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Courage!

Slavoj Zizek, "As Putin has proven, political madness is the new status quo: We used to hope that politicians wouldn't be held back from pursuing their personal visions by unnecessary bureaucracy and shadowy forces. Now we pray that they are"

Addressing members of the Russian parliament, Vladimir Putin said last week: “The missile's test launch and ground trials make it possible to create a brand new weapon, a strategic nuclear missile powered by a nuclear engine. The range is unlimited. It can manoeuvre for an unlimited period of time.

“No one in the world has anything similar,” he said to applause and concluded: “Russia still has the greatest nuclear potential in the world, but nobody listened to us. Listen to us now.”

Yes, we should listen to these words, but we should listen to them as to the words of a madman joining the duet of two other madmen.

Remember how, a little while ago, Kim Jong-un and Donald Trump competed about buttons to trigger nuclear missiles that they have at their disposal, with Trump claiming his button is bigger than Kim’s? Now we got Putin joining this obscene competition – which is, we should never forget it, a competition about who can destroy us all more quickly and efficiently – with the claim that his is the biggest in turn.

Lately our media reports on the more and more ridiculous exchange of insults between Kim and Trump. The irony of the situation is that, when we get (what appears to be) two immature men hurling insults at each other, our only hope is that there is some anonymous and invisible institutional constraint preventing their rage from exploding into all-out war. Usually, of course, we tend to complain that in today’s alienated and bureaucratised politics, institutional pressures and constraints prevent politicians from expressing their personal visions – now we hope such constraints will prevent the expression of all too crazy personal visions.

But does the danger really reside in personal pathologies? Each side can, of course, claim that it wants only peace and is only reacting to the threat posed by others – true, but what this means is that the madness is in the whole system itself, in the vicious cycle we are caught in once we participate in the system.

Although the differences between North Korea and the US are obvious, one should nonetheless insist that they both cling to the extreme version of state sovereignty (“North Korea first!” versus “America first!”), plus that the obvious madness of North Korea (a small country ready to risk it all and bomb the US) has its counterpart in the US still pretending to play the role of the global policeman, a single state assuming the right to decide which other state should be allowed to possess nuclear weapons.

This global madness becomes visible the moment we ask a simple question: how do the protagonists of nuclear threats (Kim, Trump, Putin) imagine pressing the button? Are they not aware of the almost 100 per cent certainty that their own country will also be destroyed by retaliatory strikes? Well, they are aware and not aware at the same time: although they know they will also perish, they talk as if they somehow stand out of the danger and can strike at the enemy from a safe place.

This schizophrenic position combines the two axioms of nuclear warfare. If the basic underlying axiom of the Cold War was MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), today this axiom is combined with the opposite one, that of NUTS (Nuclear Utilization Target Selection), i.e. the idea that, by means of a surgical strike, one can destroy the enemy's nuclear capacities while the anti-missile shield is protecting us from a counterstrike. The very fact that two directly contradictory strategies are mobilised simultaneously by the same superpower bears witness to the fantastical character of this entire reasoning.

In December 2016, this inconsistency reached an almost unimaginable ridiculous peak: both Trump and Putin emphasised the chance for new more friendly relations between Russia and the US, and simultaneously asserted their full commitment to the arms race – as if peace among the superpowers can only be provided by a new Cold War. Alain Badiou wrote that the contours of the future war are already drawn: “The United States and their Western-Japanese clique on the one side, China and Russia on the other side, atomic arms everywhere. We cannot but recall Lenin’s statement: ‘Either revolution will prevent the war or the war will trigger revolution.’”

There is no way to avoid the conclusion that a radical social change – a revolution – is needed to civilise our civilisations. We cannot afford the hope that a new war will lead to a new revolution: a new war would much more probably mean the end of civilisation as we know it, with the survivors (of any) organized in small authoritarian groups. North Korea is not a crazy exception in a sane world but a pure expression of the madness that drives our world.

