response to Alan Johnson's "the power of nonsense"
The violence of democracy
There is something curious to Žižek’s notion of ‘divine violence’ that Alan Johnson totally misses. He includes it in a list of Žižek’s ‘system of concepts’ which justify his belief in the use of revolutionary violence to achieve communism. However, far from being a justification of revolutionary violence it is meant to describe the violence perpetrated by democracy. Indeed, Žižek actually comes down against violence for revolutionary purposes because “such violence merely reinforces the state power” and indeed the ‘legitimate’ use of violence (for reestablishing social order or erecting a government) is also rejected: “violence is the poorest possible basis on which to build a government. Violence is the weapon of choice for the impotent… [it] rarely creates power” (388). So what is divine violence? Žižek describes it as “not a deplorable but inevitable use of violent means towards non-violent ends” (392-3, my italicizations).[1] This is not an advocation of violence but a sober look at a material fact of emancipatory movements, particularly democracy. “Here, the ‘critique of instrumental reason’ has done its job, demonstrating that means are never purely instrumental: the ‘means we use to achieve emancipatory social ends have to display the character of these ends themselves” (393). We must always remember that the bourgeoisie state and liberal democracy has been historically established by revolution and violence. Because of this ‘founding’ or what Žižek might call ‘obscene’ act, violence is an integral and intrinsic dynamic ever present in democracy. But in what capacity? Žižek quotes James Madison who prophesizes that
‘the various and unequal distribution of property. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society.’ In short, the problem is class struggle: how to prevent the poor majority from ‘discovering their own strength’ given to them in principle in democracy. His solution is an ‘extensive’ federalist republic, for then ‘it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other… the influence of factious leaders may kindle a flame within their particular states but will be unable to spread a general conflagration’ (392)
Thus, democracy internalizes this discontent and seeks abate it through its formal processes. Further, it may contain any larger scale discontent through a strong federal government which may be sufficiently powerful to quell any significant uprisings. The ‘logic’ of democracy then is that constant repressed violence and antagonism is cathected into democratic procedure or crushed with violence proper when it is substantial enough. This democratic terror is divine violence. However, in the Jacobin article Žižek states:
One cannot separate violence from the state conceived as an apparatus of class domination: from the standpoint of the oppressed, the very existence of a state is a violent fact (in the same sense in which Robespierre claimed there was no need to prove that the king had committed any crime, since the very existence of the king was a crime in itself, an offense against the freedom of the people). In this sense, every act of violence against the state on the part of the oppressed is ultimately “defensive.” Not to concede this point is, nolens volens, to “normalize” the state and accept that its own acts of violence are merely contingent excesses to be dealt with through democratic reforms. This is why the standard liberal motto — that violence is never legitimate, even though it may sometimes be necessary to resort to it — is insufficient. From a radical emancipatory perspective, this formula should be reversed: for the oppressed, violence is always legitimate (since their very status is the result of the violence they are exposed to), but never necessary (it will always be a matter of strategy whether or not use violence against the enemy).
Finally we have a more nuanced picture than Alan Johnson’s uncareful portrait of Žižek as virulent revolutionary chaffing at the bit for 20th century revolutionary violence. Violence is inevitable, legitimate for the oppressed, illegitimate for those in power and never necessary. Further, this account is far from proscriptive; it is an analysis of the violence perpetrated against the subject by the state.
