Slavoj ZIZEK

The Spectre Is Still
Roaming Around!

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

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

This, then, is the reason why The Communist Manifesto is still alive, perhaps more than ever, since the predicament it describes is heightened today to a new level of unbearable tension. The lesson of The Communist Manifesto for us today is that the dilemma "global market-liberalism or fundamentalism" is a false one. On the one hand, any hope that social antagonisms will be resolved through the further development of capitalist economy and its political counterpart, multiculturalist liberal democracy, is misleading: antagonistic tension is inscribed into the very notion of capitalism and thus cannot be attenuated through "more consequent" multicultural tolerance, struggle against ethnic or sexist fundamentalism and other "remainders of the past", etc. On the other hand, any return to traditional values (from Catholic or Islamic fundamentalism to Oriental New Age wisdom) is doomed to fail - not only because it is impotent in face of the thrust of Capital, but because attempts to reassert the old ways already by their very form reinforce the New (is today's televangelist, preaching the return to authentic traditional values, in the very form of his activity not already a mediatic show-man?).

Perhaps there is a grain of truth in its detractor's claims; perhaps the answers offered by The Communist Manifesto are no longer pertinent. However, in its very deficiency, The Communist Manifesto continues to address us, imposing upon us the task of reinventing the way out of the vicious cycle of capitalism. And why are we, from the "post-Communist" Eastern European countries, the ones to assume this task? Because we are compelled to live out and sustain the contradiction of the global capitalist New World Order at its most radical. The ideological dream of a unified Europe aims at achieving the (impossible) balance between the two components: full integration into the global market; retaining the specific national and ethnic identities. What we are getting in the post-Communist Eastern Europe is a kind of negative, distopian realization of this dream - in short, the worst of both worlds, unconstrained market combined with ideological fundamentalism.

The passage from really-existing Socialism to really-existing capitalism in Eastern Europe brought about a series of comic reversals of sublime democratic enthusiasm into the ridiculous. The dignified East German crowds gathering around Protestant churches and heroically defying Stasi terror suddenly turned into vulgar consumers of bananas and cheap pornography; the civilized Czechs mobilized by the appeal of Havel and other cultural icons suddenly turned into cheap swindlers of Western tourists The disappointment was mutual: the West, which began by idolizing the Eastern dissident movement as the reinvention of its own tired democracy, disappointedly dismisses the present post-Socialist regimes as a mixture of corrupt ex -Communist oligarchy and/or ethnic and religious fundamentalists; even the dwindling numbers of liberals are mistrusted as insufficiently "politically correct": where is their feminist awareness? etc.) The East, which began by idolizing the West as the model of affluent democracy, finds itself in the whirlpool of ruthless commercialization and economic colonization. So was all this worth the effort? The hero of Dashiell Hammett's Maltese Falcon, the private detective Sam Spade, narrates the story of his being hired to find a man who had suddenly left his settled job and family and vanished. Spade is unable to track him down, but, a few years later, he accidentally encounters the man in a bar in another city. Under an assumed name, the man leads there a life remarkably similar to the one he fled from (a regular boring job, a new wife and children). However, in spite of this similarity, the man is convinced that his beginning again was not in vain, that it was well worth the trouble to cut his ties and start a new life Perhaps the same goes for the passage from really-existing Socialism to really-existing capitalism in ex-Communist East European countries: despite the betrayal of enthusiastic expectations, something did take place in-between, in the passage itself, and it is in this Event which took place in-between, in this "vanishing mediator", in this moment of democratic enthusiasm, that we should locate the crucial dimension obfuscated by later capitalist renormalization.

It is clear that the protesting crowds in the gdr , Poland and the Czechoslovakia did wanted "something else", an utopian object of impossible Fullness designated by a multiplicity of names ("solidarity", "human rights", etc.), not what they actually got. Two reactions are possible towards this gap between expectations and reality; the best way to capture them is via reference to the well-known opposition between fool and knave. The fool is a simpleton, a court-jester who is allowed to tell the truth precisely because the "performative power" (the socio-political efficiency) of his speech is suspended; the knave is a cynic who openly states the truth, a crook who tries to sell the open admission of his crookedness as honesty, a scoundrel who admits the need for illegitimate repression in order to maintain social stability. After the fall of Socialism, the knave is a neoconservative advocate of the free market who cruelly rejects all forms of social solidarity as counterproductive sentimentalism, while the fool is a multiculturalist "radical" social criticist who, by means of his ludic procedures destined to "subvert" the existing order, actually serves as its supplement. With regard to Eastern Europe, a knave dismisses the "third way" project of Neues Forum in ex-ddr as hopelessly outdated utopia and exorts us to accept the cruel market reality, while a fool insists that the collapse of Socialism effectively opened up a Third Way, a possibility left unexploited by the Western re-colonization of the East.

This cruel reversal of the sublime into the ridiculous was, of course, grounded in the fact that there was a double misunderstanding at work in the public (self-)perception of the social protest-movements in the last years of Eastern European Socialism (from Solidarity to Neues Forum). On the one hand, there were the attempts of the ruling nomenklatura to reinscribe these events in their police/political framework, by distinguishing between "honest critics" with whom one could discuss, but in a calm, rational, depoliticized atmosphere, and a bunch of extremist provocateurs who serve foreign interests. The battle was thus not only for higher wages and better conditions, but also and above all for the workers to be acknowledged as legimitate partners in negotiating with the representative of the regime - the moment that power was forced to accept this, the battle was in a way already won. When these movements exploded in a broad mass phenomenon, their demands for freedom and democracy (and solidarity and) were also misperceived by Western commentators who saw them confirmation that the people of the East also want what the people in the West already have: they automatically translated these demands into the Western liberal-democratic notion of freedom (the multi-party representational political game cum global market economy). Emblematic to the point of caricature was the figure of Dan Rather, the American news reporter, on Tienanmen Square in 1989, standing in front of the copy of the Statue of Liberty and claiming that this statue says it all about what the protesting students demand (in short, if you scratch the yellow skin of a Chinese, you find an American). What this Statue effectively stood for was a utopian longing having nothing to do with the actual usa (incidentally, it was the same with the original immigrants to America, for whom the view of the Statue stood for a utopian longing soon to be crushed). The perception of the American media thus offered another example of the reinscription of the explosion of what Etienne Balibar has called egaliberté (the unconditional demand for freedom-equality which explodes any positive order) within the confines of a given order.

Are we then condemned to the debilitating alternative of choosing between a knave or a fool, or is there a tertium datur? If The Communist Manifesto still has something to say to us, then there is still hope for a tertium datur.