Two books by Slavoj Zizik (“Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism”, 1038 pp., and “Living in the End Times”, 504 pp.) were  reviewed by John Gray ("The Violent Visions of Slavoj Zizek") in the July 12, 2012 issue of The New York Review of Books. Professor Gray is to be commended for wading through 1500 pages of undiluted Zizek (and perhaps saving some of us from having to do so). I propose to review Gray's article and thus give a meta-critique, as it were, of some of Zizek's views as presented by Gray. If anyone is stimulated to go on to read Zizek so much the better, or worse as the case may be. You can find Gray's original article here:The Violent Visions of Slavoj Žižek by John Gray | The New York ...…. My reflections are divided into five parts.


1.) Zizek has produced over 60 books in the last two decades or so and has become one of the most famous public intellectuals in the West; propounding a sort of non-Marxist Marxism. The NY Review article has a picture of the philosopher sitting up in his bed in Ljubljana, Slovenia with a framed picture of Stalin on the wall behind him. New Yorkers may remember that he addressed the OWS movement in Zuccotti Park.


So what is Zizek's message? At one time he was a member of the Communist Party of Slovenia but he quit in 1988 and has since articulated a critique of capitalist society more influenced by a strange version of Hegel than by Marx. Gray says a CENTRAL THEME of ZZ's work "is the need to shed the commitment to intellectual objectivity that guided radical thinkers in the past."  Intellectual objectivity is a BOURGEOIS ILLUSION and most radicals, at least most Marxists, have always been partisans for the working class. Gray should be clearer about what ZZ is trying to express with this criticism.


ZZ wants to, in his own words, "repeat the Marxist 'critique of political economy', without the utopian-ideological notion of communism as its inherent standard." We had better be pretty familiar with, at least, the three big volumes of Das Kapital before we decide on accepting ZZ's "repeat" of Marx's project! ZZ doesn't think the world communist movement was radical enough. He writes, "the twentieth-century communist project was utopian precisely insofar as it was not radical enough." What does this mean? "Marx's notion of the communist society," ZZ writes, "is itself the inherent capitalist fantasy; that is, a fantasmatic scenario for resolving the capitalist antagonisms he so aptly described."


2.) It is all very well for ZZ to put down what he thinks is Marx's notion of communist society, but as a matter of fact neither Marx nor Engels spent much time speculating about a future communist society precisely because they thought such idle speculation unwarranted; they were more interested in dissecting the nature of capitalism and the methods needed to overthrow it. ZZ at least follows their example as Gray points out that nowhere in the 1000+ pages of “Less Than Nothing” does ZZ discuss what he thinks a future communist society would/should be like.


What he does discuss  says Gray (who calls the book a "compendium" of all ZZ's past work) is his new and unique interpretation of Hegel (by way of Jacques Lacan's unscientific reinterpretation of Freud) and its application to a new reading of Marx. In other words, the arch-rationalist Hegel is viewed from the point of view of the irrationalist Lacan and this mishmash of misinterpretation is used to explain Marx to us. 


One of Lacan's teachings is that REALITY cannot be properly understood by LANGUAGE. Which, if true, would make science impossible and bar us from ever understanding the nature of the world we live in. But it is language that Lacan uses to tell us something about the nature of reality, i.e., that language can't do that! Lacan also rejected Hegel's view that Reason is imminent in history. Big deal-- Marx and the entire history of post-Hegelian materialism has rejected this notion of Absolute Idealism for the last 150 years or more and no one needed Lacan to tell us about the outmodedness of this Hegelian notion. 


But ZZ thinks that Lacan has shown more than just that Hegel was wrong to think that Reason Rules the World. ZZ, says Gray, thinks that Lacan has shown "the impotence of reason."  This is a fundamental attack on the legacy of the Enlightenment upon which all attempts to understand the world scientifically and rationally are based; it is ultimately a fascist outlook.


ZZ has also been influenced by the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou (who has been himself influenced by Lacan and, shudder, Heidegger and has developed a form of Platonic Marxism).  Using some of Badiou's ideas ZZ constructs his own view of "dialectics" as being based, Gray says, on "the rejection  of the logical principle of noncontradiction." ZZ imputes this view to Hegel and thus claims Hegel rejected reason. ZZ writes  that for Hegel a (logical) proposition "is not  really suppressed by its negation." ZZ credits Hegel with the invention of a new type of logic: "paraconsistent  logic."


This is really confused. We have to distinguish between FORMAL LOGIC where the law of non-contradiction reigns, and Hegel's metaphysics or ontology of Being where there are different sorts of logic at work-- subjective logic (thoughts) and objective logic (the external world). But even here it is not a question of a "proposition" being suppressed. Hegel says neither things nor thoughts care for contradictions and when contradictions appear there is a movement to overcome and resolve them on higher levels of understanding and reason-- this is the inherent motion driving the "dialectic" a motion to overcome and eliminate contradictions.


Despite these considerations, ZZ forges ahead with his ill conceived "paraconsistant logic."  "Is not," he writes, "'postmodern' capitalism an increasingly paraconsistant system in which, in a variety of modes, P is non-P: the order is its own transgression, capitalism can thrive under communist rule, and so on?" 


At this point Gray quotes a long passage from “Less Than Nothing” in which ZZ lays out the main theme of his book dealing with the response needed to "postmodern" capitalism: "The underlying premise of the present book is a simple one: the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. Its 'four riders of the apocalypse' are comprized by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions." ZZ misses here the fact that the four horsemen of the capitalist apocalypse are simply four manifestations  of the same fundamental contradiction underpinning the entire capitalist system, namely, the private appropriation of socially created wealth.


At this point Gray launches an unjustified attack on ZZ, accusing him of ignoring "historical facts" such as the environmental damage done by the Soviet Union and to the countryside by Mao's "cultural revolution." You can't just blame capitalism since both the SU and China had centrally planned economies. History, Gray says, does not provide any evidence that replacing capitalism by socialism will better protect the environment. 