So let’s be serious here: even non-violent social movements—like the civil rights movement or Indian independence—were, effectively, violent in the sense that they were subjected to the most violent repressive mechanisms of government. If I may speculate, any sober participant in a revolutionary cause has to be attenuated to violence—not the distribution but the reception of violence. They need a taste for it lest they give up. Indeed, this might be what Žižek means by ‘defetishizing’ violence: to stop conceiving of it as something ‘perpetrated’ by one subject upon an other or something that ‘flares up’ in instances of crime or war and vanishes but rather as existing in a variety of dimensions—historical, economic, political, structural, and ongoing. In this regard, Žižek’s analysis is actually very sober. But what does Žižek actually proscribe?—for it is clear that violence performs a very specific function in his analysis. It is meant to reveal a central antagonism, produce a spectacle, or stage an event which will get the revolutionary ball rolling. “The problem for emancipatory politics is how to reintroduce into this democratic field the radical antagonism (the difference which cuts into the social field itself in its universality, which admits no big Other, neither substantial or formal)—and the solution is: the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’” (393). The proletariat, who is not beholden to a big Other (an implied but nonexistent regulating concept which governs the subject’s social life manifesting as unwritten rules or proscriptions) ejects himself or is ejected from the social order and establishes their own means of production. The dictatorship of the proletariat, for Žižek, is the self-organizing principle of this excluded group. It is for this reason that “the dictatorship of the proletariat is ultimately indifferent towards formal democracy—what matters is not the mode of selection of the government, but the pressure exerted on it by the people’s mobilization and self-organization” (393). Thus, the emergence of a dictatorship of the proletariat, Žižek implies, would spark an instance of this ‘divine violence’ that reveals that democracy and capitalism are exclusive, non-universal, and found themselves on class antagonisms and contradictory assumptions. In other words, would start a class war that ended the cycle of divine violence.
In “The Jacobin Spirit” Žižek “Marxified” his argument for terror and dictatorship by radically misconstruing what “Marx’s key insight” was. He claimed Marx understood political democracy to be a mere “democratic illusion” because without economic equality political democracy can only be a tool of the ruling class, a part of the state apparatus and therefore our “main enemy.” This gets Marx totally wrong. And getting Marx right is not merely an academic exercise. Looking back, what is at stake are those 100 million Communist corpses memorialized by Vasily Grossman in Forever Flowing, with their “crazed eyes; smashed kidneys; skull[s] pierced by a bullet; rotting infected, gangrenous toes; and scurvy racked corpses in log-cabin, dugout morgues.” Looking forward, what is at stake is the possibility of the Left creating more corpses.
From 1970 to 1990 the revolutionary socialist Hal Draper devoted himself almost exclusively to Marx scholarship. The main result was the four-volume Karl Marx’s Theory of Revolution, two thousand pages of meticulous textual exegesis and analysis. Draper’s central argument: Marx did not abandon liberty and democracy to become a communist but became a communist in order to make real the promise of liberty and democracy. There was continuity from “his democratic views of 1842 [to] the revolutionary communism of his mature years.” Marx started out a “democratic extremist” unambiguously committed to freedom of expression and organization, the rule of law and democratic institutions, and viscerally opposed to the unaccountable power of the state and its core, the bureaucracy. What then forced a deepening (not an abandonment) of his democratic extremism was his insistence on treating the promise of freedom and democracy not in abstraction, as free-floating discourses, but in their external social relations here down on earth. Žižek’s claim that Marx saw democracy as “the ultimate enemy” inverts Marx’s actual insight – that the full promise of political democracy could only be fulfilled by the extension of democracy into the social and economic. This is how Hal Draper frames Marx’s journey:
Marx was the first socialist figure to come to an acceptance of the socialist idea through the battle for the consistent expression of democratic control from below. He was the first figure in the socialist movement who, in a personal sense, came through the bourgeois-democratic movement: through it to its farthest bounds, and then out by its farthest end. In this sense, he was the first to fuse the struggle for consistent political democracy with the struggle for a socialist transformation. But it might be asked, wasn’t it the case that, in his course from bourgeois democracy to communism, Marx relinquished his early naive notions about political democracy? Not in Marx’s view.
Contra Žižek, Marx’s “key insight” was that it had become possible for the first time in human history to pose the relation between political democracy and the social question in a radically new way. Rejecting the Jacobin educational dictatorship that Žižek would have us rehabilitate, Marx grasped, as Draper argues, “the social dynamics of the situation under which the apparent contradiction between the two [i.e. political democracy and the social question]…is resolved.” Global capitalism, he understood, had created not just exploitation but also the material ground on which the relationship of the social question to political freedom might be resolved through a political process of popular self-emancipation.
