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→In the work of Slavoj Žižek
Žižek’s more openly para-Marxist turn between 1997 and 1999 has seen a larger shift in his attitude, both towards really existing liberal democracies and towards radical democratic politics as a proposed critical alternative to them. Broadly speaking, Žižek has embraced a version of the old [[Marxist]] critique of [[liberal democracies]], for which the “[[superstructure]]” of liberal freedoms (of press, conscience, association; from arbitrary arrest) is to be considered an [[ideological]] veil. What it conceals is the way that economic liberty, the freedom to trade in markets, together with the power of money and “market forces” in shaping public life, undermines the other liberal freedoms or renders them eff ectively empty or “formal”, while itself being far beyond the possibility of political contestation – if not itself an avatar of the [[Lacanian Real]] that always returns to the same place.
Th is criticism of the really existing capitalist democracies has implications for how Žižek has come to understand what might truly oppose today’s [[hegemonic]] [[neo-liberal]] regimes. His claim is that advocacy of “radical democracy” is bound to remain inefficacious – indeed, it will simply imitate [[liberalism]]’s own ideological obfuscation of the determinant role of the economy – unless it politicizes the economy. As Žižek has written:<blockquote>We do not vote concerning who owns what, or about the relations between workers in a factory. Such things are left to processes outside the sphere of [[the political]], and it is an [[illusion]] that one can change them by “extending” democracy: say, by setting up “democratic” banks under the people’s control. (“[[Democracy is the Enemy]]”)</blockquote>Yet, he complains, [[the cultural turn]] in much Western “[[postmodern]]” [[theory]] has insulated economics from critical and political concern every bit as thoroughly as [[neo-liberalism]] itself: “The depoliticised economy is the disavowed ‘[[fundamental fantasy]]’ of postmodern politics – [hence] a properly [[political act]] would necessarily entail the repoliticisation of the economy” (TS: 355). It is this reason that underlies Žižek’s increasingly polemical break with fi gures figures advocating radical democracy like [[Ernesto Laclau|Laclau]], [[Simon Critchley]] and [[Stavrakakis]]. Indeed, in writings since 2006, particularly around the time of the [[global financial crisis]], Žižek has increasingly drawn upon [[Alain Badiou]]’s much more hostile post-[[Maoist]] stance towards a form of nominally “democratic” radical politics, instead advocating for the “[[idea of communism]]”, or even a “[[dictatorship of the proletariat]]”, and claiming that “the name of the ultimate enemy today is not [[capitalism]], empire, exploitation or anything of the kind, but democracy” (“[[Democracy is the Enemy]]”).
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