What does "history" really show? Just take the case of the Soviet Union. The soviets tried to build socialism but were attacked by the western capitalist powers from day one. They had to take short cuts to industrialize and fend off the Nazi attack, and then the Nazi successor state as US imperialism took up the anti-communist crusade. China has a similar history. All parties in this conflict were societies still under the rule of the law of value, the reigning economic force in commodity producing economies. Socialism did not thrive (nor could it have thrived) in the primitive backward conditions it developed under in the 20th century. If socialist central planning were to replace the social anarchy of capitalism in the advanced capitalist states of the west (including Japan) where production could be based on need not profit (thus overcoming the law of value) we would be able to reign in our four apocalyptic horsemen and literally save the planet. This is what "history" really suggests and Gray's attack on ZZ on this issue is unjustified.


However, his next attack on ZZ has merit. ZZ's "Marxism" lacks any relation to the actual class struggle and does not reflect Marx's commitment to a materialist dialectic grounded in the empirical reality of day to day economic struggle. Here is what ZZ says: "Today's historical juncture does not compel us to drop the notion of the proletariat, or of the proletarian position--- on the contrary, it compels us to radicalize it to an existential level beyond even Marx's imagination. We need a more radical notion of the proletarian subject [i.e., the thinking and acting human being], a subject reduced to the evanescent point of the Cartesian cogito, deprived of its substantial content." 


This is just ridiculous. The worker treated in complete isolation from his/her class and relation to the means of production, treated as an isolated human being, is simply retrograde bourgeois idealism and in no way a more radical conception than that of Marx. It is an abandonment of the concept of the proletariat, or working class, as understood by Marxists.


3.) ZZ in fact abandons objectivity for a completely subjective position. "The truth we are dealing with here," he writes, "is not 'objective truth' but the self-relating truth about one's own subjective position; as such it is an engaged truth, measured not by its factual accuracy but by the way it affects  the subjective position of enunciation." In other words, "truth" is what inspires me to feel good about my chosen path-- my "project" and reinforces me in my actions to attain the fulfillment of my "project." ZZ thinks a communist society would be nice but doesn't think it's really possible to attain but that doesn't mean we should not act up and agitate against the status quo. ZZ also thinks it’s ok to engage in terror if it helps my subjective enunciation. He supports Badiou's position in favor of "emancipatory terror" and lauds Mao's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.


To top off this witch's brew of petty bourgeois pseudo-revolutionary clap-trap, ZZ, Gray points out, "praises the Khmer Rouge." For all the meaningless killings Pol Pot and his gang indulged in ZZ does not blame their fall from grace as related to their barbarity. "The Khmer Rouge, were," he says, "in a way, not radical enough: while they took the abstract negation of the past to the limit [this is how a "Hegelian" refers to the killing fields!-tr] they did not invent any new form of collectivity." Would a new form of collectivity have justified their actions? [As we shall see ZZ rejects these criticisms by Gray on the grounds that his theory of violence has been misunderstood].


ZZ even goes so far as to call himself a Leninist. Gray gives a quote from a 2009 interview where ZZ remarks that: "I am a Leninist. Lenin wasn't afraid to dirty his hands. If you can get power, grab it." Gray is right to think that Lenin (as well as Marx) would hold ZZ's views in contempt. Lenin recognized the need for violence, it would be forced upon the workers by the ruling class, but he never celebrated it in the manner of ZZ who thinks it should be applied in a terrorist manner as a morale booster for the radical movement even though a successful revolution to get rid of capitalism is impossible. Gray gives another gem from ZZ on this topic: "Francis Fukuyama was right: global capitalism is 'the end of history.'" Very few, if any, people claiming to be Leninists believe that Fukuyama was right; I don't think, based on some of his current writings, that even Fukuyama thinks he was right.


4.) In this section I will deal with some valid points Gray makes against ZZ's fascination with the cult of violence, but points that are tarnished by Gray's own hyper cold war anti-communism and distortion of facts. ZZ does not think class conflict has an objective basis, according to Gray, who produces this quote from ZZ maintaining that class war is not "a conflict between particular agents within social reality: it is not a difference between agents (which can be described by means of a detailed social analysis), but an antagonism ('struggle') which constitutes these agents." It is therefore ultimately subjective-- just the opposite of what Marx and Lenin held.


To illustrate his position ZZ discusses the collectivization of agriculture and the struggle against the kulaks in the USSR in the 1920s and 30s. ZZ makes a valid observation that often non-Kulak poorer peasants  joined with the kulaks in opposing collectivization. This was a case of false consciousness. Americans are familiar with this phenomenon when they observe working people and minorities voting for the Republican Party and conservative candidates. ZZ says the Kulak non-Kulak boundary was often "blurred and unworkable: in a situation of generalized poverty, clear criteria no longer applied and the other two classes of peasants (poor and middle peasants -tr) often joined the kulaks (rich peasants- tr) in their resistance to forced collectivization." 


ZZ goes on to say, " The art of identifying a kulak was thus no longer a matter of objective social analysis; it became a kind of complex 'hermeneutics of suspicion," of identifying and individual's  'true political attitudes" hidden beneath his or her deceptive public proclamations." This is, by the way, the same "hermeneutics" Americans have to use, following the maxim that "all politicians are liars and say one thing but do another," when they try to figure out what candidates are saying and how they will actually behave once in office. 


 ZZ is wrong to think of this as a subjective process of self identification. Cases of false consciousness have objective social conditions (miseducation, prejudicial propaganda, poverty, illiteracy) as their causes. Gray is wrong, I think, to call ZZ's view "repugnant and grotesque" because he appeals to hermeneutics and doesn't criticize Stalin for killing millions of people but for using Marxist theory to try and explain what the actions of the USSR were with respect to collectivization. The idea that Soviet policy was to bring about forced collectivization by killing millions of people is a relic of cold war bunko. I recommend Michael Parenti's “Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism”  for a balanced discussion of the role of violence in Soviet history.