Alan Johnson, for all his democratic inclinations, would like to expose us to the “correct” interpretation of Marx: Marx as a libertarian or an occupier, a champion of horizontal government and democracy. Who can argue with the rigor of 2000 pages of rigorous exegesis?—suffice it to say, there are a multiplicity of interpretations of Marx and any skilled academic can bend quotation easily to one’s will. This is precisely Lenin’s crime according to Johnson’s interpretation of the term ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’ But does this pretty picture that Hal Draper paints make Marx a liberal? Does this actually make him an opponent of revolution or violence? Or an advocate of Johnson’s totally abstract and undefined ‘self-emancipation’? —something that smacks of libertarian virtues. It would be fanciful to imagine so. Not to mention this stupid appeal to the imagery of totalitarian violence is meant to discourage us from Žižek’s ‘virulent’ discourse by reminding us of the horrors of revolution and idealistic experimentation.[2]
But Alan Johnson was never not convinced of the horrors of capitalism and the issue of Marx’s advocacy of violence remains a debate. The issue is the image of Marx as a pro-democratic liberal. No doubt the quote that rubbed Johnson the wrong way was this:
In “democratic” procedures (which, of course, can have a positive role to play), no matter how radical our anti-capitalism, solutions are sought solely through those democratic mechanisms which themselves form part of the apparatuses of the “bourgeois” state that guarantees the undisturbed reproduction of capital. In this precise sense, Badiou was right to claim that today the name of the ultimate enemy is not capitalism, empire, exploitation, or anything similar, but democracy itself. It is the “democratic illusion,” the acceptance of democratic mechanisms as providing the only framework for all possible change, which prevents any radical transformation of capitalist relations.
Participation in democracy means playing a field mastered by the bourgeois. Even the spontaneous use of democracy, democratic procedure, or “horizontal government” as it is called is problematic for democracy is a bourgeois creation and the virtues and values that establish it are, in fact, bourgeois. Thus, for Žižek and Badiou, it is a fetish. But why this skepticism of democracy? Žižek states:
We do not vote on who owns what, or about relations in the factory, and so on — such matters remain outside the sphere of the political, and it is illusory to expect that one will effectively change things by “extending” democracy into the economic sphere (by, say, reorganizing the banks to place them under popular control). Radical changes in this domain need to be made outside the sphere of legal “rights.”
This is a classic ‘anti-reformist’ argument. Democracy is the site of individual liberties and inalienable rights to freedom and property. It is the fantasy of John Stuart Mill and the participation of would-be revolutionaries can only validate the basic values and assumptions of that political form. Or rephrased, the use of democracy can only reproduce the dominant class relations, economic structure, and all the antagonisms there-in. Even innocent “Athenian” experiments in direct-democracy compromise the worker because it makes a contradictory presupposition: that all people are equal in political power and can wield this power legislatively. Democracy cannot encompass the totality of social relations; it excludes the sphere of economic or class relations. Marx’s lesson at the end of his section on commodities in Capital vol. I is that individuals never confront each other as equals: they confront each other as buyers and sellers, producers and consumers, workers and employers. All of these groups wield power that is extraneous from any political form and is conditioned by their relationship to the means of production.
This healthy skepticism of democracy underlies the larger Marxist skepticism of the state as an instrument of the ruling class. It is a matter of debate whether or not Marx is an advocate of democracy but what is certain and clear is that he opposed parliamentary democracy. Marx’s disdain for parliamentary government can be shown in his critique of the Factory Acts of 1821. He dismisses them as inefficient, ineffectual and a result of a compromise of the working class with the rich for the sake of political power. The working class cannot make a Chartrist compromise with the former aristocracy for power in government lest they be screwed every time. Further, the worker’s slavery to the capitalist is determined by their alienation from the means of production and their reliance on the capitalist for their sustenance. True “democracy” then is allowing workers to control the means of production, to provide for themselves, and to liberate themselves from an economic logic that would have them work more than they need to at their own expense. Of course, this flies in the face of the right to property and indeed calls for the abolition of the right to property—property being a classic condition for participation in the democratic process. And no free thinking democratically inclined individual would ever consent to a redistribution of “what is rightfully theirs” to someone else just because of majority rule—I imagine they would resist. This is why he calls the factory owners and bourgeoisie “revolters” in his account of British labor history: they resisted the democratic spirit of the country by going against majority will, manipulated public opinion, forced compromises through parliamentarian trickery and incessantly haggled over legal language so they could effectively break the law. In his account of the Factory Acts, Marx implies that the democratic spirit of Britain was effectively broken by democracy. Žižek turns to Robespierre to formulate this ‘democratic anti-democratic’ tendency in Marxism to realize the ‘will of the people’ through revolutionary, non-legislative, or non-representative means but I think this is a poor rhetorical maneuver (poor in the sense that an appeal to Robespierre will definitely not unlock a liberally minded readers latent Marxist sentiments): as we have seen this sentiment exists ‘negatively’ in Marx already. True democracy then, happens when the means of production are ‘democratically’ controlled and administrated, i.e. controlled by workers in a dictatorship of the proletariat.