On & Off

Communism failed in the 20th century, but is allowing the super-rich to dictate to the rest of humanity the only alternative system? Perhaps we need to design a socialist system, which also recognizes achievement.
Bill Gates, the second-richest person on Earth, has repeatedly criticized capitalism. Back in 2015 he explained his reasoning was based on a simple ecological calculation: the use of fossil fuels has to be radically reduced if we are to avoid a global catastrophe, and the private sector is too selfish to produce clean and economical alternatives to fossil fuels, which means humanity has to act outside market forces. Gates himself plans to spend $2 billion of his own money on green energy, even though there’s no fortune to be made from it, and he called on fellow billionaires to help make the US fossil-free by 2050 with similar philanthropy.

From an orthodox Leftist position, it is easy to make fun of the naivety of Gates’s proposal. However, the more these reproaches are right, the more they render palpable the misery of the genuine Left: where is THEIR feasible proposal on what we should do?

Because we know words matter in public debates: and even if what Gates is talking about is not “true Socialism,” he does talk about the fateful limitations of capitalism – and, again we can ask, do the self-proclaimed Socialists of the present have a serious vision of what Socialism should be today?

Thus, the paradox of our predicament is that, while the resistance against global capitalism seems to fail to undermine its advance, again and again, its opponents remain strangely out of touch with many trends which clearly signal capitalism’s progressive disintegration.

And it is as if the two tendencies (resistance and self-disintegration) move at different paces and cannot meet so that we get futile protests in parallel with talk of imminent decay, but there seems to be no way to bring the two together in a coordinated act (such as capitalism’s emancipatory overcoming).

Good billionaires?

How did it come to this? While (most of) the Left desperately tries to protect the old workers’ rights against the onslaught of global capitalism, it is almost exclusively the most “progressive” capitalists themselves (from Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg) who talk about post-capitalism – as if the very topic of passage from capitalism, as we know it, to a new post-capitalist order is appropriated by capitalism itself.

As a consequence, a new group of “organic intellectuals” is thus emerging: and they exemplify the privatization of our commons. The figure of Elon Musk is emblematic here, and he belongs to the same class as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and others: all ‘socially conscious’ billionaires. And they represent global capital at its most seductive and “progressive,” in short, at its most dangerous.

But can then these ultra-rich save us?

The German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk would not be Sloterdijk if he did not draw this provocative conclusion: previously, we thought that only the (united) poor could save the world, but the twentieth century has shown the catastrophic consequences of this attitude and the destructive violence which is engendered by universalized resentment.

Now, in the twenty-first century, we should finally have the courage to accept that only the rich can save the world, and we can argue that exceptionally creative individuals, who give generously, like Bill Gates and George Soros, have done more for the struggles for political freedom and against disease than has any state intervention.

Sloterdijk’s diagnosis should not be confused with the usual conservative-liberal rant against the so-called “resentment Left.” Because the central idea that sustains this rant is that we have had enough of the “welfare tyranny” that abounds in our “democratic despotism”; as in the Middle Ages, personal pride is today the greatest sin, and our fundamental right is more and more simply the “right to dependence.”

Alternative approach

“Welfare is today a drug on which more and more people depend. A good human idea turned into a kind of opium for the people,” as Norbert Bolz, another German thinker, explained.

But what makes Sloterdijk different is that he understands his proposal as a strategy to secure the survival of modern Europe's greatest economic-political achievement, the social democratic Welfare State. According to Sloterdijk, our reality — in Europe, at least — is “objective” social democracy as opposed to “subjective” social democracy. And to keep it alive, we should create a “new semantic,” a new space of hegemonic ideas in which the culture of pride, and the recognition of the achievers (not only fiscal but also moral), will have its proper place.

But can this work? I don’t think so. Let’s return to Bill Gates, he correctly locates the ultimate cause of our (ecological) problems in capitalism, and then, instead of proposing changes to the system itself, he appeals to the common sense of individual capitalists.

Yet, wouldn’t it be much more appropriate to try to create a non-capitalist system, which recognizes achievers? Are these two desires really irreconcilable?

-Slavoj Zizek, "Is it true that only progressive billionaires can save humanity?"

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