However, ZZ is to be faulted for rejecting using Marxist theory to understand and explain political actions. He says that a time comes to junk theory because "at some point the process has to be cut short with a massive and brutal intervention of subjectivity: class belonging is never a purely objective social fact, but is always also the result of struggle and social engagement." But you cannot have a successful people's movement (struggle and engagement) without a correct  analysis of the purely objective  social facts-- otherwise the movement has to rely on spontaneity and no movement has grown and prospered that based itself on spontaneity.


An idea of how far down the wrong road a social theorist calling him/herself a "Leninist" can wander is revealed by ZZ's attitudes towards Hitler and the Nazi apologist Martin Heidegger. Concerning Heidegger, ZZ writes, "His involvement with the Nazi's was not a simple mistake [of course not-- it was the essence of his world view-- tr] , but rather a 'right step in the wrong direction.'" How does ZZ arrive at this? He has a new reading of Heidegger to propose. He says, "Reading Heidegger against the grain, one discovers a thinker who was, at some points strangely close to communism…." Gray points out that ZZ  claims that the radically pro-Hitler Heidegger of the mid 1930s could even be classified as "a future communist."  Indeed. What future does ZZ have in mind? Heidegger died in 1976 without ever, to my knowledge, having become any kind of communist.


ZZ thinks Heidegger was wrong, but also kind of right, in being a follower of Hitler, because there was a big problem with Hitler. Here is what it was, according to ZZ's own words quoted by Gray: "The problem with Hitler was that 'he was not violent enough,'  his violence was not "essential" enough. Hitler did not really act, all his actions were fundamentally reactions, for he acted so that nothing would really change, staging a gigantic spectacle of pseudo-Revolution so that the capitalist order  would survive….  The true problem of Nazism is not that it 'went too far' in its subjectivist-nihilist hubris [ I am tempted to say it takes one to know one- tr] of exercising total power, but that it did not go far enough, that its violence was an impotent acting-out  which, ultimately, remained in the service of the very order it despised."


There is so much wrong with this that I hardly know where to begin. In the first place there was only one socio-economic order at any rate that Hitler "despised" and wanted to destroy-- that was the order represented by the Soviet Union (he also despised and wanted to destroy the Jews.) Hitler used all the power at his disposal to accomplish his aims. It is impossible to conceive of what destruction Hitler could have wrought if had used (and had) the means to wreak even more violence on the world that he in fact did. He would not have destroyed capitalism as that was the economic order he furthered in Germany-- it was socialism, Marxism that he wanted to destroy. The Nazi's also rejected bourgeois democracy-- but because it was too weak to save the West from the hoards of semi-barbaric Bolshevik Untermenshen waiting to burst out of the Soviet Union and inundate Aryan Europe. If World War II was an impotent acting-out, I shudder to think what Hitler could have achieved if he was on ZZ's  political viagra.


But what about the Jews? What about anti-Semitism? Gray suggests that ZZ's attitude towards eliminating anti-Semitism from the world would also involve eliminating the Jews. This may or may not be so but it does not make ZZ an anti-Semite; it only shows, if that is what he means, that he accepts the ultra-right Zionist view that non Jews will always be against Jews and the only solution is an exclusively Jewish state. Well, what does ZZ say about all this?


He states that "The fantasmatic [ZZ's own word for "fantastic"- tr]  status of anti-Semitism is clearly revealed by a statement attributed to Hitler: 'We have to kill the Jew within us.'" He continues: "Hitler's statement says more than it wants to say: against his intentions, it confirms that the Gentiles need the anti-Semitic figure of the "Jew" in order to maintain their identity. [Oh my! I hope Herr Hitler is not the representative spokesperson for the "Gentiles." Hitler's statement doesn't confirm anything other than his own personal anti-Semitism-tr] It is thus not only that 'the Jew is within us'-- what Hitler fatefully forgot to add is that he, the anti-Semite, is also in the Jew.  What does this paradoxical entwinement mean for the destiny of anti-Semitism?" 


Gray admits to having problems trying to figure just what ZZ means (he is too prolix and uses terms out of context from different philosophies to describe his own quite different views) but it seems quite a stretch to suggest that ZZ may be soft on anti-Semitism. ZZ himself has taken great umbrage at Gray's comments in this review and has penned a response that it is well worth reading and claims to set the record straight on this issue.  [“Slavoj Zizek Responds to His Critics”]


5.) An example Gray gives of using terms out of context is ZZ's assertion that one may say that Gandhi was more violent than Hitler. Why would anyone want to say that except for "shock value?" ZZ says, in his reply to Gray, that Gray has misinterpreted him. ZZ believes in a type of violence in which "no blood is shed" and then refers to Gandi's struggles against the British in India-- usually referred to as based on "nonviolence." Since "nonviolence" is a special sort of "violence" it appears that since Ghandi was more nonviolent than Hitler he was more violent than Hitler. This is the "Hegelian" dialectic run amuck.


Here is another example of ZZ, saying nothing according to Gray, engaging in meaningless wordplay. "The … virtualization of capitalism is ultimately the same as that of the electron in particle physics. The mass of each elementary particle is composed of its mass at rest plus the surplus provided by the acceleration of its movement; however, an electron's mass at rest is zero [sic], its mass consists only of the surplus generated by the acceleration, as if we are dealing with a nothing which acquires some deceptive substance only by magically spinning itself into an excess of itself." I'm not sure what ZZ is trying to say here about electrons, let alone capitalism (is surplus value "magical") but I don't think the rest mass of an electron is zero in the first place. For what it is worth Wikipedia says "The electron rest mass (symbol: me) is the mass of a stationary electron. It is one of the fundamental constants of physics….  It has a value of about 9.11×10−31 kilograms or about 5.486×10−4 atomic mass units, equivalent to an energy of about 8.19×10−14 joules or about 0.511 megaelectronvolts." 


