Slavoj ZIZEK

The Spectre Is Still
Roaming Around!

An introduction to the 150th anniversary edition of The Communist Manifesto

(excerpts): [3].[of 4].[of 10].[Chapter 04]:

The point of our insisting that we are dealing with Bill Gates as an icon is that it would be mystifying to elevate the "real" Gates into a kind of Evil Genius who masterminds a plot to achieve global control over all of us. Here, more than ever, it is crucial to remember the lesson of the Marxist dialectic of fetishization: the "reification" of relations between people (the fact that they assume the form of phantasmagorical "relations between things") is always redoubled by the apparently opposite process, by the false "personalization" ("psychologiozation") of what are effectively objective social processes. It was already in the 30s that the first generation of Frankfurt School theoreticians drew attention to how - at the very moment when global market relations started to exert their full domination, making the individual producer's success or failure dependent on market cycles totally out of his control - the notion of a charismatic "business genius" reasserted itself in the "spontaaneous capitalist ideology", attributing the success or failure of a businessman to some mysterious je ne sais quoi which he possesses. (Adorno pointed out how the very emergence of psychology as "science", with the individual's psyche as its "object", is strictly correlative to the predominance of impersonal relations in economic and political life.) And does the same not hold even more today, when the abstraction of market relations that run our lives is brought to extreme? The book market is overflowing with psychological manuals advising us how to succeed, how to outdo our partner or competitor - in short, making our success dependent on our proper "attitude". So, in a way, one is tempted to invert the famous formula of Marx: in contemporary capitalism, the objective market "relations between things" tend to assume the phantasmagorical form of pseudo-personalized "relations between people". No, Bill Gates is no genius, good or bad, he is just an opportunist who knew how to seize the moment, and as such the result of the capitalist system run amok. The question to ask is not "How did Gates do it?" but "How is the capitalist system structured, what is wrong with it, so that an individual can achieve such disproportionate power?". Phenomena such as Bill Gates thus seem to point towards their own solution: once we are dealing with a gigantic global network formally owned by a single individual or corporation, is it not that ownership becomes in a way irrelevant to its functioning (there is no longer any worthwhile competition, profit is guaranteed), so that it becomes possible simply to cut off this head and to socialize the entire network without greatly perturbing its functioning? Does such an act not amount to a purely formal conversion that simply brings together what de facto already belongs together: the collective of individuals and the global communicational network they are all using, and which thus forms the substance of their social lives?

The overtly "irrational" prospect of concentrating quasi-monopolistic power in the hands of a single individual or corporation, like Rupert Murdoch or Bill Gates, is thus an index pointing towards the necessity of some kind of politicization of the economy. If the next decade brings the unification of the multitude of communicative media in a single apparatus reuniting the features of interactive computer, TV, video- and audio-phone, video and CD-player, and if Microsoft effectively succeeds in becoming the quasi-monopolistic owner of this new universal medium, controlling not only the language used in it but also the conditions of its application, then we obviously approach the absurd situation in which a single agent, exempted from public control, will effectively dominate the basic communicational structure of our lives and will thus in a way be stronger than any government. This effectively opens up the prospect of paranoiac scenarios: since the digital language we shall all use will nonetheless be man-made, constructed by programmers, is it not possible to imagine a corporation that owns it installing in it some special secret programme-ingredient which will enable it to control us, or a virus which the corporation can trigger and thus bring our communication to a halt? When biogenetic corporations assert their ownership of our genes through patenting them, they also give rise to a similar paradox of owning the innermost parts of our body, so that we are already owned by a corporation without even being aware of it. The prospect we are confronting is thus that both the communicational network we use and the genetic language we are made of will be owned and controlled by corporations (or even a corporation) out of public control. Does the very absurdity of this prospect - the private control of the very public base of our communication and reproduction, of the very network of our social being - again not impose as the only solution a kind of socialization? In other words, is the impact of the so-called informational revolution on capitalism not the ultimate exemplification of the old Marx's thesis that

"at a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production, or - what is but a legal expression of the same thing - with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto"?

Furthermore, does the antagonism contained in the notion of owning (scientific) knowledge since knowledge is in principle neutral towards its propagation, i.e. it is not worn by its spread and universal use not explain why today's capitalism has to resort to ever more absurd strategies to sustain the economy of scarcity in the sphere of information, and thus to contain within the frame of private property and market relations the demon it has unleashed (e.g., by way of inventing ever new modes of preventing the free copying of digitalized information)? In short, does the prospect of the informational "global village" not signal the end of market relations (which is by definition based on the logic of scarcity), at least in the sphere of digitalized information? The paradox of the US administration's legal action against the monopoly of Microsoft is in this respect very indicative: does this action not demonstrate how, far from being simply opposed, State regulation and market are mutually dependent? If left to itself, the market mechanism would lead to the full monopoly of Microsoft and thus to the self-cancellation of competition - it is only through direct state intervention (which, from time to time, orders overly large companies to break up) that market competition can be maintained...

Chapter 10 >>