If I may interpret, it seems that democracy or a true democratic form of social organization can occur only after economic equality has been established, i.e. class and private property have been abolished. The dictatorship of the proletariat is the ‘climate’ in which democracy thrives. And here we have it, the classic opening which has justified all the left-wing demagoguery of the 20th century. But it is here that Žižek puts forth his wager: what do we, as the left, want and how are we going to get it? Are we going to be too afraid of totalitarian cooption of our cause to trust in effective charismatic leaders? Or more likely, are we going to not act or participatebecause there is no cause that conforms adequately to our moral or political proscriptions. Will the fear of corpses pacify us sufficiently so that we will not act to end the terror of capitalism?
Truly, any well-meaning leftist would be skeptical of trading one terror for another but it would be immoral to let the terror of the current state of affairs go on indefinitely. And, as Alan Johnson has proven, we are (on the left) are not so naïve. We know well the history of betrayals and compromises that mar the history of the left. But this should not be sufficient reason to not try all together. Rather it should give us further reason to go forward with this knowledge in hand so that we may not repeat the mistakes of the past and realize the dream of a more fair and just future. Žižek is one of the few theorists today that has this optimism. And honestly, the left is not staring totalitarianism down the throat; what powerful worldwide left-wing movement is in danger of becoming fascist? What governments are about to be toppled or taken over by virulent left-wing parties? Johnson seems to be counting his hens before they’ve hatched and he is hardly a Danton to Žižek’s Robespierre.
[1] Page numbers refer to Living in the End Times
[2] However, the same imagery could be used as anti-capitalist rhetoric: the same millions of corpses that populate Western Africa ought to be enough for us to turn our moral sensibilities against capitalism and its “implicit” “structural” violence. What of the constant drive towards ever cheaper materium that can be extracted at low cost in undeveloped countries without a stable political system to defend them from capitalist expropriation? Back in 2001 a UN report found that the primary resources expropriated from the Congo by warlord armies (which fields child soldiers and frequently use rape to pacify local populations) were colton ore, diamonds, copper, cobalt and gold—all of these resources have value on international markets because they comprise the components of high tech consumer products like laptops and phones. Those same materials often find themselves in countries with low-cost high-tech manufacturing industries like China. The Taiwanese company Foxconn (the company which produces Apple products) has been in the news recently because of the poor working conditions and high rate of worker suicide in their Chinese factories. In Foxconn factories workers significantly shorten their lives by inhaling dust, suffer in poor working conditions (Foxconn refuses to close their plants even after accidents, disasters like fires, or construction) and work 12 hours for months without reprieve. This violence is extreme and explicit—it is perpetuated by the vetted mechanics of capitalism: supply and demand, perpetual growth, and the accumulation of capital in the form of profit. When the violence is real and affecting the lives of millions than what other alternative do we have? Rhetorical appeals to the failure of communism are morally impoverished. Anyone who is not convinced that violence is justified cannot call themselves a Marxist. They are content to limit their analysis to the morally or psychologically manageable “structural” violence which manifests as a “problem” which can be democratically solved (through popular movements or social reform). But not only is violence justified it is necessary; necessary because we have the right to defend ourselves against capitalism’s total disregard for human dignity.