Granted it is a very small mass, an electron is, after all, a very small particle-- but it is not zero. ZZ expects us to read 1038 pages of this stuff!  It might be a good reference book to ZZ ideas-- which don't seem to be very Leninist-- the index has 10 references to Lenin while Lacan has over 2 columns devoted to his views! Gray is a hostile reviewer, but he is also hostile to Marxism, nevertheless, his review calls into question ZZ's basic methods of thinking and expressing himself (Gray says he represents "formless radicalism"). To get some idea of where Gray is coming from (I don't think it's a very nice place since it's anti-Enlightenment) check out the following: John N. Gray - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
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​This is a reply to Slavoj Zizek's article "Mandela's Socialist Failure" published online in The Stone (a New York Times maintained philosophy blog) on December 6, 2013. In eight pithy paragraphs Zizek endeavors to expose the real legacy of Mandela as opposed to his current "beatification." The Catholic Church used to have someone play the role of Devil's Advocate to denigrate the reputation of a person nominated to become a saint. Zizek has taken it upon himself to see to it that Mandela's "beatification" does not progress to full fledged "sainthood."

Zizek's mantra is that "Mandela was not Mugabe"-- the "good" as opposed to the "bad" Black African leader. Mandela is seen as "a saintly wise man" and Hollywood even makes movies about him. He was "impersonated" by Morgan Freeman who, Zizek points out also impersonated God! Oh my!-- what are they trying to tell us? Zizek should perhaps be reminded that Morgan Freeman is an outstanding actor (or impersonator if you prefer) and has played many roles-- including a chauffeur. And, Zizek notes, "rock stars and religious leaders, sportsmen and politicians from Bill Clinton to Fidel Castro are all united in his beatification." Somehow I don't see Fidel Castro as a "politician" in quite the same way as the unprincipled pragmatist Bill Clinton. Nor do I think Fidel and Clinton are "united" in their evaluations of Nelson Mandela-- far from it. According to Zizek, Mandela is hailed for leaving behind "a muti-party democracy with free press and a vibrant [!] economy well-integrated into the global market and immune [!] to hasty Socialist experiments."

But what is the truth about this man's legacy? The Devil's Advocate will reveal "two key facts" that are "obliterated" by all the pro-Mandela beatification activities. Fact One: There is still wide spread poverty and social misery in South Africa and an increase in "insecurity, violence, and crime." The majority of Black South Africans are living "broadly," Zizek says, "the same as under apartheid." This fact "counterbalances" any "rise of political and civil rights." What is the "main change" in South Africa since the time of Mandela according to Zizek? It is a "new black elite" has joined the "old white ruling class"-- not a new constitution giving equal rights to all citizens and allowing all South Africans to live and work together.

Zizek's statements are completely ridiculous. There are deepening economic problems in South Africa today as well as class divisions but Black people and all South Africans no longer have to carry passes, all can vote, people can go to the same beaches and hotels, etc. The millions who mourned the death of Mandela are acutely aware of the problems facing their country and also aware that the repressive, dehumanizing regime of official racism and apartheid is dead. To think that reality has been "obliterated" in the consciousness of South African people by a Mandela sainthood cult is an insulting affront to the citizens of the new South Africa and reeks of a colonial European outlook towards African peoples. So much for "Fact One."

Fact Two: Black South Africans are becoming angry because the memory of the aims of the "old" African National Congress (social justice and a "kind of" socialism are being "obliterated from our memory." Far from being "obliterated" the program of the ANC and its allies in the labor unions and the South African Communist Party are constantly debated and discussed by the people of South Africa and the demands for more radical reforms and more progressive policies can be democratically advanced. Zizek overlooks the fact that there is a real living democracy at the root of the New South Africa and that Nelson Mandela played a major role in its creation. The millions mourning his passing are not mindless masses with "obliterated" memories.

According to Zizek South Africa is just another example of the current left paradigm: the left comes to power promising a "new world" but then confronts the reality of the international neoliberal capitalist consensus . Imperialism can speedily punish countries trying to embark on the socialist road. In South Africa's case political power was ceded to the ANC on condition that the existing economic system was preserved . It was thought that this prevented a civil war of massive proportions.

This Historic Compromise (called by some a Faustian pack with the old regime) is at the root of the current problems of poverty and mass discontent in the country.

Zizek is sympathetic to Mandela's dilemma -- create a "new world"-- risk a civil war-- or "play the game" and abandon the "socialist perspective." [There is too much focus on Mandela here-- these decisions were made collectively by the leaders of all the major forces in the liberation movement.] Zizek asks a question that is still hotly debated today. Given the constellation of forces facing the ANC et al on the assumption of power "was the move towards socialism a real option?" [Compromise was indeed necessary, but did the ANC concede too much?]
Seemingly inspired by Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (a coming of age novel for adolescent libertarians), Zizek looks for "the grain of truth" in the "hymn to money" found in the novel: "Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to become the means by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of other men. Blood, whips and guns or dollars. Take your choice-- there is no other."

Not only is there no "grain of truth" in this "hymn" but when human beings only deal with each other on the basis of money we get all the horrors of blood, whips and guns that humans employ against each other in order to obtain and control more and more money (slavery, colonialism, imperialism, fraud-- you name it). It is not humans per se, of course, who engage in these horrors, but a special class of humans (capitalists) created by the dominant economic system of monopoly capitalism.

Not content with uncovering a grain of truth in Randism, Zizek imputes the same idea to Karl Marx-- a most un-Randian leap of fallaciousness. He asks if Marx's ideas about "the universe of commodities" were not similar to what Rand said in her hymn about money. After all Marx said under capitalism "relations between people assume the guise of relations among things." This is a perfect example of a non sequitur and I defy anyone to find the similarity between Marx's statements about the fetishism of commodities and Rand's view "that money is the root of all good."

