by Slavoj Zizek
The French Yellow Vest movement exposes a problem at the heart of
today’s politics. Too much adherence to popular “opinion” and not enough
innovation and fresh ideas.
Already a quick glance at the imbroglio makes it clear that we are
caught in multiple social struggles. The tension between the liberal
establishment and the new populism, the ecological struggle, efforts in support
of feminism and sexual liberation, plus ethnic and religious battles and the
desire for universal human rights. Not to mention, trying to resist digital
control of our lives.
So, how to bring all these struggles together without simply privileging
one of them as the “true” priority? Because this balance provides the key to
all other struggles.
Old ideas
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 a common currency in
political debates. Perhaps, this distinction deserves to be brought back to
life.
Let’s begin with a simple example: Macedonia – what’s in a name? A
couple of months ago, the governments of Macedonia and Greece concluded an
agreement on how to resolve the problem of the name “Macedonia.” It should
change its name into “Northern Macedonia.”
This solution was instantly attacked by the radicals in both countries.
Greek opponents insisted “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, the solution offered a glimpse of hope to end a
long and meaningless struggle with 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 side). 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
conservative nationalist forces in both countries, to varying degrees.
So, which side should we take here? I think we should decidedly take the
side of 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.
Power games
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
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 which is no longer the Foxconn China, the place of
half-slave labor assembling machines developed elsewhere, but a place where
software and hardware is 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, through economic heft and numbers.
But enough of particular examples. Things get
more complex with the struggle for universal human rights. We get here the
“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. No wonder that the
reference to human rights served as a justification of 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. But how to decide here?
A middle-of-the-road compromise is not enough,
so one should give preference to universal human rights for a very precise
reason. The 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 which makes visible its own
limitations.
When the standard Western ideas are criticized
for a 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.
Social divides
Things get even more complex with the
“contradiction” between the alt-right descent into racist/sexist vulgarity and
the politically correct stiff regulatory moralism.
Thus, it is crucial, from the standpoint of the
progressive struggle for emancipation, not to accept this “contradiction” as
primary but to unravel in it the displaced and distorted echoes of class
struggle.
In a fascist way, 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, the politically-correct anti-racism and anti-sexism struggles barely
conceal 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 Marxism,
obfuscating/displacing class struggle as the “principal contradiction.”
The same goes for the transgender and #MeToo struggle. It is also
overdetermined by the “principal contradiction” of the class struggle which
introduces an antagonism into its very heart.
Tarana Burke, who created the #MeToo
campaign more than a decade ago, observed in a recent critical note that in the years
since the movement began, it deployed an unwavering obsession with the
perpetrators — a cyclical circus of accusations, culpability, and
indiscretions.
“We are working diligently so that
the popular narrative about MeToo shifts from what it is,” Burke said.
“We have to shift the narrative that
it’s a gender war, that it’s anti-male, that it’s men against women, that it’s
only for a certain type of person — that it’s for white, cisgender,
heterosexual, famous women.“
In short, one should struggle to refocus #MeToo onto the daily suffering
of millions of ordinary working women and housewives. This emphatically can be
done. For example, in South Korea, #MeToo exploded with tens of thousands of
ordinary women demonstrating against their sexual exploitation.
The ongoing Yellow Vests (gilets jaunes) protests in France condense all
we were talking about. Their fatal limitation resides precisely in their
much-praised “leaderless” character, their chaotic self-organization.
In a typical populist way, the Yellow Vest movement bombards the state
with a series of demands which are inconsistent and impossible to meet within
the existing economic system. What it lacks is a leader who would not only
listen to the people but translate their protest into a new, coherent vision of
society.
The “contradiction” between the demands of the Yellow Vests and the
state is “secondary”: their demands are rooted in the existing system. The true
“contradiction” is between our entire socio-political system and (the vision
of) a new society in which the demands formulated by the protesters no longer
arise. How?
The old Henry Ford was right when he
remarked that, when he offered the first serially produced car, he didn’t
follow what people wanted. As he put it succinctly, if asked what they want,
the people would have answer: “A better and stronger horse to pull our carriage!”
This insight finds an echo in Steve
Jobs’ infamous motto that “a lot of times, people don't know what they want
until you show it to them.”
In spite of all one has to criticize in
the activity of Jobs, he was close to an authentic master in how he understood
his motto. When he was asked how much customer feedback Apple uses, he snapped
back: “It's not the customers’ job to know what they want… we figure out
what we want.”
Note the surprising turn of this
argumentation. After denying that customers know what they want, Jobs doesn’t
go on with the expected direct reversal “it is our task (the task of
creative capitalists) to figure out what customers want and then ‘show it to
them’ on the market.”
Instead, he continues “we figure out
what we want” – this is how a true master works. He doesn’t try to guess
what people want. He simply obeys his own desire so that it is left to the
people to decide if they will follow him.
In other words, his power stems from his fidelity to his vision, from
not compromising it.
And the same goes for a political leader that is needed today.
Protesters in France want a better (stronger and cheaper) horse – in this case,
ironically, cheaper fuel for their cars.
They should be given the vision of a society where the price of fuel no
longer matters in the same way that, after cars, the price of horse fodder no
longer matters.
Slavoj Zizek is a cultural philosopher. He’s a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana and Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University.
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