (FT: 100). The ([[Bourgeoisie|bourgeois]]) [[liberal-democratic]] approach to the excluded is to find new ways of including [[them ]] in the existing system. The difference between democracy and communism has to do with the attempt to include the excluded (through formal, ideological-legal [[discourse]], such as “multiculturalism”) into the existing order, rather than transforming [[society ]] around the interests, primarily, of the excluded. Th t is, of re-organizing political [[space ]] to fit the excluded. Th is is how we should differentiate between bourgeois democracy and the “[[dictatorship of the proletariat]]” (''FT'': 102): “The [[goal ]] of [[Terror|revolutionary violence]] is not to take over state [[power]], but to transform it, radically changing its functioning, its [[relationship ]] to its base … therein resides the key component of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’” (FT: 130–31). In contrast to the old Marxist idea [[about ]] the “withering away of the state”, Žižek argues for the [[necessity ]] of the state. But the latter is not, for him, the form of the state found in the former [[Soviet Union]]: “Dictatorship of the proletariat is a necessary oxymoron, not a state-form in which the proletariat are now the [[ruling class ]] … we are dealing with the dictatorship of the proletariat only when the state itself is radically transformed, relying on new forms of popular participation” (''FT'': 131).