Zizek's confusions continue. He thinks that the relations between people in the "market economy" can appear "as relations of mutually recognized freedom and equality." Maybe in the days of Adam Smith but I doubt even then. Donald Trump and his chauffeur hardly are equals or exercise the same amount of freedom. Mitt Romney thought 47 per cent of the American people were social parasites and he is an outstanding representative of the freedom and equally offered by the "market economy." Most working people know exactly their relations to their bosses and it not only appears to be unequal and unfree (who gets the pink slip and loses unemployment insurance) it is unequal and unfree-- and all of Ayn Rand's baloney will never make it otherwise.

It is obvious to any aware working person, that the blatant inequality and restrictions on human freedom under the "market economy" lived and felt by millions of Greek workers, Spanish working people, and others in the EU and throughout the world, that Zizek's view -- under capitalism "domination is no longer directly enacted and visible as such" -- is just nonsense. Such ruminations by a famous philosopher can only give philosophy a bad name.

While Zizek says that Ayn Rand's ideological claim (only the love of money can free people) is ridiculous, he persists in reminding us of the "moment of truth" it contains. The problem, he thinks, is Rand's "underlying premise" which is "that the only choice is between direct and indirect relations of domination and exploitation" and any alternative is "utopian." Ayn Rand has no such premise. She thinks in simple dichotomies. Unfettered dynamic capitalism and the love of money is GOOD and it is in no way, direct or indirect, involved in any relations of domination and exploitation-- it is the root of GOODNESS. On the other hand any efforts by liberals , socialists, misguided Catholic popes, or anybody else that impinges on this system of goodness is EVIL and a direct source domination and exploitation.

Zizek, however, thinks the "moment of truth" in Ayn Rand's theory of money is that it teaches us "the great lesson of state socialism." Despite Zizek's discovery of the Randian "moment of truth," I don't recommend using Atlas Shrugged as a prolegomena to any future socialism. This is the "truth" that Zizek has discovered.

If you abolish private property (God forbid!) and the market without concretely regulating production then you resuscitate "direct relations of servitude and domination." What does this mean? What "state socialist" country or countries can he be referring to that did not or do not have plans that regulate production? So called "state socialism" was famous for having "central planning" and tried to concretely regulate both production and distribution. As it stands Zizek's lesson is pointless.

He expands on his lesson. If we just abolish the market "without replacing it with a proper form of Communist organization of production and exchange, domination returns with a vengeance, and with it direct exploitation." This isn't very helpful. Communism doesn't spring full blown from the brow of Lenin the day after the revolution. What does Zizek think is the "proper form" of Communism. He gives us no clue in this article. I fear there is no lesson at all to be learned from Ayn Rand's "moment of truth." Certainly not Zizek's tautology that socialism fails to create communism if it doesn't create the proper form of communism.

Zizek now propounds a "general rule"-- it is really just his way of saying the more things change the more they stay the same. It goes like this: when the people rise up against "an oppressive half-democratic regime" [what is a "half-democracy"-- people either have democratic rights or they don't] it's "easy" to get large demonstrations underway [I think that's what rising up means] and crowd pleasing slogans are devised (pro democracy, anti-corruption, etc) but after the "revolt succeeds" the people find themselves still oppressed as they were before except in a "new guise."

This seems to me to be a strange concept of what a "successful" revolt is. Zizek seems to think it is some sort of spontaneous generation of all things good and great for the people and if doesn't happen overnight, then the revolt has failed. His case studies are of the revolts "in the Middle East in 2011." He doesn't seem to understand that these are ongoing processes. The French Revolution didn't end with chopping off the King's head. The revolts may have been begun in the Middle East in 2011 but they are ongoing processes with ups and downs, advances and set backs and it much to early to decide which have failed and which have succeeded or even what "failure" or "success" will mean in the longue duree.

Zizek plogs along. The people do not succeed because they are prevented from seeing that their exploitation continues in the new guise after the revolution by the "ruling ideology" which blames them for their failure because they don't understand that they are not yet mature enough for full democracy [ and anyway, as Lady Thatcher put it, 'there is no alternative" to capitalism (TINA)]. Zizek doesn't make sense here because he maintains both that the people don't realize the same old exploitation is going on and that they do realize it but are themselves blamed for it by the "ruling ideology." I think Zizek will find "the people" a bit more sophisticated and not as simple minded as he portrays them.

Zizek now explains how US foreign policy has developed a strategy that redirects the revolutionary energy of a popular revolt into political forms desired by US imperialism (not a word used by Zizek in this article). The US did this in South Africa after the end of apartheid. If this is the case then the ANC, Mandela, the SACP, and entire liberation movement were puppets of US imperialist foreign policy. While he is at it, Zizek also says the same was done in the Philippines, post Marcos, in Indonesia, post Suharto, "and elsewhere."

Now US foreign policy is indeed a formidable enemy of the people's of the world but the explanation for the problems of liberation movements in attaining their stated goals after the assumption of power can't simply be explained by saying they are victims of US foreign policy's elaborate "detailed strategy of how to exert damage control." In fact, as Wikileaks has shown, the people in charge of US foreign policy often don't know what they are doing, set in motion ridiculous plans, and often end making a mess out of whatever they had in mind to accomplish.

US foreign policy is by and large incompetent and its agents, diplomats, Congressmen and women, generals, cabinet members, and intelligence professionals can only foam at the mouth and yell "treason" when a young soldier, performing his duty to the Constitution of the United States, Chelsea Manning, reveals some "secret" wires showing up the blunders and failures of the "professionals" in the state department and others and how they try to mislead the American people. In any event, Zizek says the big problem of the liberation movements is in finding a way to counteract US policies. As he puts it-- "how to move further from Mandela without becoming Mugabe." Perhaps a dialectical synthesis. Is Zizek is waiting for Mangabe?

