By Carl Raschke
The expression "hinge of history" has often been reserved for certain brief epochs in which the momentum of events, though not necessarily pre-determined, is poised to turn decidedly in a different direction than has been the case for a relatively long time theretofore. The enthronement of Charlemagne at the start of the ninth century was just such a moment. Martin Luther's posting of his 95 theses in 1517 was another one. The assassination of the Austrian archduke Ferdinand in 1914 was still another example. There are many more illustrations and iterations of how the course of human affairs can "swing" one way or the other on these hinges. Sometimes the hinges themselves are rusted and fragile. There may be a definite "swing" along a certain trajectory for a brief moment, but the "hardware" on which historical processes are mounted may itself be rusted and coming apart. In that case the whole system collapses and doesn't swing any particular way.
It is not clear yet whether we are about to see history swing on a hinge, or whether the hinge itself is faulty. Let me explain further what I mean. The current global financial crisis has been both rued by the public at large and welcomed at the same time with a certain amount of Schadenfreude by many political, moral, and spiritual critics of global capitalism. For those who never bought into the neo-liberal fantasy of planetary integration and prosperity through the viral spread of "democratic capitalism" (what is usually implied in the economic take on "globalization"), which gained favor and fervor following the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the events of the past month has seemed like divine justice, if not personal vindication. It has also re-energized - perhaps we should say "retro-energized" - intellectual, though not necessarily activist, Marxism. Until the last day or so it also seemed to have guaranteed the election of Barack Obama.
The general academic consensus is that present trends have by the weight of history repudiated capitalism itself. The obvious segue is that a new, post-capitalist order, which may ultimately resemble something akin to the "humanistic Marxism" that never materialized on the world stage, but was the profound hope among most of my own intellectual contemporaries in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, is now a serious possibility. The resurgence of the democratic left on college campuses and among urban professionals who are counted as part of the "millennial generation" testifies to this hope, which unfortunately may turn out to be as much a fantasy as the now discredited neo-liberalism.
One of the more prescient observers of the current crisis has been Slavoj Žižek. Writing on numerous occasions in The London Review of Books in recent months, he has pointed out in his own curious and curmudgeonly manner that something that doesn't at all fit the familiar political mold is actually afoot. On October 9 Žižek called not for "less politics" in the current debate over the meaning, causes, and solutions to the financial crisis but for "more" politics. He writes that "this is true politics: the struggle to define the conditions that govern our lives."
Basically what are those "conditions?" One of Žižek's chief arguments is that the political conditions of global capitalism are what have kept capitalism in the saddle for so long, defying classical Marxist expectations. Capitalism may have become irremediably corrupt, but its corruption serves even its most vehement critics, which is why the Western political imagination can't in honesty imagine anything much better. As a USA Today news analysis points out in interviewing key economists, the current financial crisis is in many ways the direct result of democracy itself. History shows us that the people who live under socialism, even with a "human face," don't really want it, because it requires what Max Weber termed a "worldly asceticism" that was two hundred years ago the exclusive prerogative of capitalism itself. Think of all the German "Ostis" who in 1989 trampled down the Berlin Wall, not because they hated the concept of "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs," or because they were morally repulsed by the Stasi-run state apparatus, but because (1) it didn't provide them with MTV or cheap washing machines (2) it was deemed a fraud, especially because "classless" societies always have their own entrenched ruling classes who act like capitalist robber barons while hypocritically maintaing they are not capitalist robber barons. Hence today's Chinese leadership who simply decided not to be hypocritical any longer.
Today's global "consumer capitalism" is not really capitalism at all in the way Marx understood it. The metaphors of "big, wild party" and "waking up with a hangover," which the mainstream media tends to rely on, are probably more apt than anyone realizes. These "cultural contradictions of capitalism," as Daniel Bell dubbed them over a generation ago, are what is bringing capitalism to its knees. But no one, not even the fiercest critics of capitalism, are really without serious accountability. Those who blame it simply on "capitalist greed" are not unlike those college students who go to a decadent fraternity or sorority party enthusiastically expecting to get plastered or laid or both, but get rounded up instead in a police raid. At that point there is a tendency to blame either the party organizers or the snitch who called the police or the most unruly guests who might have caused someone to snitch in the first place. No blames everyone who went to the party in the first place. The truth is we were all "greedy", insofar as we all had fun at the party. The academic "superstar" who has been writing books about the evils of capitalism from their endowed university research position financed with the same Wall Street wealth that caused the crisis may need to think a little more carefully about what the long-awaited "collapse of capitalism" really means in their own universe. After all, many "progressive" causes these days from environmentalism to campaigns against global hunger and human trafficking have been lavishly funded by options and equities appreciation in the portfolios of major corporations and their shareholders.
Žižek's "new politics" may be more about the hypocrisy of our own politics than we are willing to admit at the moment, if not the serious and compelling need to talk about the problems of wealth itself, not simply the "distribution" of wealth. If one really examines the implicit message of both "progressive" and "conservative" politics these days, it is ultimately about making everyone richer and more able to consume. That is something Žižek seems to understand at an elementary level, but which the Chinese understand even better. However, the Chinese no longer pretend to be Marxists, only "Communists" in an Orwellian use of terms. They also understand that global consumer capitalism means that one nation - their own - can only increase domestic consumption by inducing others abroad to consume even more of their cheap goods, which builds up their balance of trade surpluses and in the end bankrupts the consumer nations, while advancing the interests of their own powerful ruling classes at the same time they recreate nineteenth century capitalism in the twenty-first century - wage slaves at home and wage slaves in what used to be called the "Third World." As The Economist recently pointed out in a cover story, the Chinese are now the "new imperialists," and they are very good at it.
I myself would like to see the door swing open the other way for a messianic "new politics" of a new age, but I believe the third option is most likely - the door will simply fall off its hinges.
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