Slavoj Žižek - A Left that Dares to Speak Its Name

And, sadly, the same failure, which is necessary for structural reasons, also characterizes a homologous project of fusion of today’s working class and today’s “less-than-proletarians” (refugees, immigrants) – i.e., the idea that the “nomadic proletarian” is the potential source of revolutionary change. Here also, one has to fully assume Platonov’s lesson: the tension is not only between the local conservative racist lower classes and the immigrants; the difference in the entire “way of life” is so strong that one cannot count on an easy solidarity of all the exploited. Perhaps the antagonism between proletarians and less-than-proletarian “others” is an antagonism that is in some sense even more unsurpassable than the class antagonism within the same ethnic community. Precisely at this point when the “subsumption” (of Others into “our” proletarians) seems the most obvious, and the universality of all oppressed seems at hand, it slips out of our grasp. In other words, the “less-than-proletarian” Others cannot be subsumed, integrated, not because they are too different, too heterogeneous with regard to our life world, but because they are absolutely inherent in it, the result of its own tensions.

This, of course, in no way implies that the Marxian proletarian position is only possible in the developed West. During a visit to India, I met representatives of the movement of the lowest part of the lowest cast (the “untouchables”), the dry-toilets cleaners, and they gave me a wonderfully concise answer to what they want to achieve: “We don’t want to be what we are.” So there is no identity politics, no search for recognition and respect for the unique job they are doing, just the demand for social change that will render their identity superfluous and impossible.

One is thus tempted to propose a radical reformulation here: in today’s global capitalism the problematic elements are not the nomadic “less-than-nothings” who resist being subsumed into the proletarian “nothing” as the eventual site of a possible radical social change; the problematic elements are, more and more, (local) proletarians themselves who, when confronted with the nomadic “less-than-nothings,” all of a sudden realize that their “nothing” (the zero-level, the “place of no-place” in the existing social order) is nonetheless a determinate nothing, a position within the existing social order with all the privileges (education, healthcare, etc.) that this implies. No wonder, then, that when “local” proletarians encounter the nomadic “less-than-nothings,” their reaction is the rediscovery of their own cultural identity. To put it in speculative Hegelian terms, the “local” proletarians discover that their “nothing” is nonetheless sustained by a series of particular privileges, and this discovery, of course, makes them much less prone to engage in radical emancipatory acts – they discover that they have much more to lose than their chains.

There is a well-known joke about Jews gathered in a synagogue to publicly declare their failures. First, a mighty rabbi says: “Forgive me, god, I am nothing, not worthy of your attention!” After him, a rich merchant says: “Forgive me, god, I am a worthless nothing!” Then a poor ordinary Jew steps forward and says: “Forgive me, god, I am also nothing.” The rich merchant whispers to the rabbi: “Who does he think he is, this miserable guy, that he can also say he is nothing?” There is a deep insight in this joke: to “become nothing” requires the supreme effort of negativity, of tearing oneself away from immersion in a cobweb of particular determinations. Such a Sartrean elevation of the subject into a void, a nothingness, is not a true Lacanian (or Hegelian) position: Lacan demonstrates how, to do this, one has to find support in a particular element that functions as a “less than nothing” – Lacan’s name for it is objet a, object-cause of desire. Let’s take a political example. The politically correct prohibition of asserting the particular identity of White Men (as the model of oppression of others), although it presents itself as the admission of their guilt, confers on them a central position: this very prohibition to assert their particular identity turns them into the universal-neutral medium, the place from which the truth about the others’ oppression is accessible. And this is why white liberals indulge so readily in self-flagellation: the true aim of their activity is not really to help the others but to achieve the Lustgewinn brought about by their self-accusations, the feeling of their own moral superiority over others. The problem with the self-denial of white identity is not that it goes too far, but that it does not go far enough: while its enunciated content seems radical, its position of enunciation remains that of a privileged universality. So yes, they declare themselves to be “nothing,” but this very renunciation to a (particular) something is sustained by the surplus enjoyment of their moral superiority, and we can easily imagine the scene from the quoted Jewish joke repeated here: when, say, a black guy says “I am also nothing!” a white guy whispers to his (white) neighbor: “Who does this guy think he is to be able to claim that he is also nothing?” But we can easily move from imagination to reality here. A decade or so ago, at a round table in New York where the politically correct Leftists predominated, I remember a couple of big names among the “critical thinkers” engaging, one after the other, in self-flagellation, blaming the Judeo-Christian tradition for our evils, pronouncing scathing verdicts on “Eurocentrism,” etc. Then, unexpectedly, a black activist joined the debate and also made some critical remarks about the limitations of the black Muslim movement. Hearing this, the white “critical thinkers” exchanged annoyed glances whose message was something like “Who does this guy think he is that he can also claim he is a worthless nothing?” And does something similar not hold for the way “our” proletarians tend to react to the nomadic proletarians? “We are the true nothing – who are they to also claim that they are nothing?”

Back to Platonov: at an abstract level, he thus raises the question of subsumption (of Others into the proletariat), and today we are facing the same problem not just with regard to refugees and other migrants (can they be subsumed into the global capitalist order?), but also at a more formal level of what Balibar calls “total subsumption” as the basic tendency of today’s capitalism. 6This term does not cover only the phenomenon of so-called “cultural capitalism” (the growing commodification of the cultural sphere), but, above all, full subsumption under the logic of the capital of the workers themselves and the process of their reproduction:

Whereas Marx explained that “capital” ultimately could be reduced to (productive) labour or was nothing other than labour in a different form, appropriated by a different class, the theory of human capital explains that labour – more precisely “labouring capacity” [Arbeits vermögen] – can be reduced to capital or become analysed in terms of capitalist operations of credit, investment and profitability. This is, of course, what underlies the ideology of the individual as a “self-entrepreneur,” or an “entrepreneur of oneself.” 7

The issue here is “not so much to describe a growth of markets for existing products; it is much more to push the range of the market beyond the limits of the ‘production sphere’ in the traditional sense, therefore to add new sources of permanent ‘extra surplus-value’ that can become integrated into valorization, overcoming its limitations, because capital is valorized both on the ‘objective’ side of labour and production, and on the ‘subjective’ side of consumption and use.” 8