Finally, Zizek tells us what to do "to remain faithful to Mandela's legacy"-- a legacy he just told us was a failure and capitulation to imperialism. Zizek is just the philosopher of that kind of legacy. One he himself calls of "unfulfilled promises" and one that didn't "really disturb the global order of power." We must forget the "celebratory crocodile tears" shed for Mandela and his leadership. I think that the people of South Africa and many of the dignitaries (but not all) at his memorial and funeral would, and should be, outraged to be accused of faking their feelings for Mandela. We must instead concentrate on his failures. He ended his life as a "bitter old man" realizing his hero status "was the mask of a bitter defeat." How does Zizek know this? He thinks, this is the type of philosopher he is, that "we can safely surmise" this to be the case because "of his doubtless moral and political greatness." What sense is there in saying there is political greatness in being a bitter old defeated man. Is the true founder of democratic South Africa then president F. W. de Klerk who is neither bitter nor considered a failure? Where is the moral greatness in bitterness?

The truth is that Mandela was a realist who made unavoidable compromises to free his people from apartheid, that he and his comrades in the ANC and SACP and the trade union movements forged a revolutionary struggle that toppled one of the most repressive political regimes in the world-- one backed by the post powerful imperialism in the world and its allies. This was not a failure to attain "socialism." Socialism cannot be imposed from above, it must be struggled for by working and oppressed people themselves and Mandela helped found the preconditions for that struggle.

The fact that the mighty of the world came to his memorial is testimony not that he failed "to disturb the global order of power" but that he profoundly shook it and they are eager to co-op his message and be identified with him because they know that all over the world at this very moment millions of oppressed people in both the centers of capitalist power and in the neocolonial fringes are beginning to rise up and demand their rights and that they have much to learn from the tactics of the South African liberation movement. Slavol Zizek's libels notwithstanding, Nelson Mandela was a great revolutionary leader who freed his people from oppression and inspires masses around the world to fight for a better world-- he was the farthest it was possible to be from a "bitter old man."

​​​​​​​About the Author:
Thomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association.

​​​​​​About the Author:
Thomas Riggins is a retired philosophy teacher (NYU, The New School of Social Research, among others) who received a PhD from the CUNY Graduate Center (1983). He has been active in the civil rights and peace movements since the 1960s when he was chairman of the Young People's Socialist League at Florida State University and also worked for CORE in voter registration in north Florida (Leon County). He has written for many online publications such as People's World and Political Affairs where he was an associate editor. He also served on the board of the Bertrand Russell Society and was president of the Corliss Lamont chapter in New York City of the American Humanist Association.

The year 2020 saw unprecedented waves of political activism. Between 15 and 26 million people participated in the demonstrations, making this happening the largest movement in American history. The Women’s March of 2017 had 3 to 5 million on a single day, even as a highly organized event, which reflected the scale and scope of the Summer Demonstrations.1 The murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor by police spurred outrage across the United States and brought an unprecedented wave of support for structural police reform. The Summer Demonstrations of 2020 were met by tear gas, rubber bullets, beatings, and in some places, protesters were arrested by federal law enforcement on suspect grounds and without explanation, identification, or acknowledgement of Miranda rights. In lay terms, citizens were taken off the streets without concern for legality by the Department of Homeland Security.2 These acts of state violence were unusual, we didn’t see these methods employed at the Women’s March of 2017 or March for Our Lives of 2018, although they were also demonstrations of unprecedented size.  The recent protests are different in that their discourse threatens the very ability of the state to reproduce its own hegemony by functioning on ideology and repression. The Summer Demonstrations called for structural change: we did not believe that police training reform or individual accountability of police officers is sufficient for the desired change, these issues are rooted in the history of the institution of policing itself. The object of desire is not reformist, it is structural- it is revolutionary.  
​

 The rhetoric of the 2020 Summer Demonstrations challenged the way we think about police and state, our opinions and assumptions; they challenged the discourse of American politics, and in doing so have threatened the stability of the hegemonic ideology, which is to say the state ideology. When the people begin to threaten state ideology, the Repressive State Apparatus serves to defend it with force to deter further action- acting on repression primarily, and ideology secondarily. A threat to state ideology, in the spatial metaphor of the edifice, is lifting the veil on the superstructure where ideology is determined by the base (means and relations of production) and is a step in the development of class consciousness. This paper will build off the spatial metaphor using Althusser’s structural theory to identify how ideology can be threatened, and how the state responds to it when threatened. 

Marx’s spatial metaphor of the edifice is his explanation of how our material existence (means and relations of production, I.e class structure, centralization of capital, private ownership) determines our social existence (socio-political structures, legal structures, ideology, ideological state apparatuses). By the logic of his metaphor, if the base undergoes a change, the superstructure will be shaped accordingly. Inversely, if the superstructure is changed, then the base may come to reflect these changes. The base heavily determines the superstructure in Marx’s metaphor, but the superstructure doesn’t quite share the same deterministic strength. The superstructure may push and nudge, but not necessarily move. Change in the superstructure undermines the ground upon which the base is maintained. As a deterministic factor, the base resists change from the structures it determines, but if it is no longer capable of determining ideology, then its cycle of reproduction is endangered. 
​
In “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” Louis Althusser elaborates on Marx’s spatial metaphor to explore ideology and identify what he calls the Ideological State Apparatus. He first remarks that “for each [Ideological State Apparatus], the various institutions and organizations comprising it form a system.” He proceeds,  

Systems, however, do not evolve or change on their own- an external force must break their cyclical motion. Althusser writes, “ideology ‘functions’ at its most concrete level, the level of individual ‘subjects’: that is, people as they exist in their concrete individuality, in their work, daily lives, acts, commitments, hesitations, doubts, and sense of what is most immediately self-evident.”5 

This implies a few important things. First, that ideological apparatuses do not exist in isolation- they are inextricably tied together into the system which Althusser calls the Ideological State Apparatus, or ISA for short. Therefore, a shift in one ideological apparatus impacts the Ideological State Apparatus as a whole, which in turn has the ability to influence the base it emerged from. Goran Therborn elaborates on Althusser’s idea, which is that ideology functions on the level of individuals. If we accept this, then we are bound to admit that individuals have the capacity for agency in the realm of ideology. Therborn writes that “to conceive a text or an utterance as ideology is to focus on the ways it operates in the formation and transformation of human subjectivity.”6 Therborn here recognizes that humans can dissociate from their ideology to examine how an idea or process contributes to their own subjection by the hegemonic class. If this is true, that we are able to examine how our ideology contributes to subjection from the ruling class, and that we have agency within the ideological realm, then class consciousness can develop and ideology can be found as a site of class struggle. The protests of Summer 2020 did exactly this- challenge the individual's notion of what is usually taken as self-evident; the object being challenged, of course, was the police apparatus. Ideologies operate in a matrix of sanction and affirmation, with this matrix determining a relationship.7If a subject fails to act predictably under the hegemonic ideology, then their stance is in contrast to the powers surrounding them: it is a stance of defiance. 

