好少見 Zizek 寫咁政治立場分析性文章來介入新自由主義和反全球化的討論... 當然 liberal communists 的吸吶能力確實很高.
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節錄自 in these times:
Liberal communists are big executives reforming the spirit of
contest, or, to put it the other way round, countercultural geeks who
took over big corporations. Their dogma is a new, postmodernized,
version of Adam Smith’s invisible hand: Market and social
responsibility are not opposites, they can be employed together for
mutual benefit. Collaboration with employees, dialogue with customers,
respect for the environment and transparent deal-making are now the
keys to a successful business.
Liberal communists are pragmatic, they hate ideology. There is no
single exploited Working Class today, only concrete problems to be
solved, such as starvation in Africa, the plight of Muslim women or
religious fundamentalist violence. When there is a humanitarian crisis
in Africa—and liberal communists love humanitarian crises, they bring
out the best in them!—instead of employing anti-imperialist rhetoric,
we should simply examine what really solves the problem: Engage people,
governments and business in a common enterprise, approach the crisis in
a creative, unconventional way, and don’t worry about labels.
Liberal communists also love May ‘68: What an explosion of youthful
energy and creativity! How it shattered the confines of stiff
bureaucratic order! What an impetus it gave to economic and social life
after the political illusions dropped away! And although they’ve
changed since then, they didn’t resign to reality, but rather changed
in order to really change the world, to really revolutionize our lives.
Didn’t Marx say that all the world’s political upheavals paled in
comparison with the invention of the steam engine when it came to
changing our lives? And wouldn’t Marx say today: What are all the
protests against global capitalism in comparison with the Internet?
Above all, liberal communists see themselves as true citizens of the
world, good people who worry. They worry about populist fundamentalists
and irresponsible, greedy corporations. They see the “deeper causes” of
today’s problems, the mass poverty and hopelessness that breed
fundamentalist terror. So their goal is not to earn money, but to
change the world (and, in this way, as a by-product, make even more
money).
The catch, of course, is that, in order to give it to the community,
first you have to take it (or, as they put it, create it). The
rationale of liberal communists is that, in order to really help
people, you must have the means to do it. And as experience—the dismal
failure of all centralized state and collectivist approaches—teaches
us, private initiative is by far the most efficient way. So if the
state wants to regulate their business, to tax them excessively, it is
effectively undermining its own official goal (to make life better for
the large majority, to really help those in need).
Liberal communists do not want to just be machines for generating
profits: They want their lives to have a deeper meaning. They are
against old-fashioned religions and for spirituality sans confessional
meditation (everybody knows that Buddhism foreshadowed brain sciences,
that the power of mediation can be measured scientifically!). Their
preferred motto is social responsibility and gratitude: They are the
first to admit that society was incredibly good to them by allowing
them to deploy their talents and amass wealth. And after all, what is
the point of their success if not to help people?
However, is any of this really something new? What about the good
old Andrew Carnegie, employing a private army to brutally suppress
organized labor and then distributing large parts of his wealth for
educational, arts and humanitarian causes, proving that, although a man
of steel, he has a heart of gold? In the same way, today’s liberal
communists give with one hand what they first took away with the other.
This is what makes a figure like Soros ethically so problematic. His
daily routine is a lie embodied: Half of his working time is devoted to
financial speculations and the other half to humanitarian activities
(providing finances for cultural and democratic activities in
post-Communist countries, underwriting the movement in the United
States to get public money out of private elections, coining pejorative
terms like “free-market fundamentalists”) that ultimately fight the
effects of his own speculations. Likewise the two faces of Bill Gates:
a cruel businessman, destroying or buying out competitors, aiming at
virtual monopoly, employing all the dirty tricks to achieve his goals …
and the greatest philanthropist in the history of mankind.
In the liberal communist ethics, the ruthless pursuit of profit is
counteracted by charity: Charity today is the humanitarian mask that
hides the underlying economic exploitation. In a blackmail of gigantic
proportions, the developed countries are constantly “helping” the
undeveloped (with aid, credits, etc.), thereby avoiding the key issue,
namely, their complicity in and co-responsibility for the miserable
situation of the undeveloped.
And the same goes for the very opposition between the “smart” and
“non-smart” approach. Outsourcing is the key notion here. By way of
outsourcing, you export the (necessary) dark side—low wages, harsh
labor practices, ecological pollution—to “non-smart” Third World places
(or invisible places in the First World itself). The ultimate liberal
communist dream is to export the working class itself to the invisible
Third World sweatshops.
Etienne Balibar, the French Marxist philosopher, distinguishes the
two opposite but complementary forms of excessive violence in the world
today: the objective (“structural”) violence that is inherent in the
social conditions of global capitalism—i.e., the “automatic” creation
of excluded and dispensable individuals (the homeless, the uninsured,
the unemployed)—and the subjective violence of newly emerging ethnic
and/or religious fundamentalisms. While they fight subjective violence,
liberal communists are the very agents of the structural violence that
creates the conditions for such explosions of subjective violence.
Precisely because liberal communists want to resolve all these
secondary malfunctions of the global capital system—to render it
“frictionless” for their mechanations—they are the direct embodiment of
what is wrong with the system as such.
In the midst of any necessary tactical alliances one has to make
with liberal communists when fighting racism, sexism and religious
obscurantism, we should remember: Liberal communists are the enemy of
every true progressive struggle today.