Therborn holds that emerging ideologies only rise out of those which already exist. This process of ideological change is dependent upon non-ideological, material changes, and that the most important material change is in modes of production and internal social dynamics.8 The rhetoric of the Summer Demonstrations did not address economic productive forces, but it did address radical change in the internal social dynamics of the United States. Protesters and activists did not call on justice for individual police officers, but for structural reform in policing and carceral institutions: demilitarization of police, defunding police to allow for greater social programs, dismantling legal codes which disproportionately target racial minorities, and abolition of carceral institutions which target racial minorities in favor of greater social programs. These measures are but a step towards dismantling structural racism, however they are heavy attacks on the foundations of policing and incarceration in American society. Therborn writes, “In conformity with the dialectics of history, the processes of social reproduction are at the same time processes of social revolution; revolutions occur when the latter become stronger than the former.”9 This suggests that as new ideologies emerge from the old ones, a revolutionary shift in discourse can overtake the old ones if they become strong enough and accepted enough by the masses. When the Repressive State Apparatus takes action in these instances, one can be sure that the emerging discursive shift functions as a threat to the old social order. The threat of a revolutionary discursive shift can be seen in the great social movements of American history, particularly during the Vietnam War and Civil Rights era and Battle of Seattle.  

When the ideological state apparatus is threatened, it relies on the Repressive State Apparatus, or RSA, as its secondary mode of reproduction. The Repressive State Apparatus is that which relies directly or indirectly on physical violence. ISAs rely primarily on ideology as its own method of sustaining itself as a system, which is to say its reproduction. The scholastic apparatus or religious apparatus do not use physical violence, conforming to them is considered an act of one's own free will, though ideology places pressure on the individual to do so. An ideological apparatus does not even have recourse for violence, its secondary function on repression comes through a separate repressive apparatus. The Repressive State Apparatus follows the same structure as the Ideological State Apparatus: it is made up of several repressive apparatuses, eg police, national guard, military, intelligence organizations, the state, carceral institutions, etc. These apparatuses are separate and operate within their own realms, but function as a singular entity in which a change in one must change the Repressive State Apparatus as a whole.10 When ideology fails to adequately defend itself, the RSA mobilizes to put down dissent, and in-so-doing discredits the dissenting party through the spectacle of force. When the RSA mobilizes, eg with riot police, national guard, etc, the dissenting party becomes discredited through the individual’s notions of state legitimacy. State action assumes legitimacy, thus when the state responds to dissent, the people believe the state to be justified in its actions and assume that the dissenting party is out of line. This is the symbolic value of state repression which relies on ideology. The RSA relies primarily on violence, crushing dissent with tear gas, crowd dispersion, and brute force, and relies secondarily on the symbolic value of its action as a function of ideology. People believe the state to be justified and the dissenting party to be invalid based on the state’s assumed legitimate use of force. This symbolic discreditation is exemplified with the historiography of the Seattle WTO protests of 1999. 

Often referred to as the Battle of Seattle, the anti-globalization protests took place alongside the beginning of a new round of trade negotiations for the new millennium. This protest was created at the grassroots level, partnering with labor organizations like the AFL-CIO and various national and international NGOs. Anticapitalistic at heart, the protest sought to air grievances about the emerging globalized mode of production. Some vandalism occurred, and police retaliation was heavy- thus began the battle for the story of Seattle. After the protest had ended, the Pentagon hired the Rand Corporation “to produce a study, in which the movement was described as ‘the NGO swarm,’ difficult for governments to deal with because it has no leadership or command structure and ‘can sting a victim to death.’ Corporate public relations  consultants Burson Marsteller published a ‘Guide to the Seattle Meltdown’ to help its clients like  [the Monsanto Company] ‘defend’ themselves.’”11 In the wake of the protest, activists fought  corporate media against government disinformation campaigns used to “stoke public fears and  justify repression against grassroots movements.”12 Media outlets focused on the small group of  “black bloc” self-described anarchists, instead of the tens of thousands of citizens who rose up  with anti-corporate sentiment and were met with tear gas and police blockades because of a  number of broken windows. This exaggeration of the destructive aspect and building it as the hegemonic narrative serves the purpose of discrediting the protesters. In January 2000, a Business Week opinion poll showed that despite the disinformation efforts, 52% of Americans sympathized with the protesters. This kind of myth is created to increase acceptance of the curtailing of civil liberties towards even the peaceful protesters by mere association.13 

Similar disinformation was pushed by the Trump Administration in response to the Summer Demonstrations. Data analysis by the US Crisis Monitor, a joint project by The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project and Princeton University reports: 

​The report suggests that some violence was not perpetrated by protesters, but by those who wish to paint the protesters as violent: 
​
During a demonstration on 27 May in Minneapolis, for example, a man with an umbrella — 

The report also identifies repression against reporters. The group Reporters Without Borders  have identified “an unprecedented outbreak of violence” against reporters, with over 100 separate incidences of government sponsored violence against journalists documented in 31 states and the District of Columbia during demonstrations associated with Black Lives Matter.16 It would appear that the disinformation campaign has been rather successful, given that 42% of respondents to a FiveThirtyEight poll believe “most [BLM] protesters are trying to incite violence or destroy property,” even when statistics show that counterprotests by the right have a 12% rate of violent occurrences, as opposed to the 5% on the part of Black Lives Matter protesters at over 10,600 protests, with 93% having no violence at all by either side of the political spectrum. In urban areas where more violence has occurred, like Portland, Oregon, “violent demonstrations are largely confined to specific blocks, rather than dispersed through the city.”17 

These disinformation efforts are a site of ideological conflict, a battle for the truth of a narrative. When one thinks of violence, one thinks of crime, terrorism, war, civil unrest. However, viewing violence only by its visible, subjective form with identifiable agents denies the existence of the background, objective violence which creates a space for these visible, subjective outbursts.18 This way of thinking allows us to identify that which sustains violence as it tends to be understood. This objective violence is that which is inherent to the “normal” state of daily life, often called systemic violence. Slavoj Zizek says that this objective violence is like the “notorious ‘dark matter’ of physics, the counterpart to an all-too-visible subjective violence. It may be invisible, but it must be considered if one is to make sense of what otherwise seems to be ‘irrational’ explosions of subjective violence.”19 When one thinks of ideology, one doesn’t think of the norms of daily life. One tends to recognize only extreme acts as those explicitly ideologically marked, but the Hegelian point here would be that it is precisely those things which are not questioned and accepted without critical thought, that are the truest manifestations of ideology. This seemingly neutral background to the state of affairs is where this objective violence is found.20 

Objective violence functioning in those things perceived as neutral is where we look again at repressive apparatuses. When the RSA mobilizes, it is believed to be just through the assumption of state legitimacy, even if the methods are more extreme. The US Crisis Monitor reports: 

​The report continues: 

The seemingly neutral object of criticism by the protesters is structural racism and police brutality, inherent to police modes of operation and the prison industrial complex. These practices are left as a result of the limitations of the Civil Rights Movement. Angela Davis writes, “we not only needed to claim legal rights within the existing society but also to demand substantive rights- in jobs, housing, healthcare, education, etc- and to challenge the very structure of society.”23 The Civil Rights Movement was able to demand legal progress, but ideology does not change as quickly, especially when racism has been used to maintain divisions in society for two and a half centuries. Angela Davis writes “the Civil Rights movement was very successful in what it achieved: the legal eradication of racism and the dismantling of the apparatus of segregation. This happened and we should not under-estimate its importance. The problem is that it is often assumed that the eradication of the legal apparatus is equivalent to the abolition of racism. But racism persists in a framework that is far more expansive, far vaster than the legal framework.”24 White American racist ideology “exerts a performative efficiency. It is not merely an interpretation of what blacks are, but an interpretation that determines the very being and social existence of the interpreted subjects,” as white America has been the dominant demographic for the duration of its existence.25 Racism, in this way, is exemplary of how ideology determines social existence. This is the process of ideological interpellation, by which an individual subject is created through its positionality within the hegemonic ideology. Legal code may change, but Louis Althusser writes that “law is indifferent to whether it is approved or condemned: law exists and functions, and can only exist and function, formally.”26

Thus, racism can only be effectively “checked” by law formally. In our concrete reality however, simply because something is bound by law does not mean that it will be either obeyed or enforced, or that the interpellated subject ceases to be subjected as such. Therborn writes, “a historical  materialist conception of ideology, it would seem, involves the not very far-fetched assumption that human beings tend to have some capacity for discriminating between enunciation of the  existence or possibility of something... and the actual existence/occurrence of what is  enunciated.”27 Police brutality and incarceration rates reflect structural racism in American legal  code, law enforcement, and carceral institutions, yet most white Americans are rather blind to the  structural racism inherent to their institutions. The Summer 2020 Demonstrations showed the consciousness of the demonstrators in their recognizing that the enunciation of racism in America does not align with the existence of racism in America. In short, that the idea of a post racial America is a farce: the people have separated fact from fiction. 

The fifth chairman of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s, Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin once said that “violence is as American as cherry pie.”28 When peaceful demonstrations do not produce desired results and law enforcement uses force to repress dissent, protests turn more disruptive.29 The social conditions of the United States have not been created; they have been passed down. Class based tensions, almost always intersected with race in the United States, rear their heads in defiance at every epoch: the Tulsa Massacre of 1921, the social movements of the 1960s, again with the expansion of globalized production in the late 90s, and now with the Black Lives Matter movement amidst cries for structural change. We have not made history as we please, but by the circumstances directly transmitted from national past.30 However, something is notably different: the extent to which these crowds were anti-capitalist and intersectional. Crowds chanted against structural racism, monuments of white supremacy, the rise of right-wing populism, the resurgence of white supremacy, and the role of class within systems of domination and exploitation.

With Black, White, Latinx, Asian, and  Indigenous peoples, as well as the support of the LGBTQ+ community, the intersectionality of  the masses implies solidarity and commonality of interest- intersectionality transcends solidarity  and steps towards class consciousness.31 This is not a factor that has been quite so significant  throughout American history, and presents a unified people engaged in social revolution.32 The  Summer Demonstrations of 2020 have openly declared that their ends can only be attained by the  structural change of existing repressive apparatuses. Now, they represent the interests of the working class and all oppressed minorities, “but in the movement of the present, they also represent and take care of the future of that movement.”33

About the Author:
​​​Joseph "Jojo" Senecal McCann II is a student completing undergraduate research in international studies and political science at Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida. McCann is interested in structuralism, post-structuralism, ideology, revolutionary history, and translation. Particularly inspired by French structuralist and existentialist writers of the 1960s, McCann hopes to translate works that have yet to be put in English for an American audience. Applying to doctoral programs in philosophy and political science, McCann hopes to continue his education in Marxian thought. In his personal life, he works as a cook, enjoys blues rock, and has an adored cat named Carlos Santana.