Demanding the Impossible (7 page)

To take one obvious example, it’s horrendous that Apple made a deal with Rupert Murdoch allowing the news on the Apple cloud to be supplied by Murdoch’s media empire. The news you will get from iPhones will be Murdoch’s news. This is a problem. The internet interests me as, to use an old-fashioned term, “a field of class struggle.” The fight has been going on there from the very beginning. Steve Jobs was no better than Bill Gates. Now I discover Steve Jobs was even worse. Because it’s clear how he manipulates it with these machines. It’s pure manipulation.

As you may know, the first version of the iPod didn’t have a function for phone calls or have a USB connection. It became clear to me, after speaking with someone who is connected with Apple, that he knew the first one would sell well and he wanted people to buy the next generation immediately after. It’s pretty horrible. You see that it’s not as simple as that. Global access is increasingly grounded in the virtually monopolistic privatization of the cloud which provides this access. The more an individual user is given access to universal public space, the more that space is privatized. I think the key is to prevent these clouds from being privately owned. This is not a technological problem; indeed, it is a purely
ideological
economic decision.

Again, here we have a proletarian problem. In the sense that apparently you have it all, with your iPhone you are connected to everything, but at the same time you have nothing. Everything is outside of you, which means you are somewhat crippled. And now something new is emerging that I cannot but call “private public space.” When you chat erotically on the internet, even showing your photos or whatever, you feel like you are in contact with the global world, but you are still isolated in a private space. It’s a kind of
global solipsism
. You are totally alone but in contact with everyone. Or you are in contact with everyone, but, in a way, still not socially connected. Again, interesting things are emerging here.

This would have been my answer. One English analytic Marxist made a very simple but nice point, and I think there is an element of truth in it. He says that, in Marx’s time, the proletariat – the good old Marxist determination of the proletarian revolutionary subject – was defined by a series of features: they were from the poorest part of society, the most populated, and they created wealth on behalf of others, etc. Today, we still have all these features, but they are no longer united in
one subject
.

So what I am trying to do is redefine the concept of the proletariat as those who belong to a situation without having a specific “place” in it; they are included but have no part to play in the social edifice. It means that the concept of the proletariat becomes a shifting category. For example, the poorest, these days, are not those who work, but those who are jobless,
excluded
, and so on. So we don’t have one subject. We just have to look to see, let’s call them,
different proletarian positions
.

And here I have problems with my orthodox leftist friends, who still identify the old notion of proletariat as the working class. To annoy them, I give them this example and it makes them furious. If you stick to the Marxist notion of exploitation and labor theory of value, then you should say that Chávez is exploiting the United States through oil profits. Because Marx, in
Capital
, demonstrates that the natural resources are not a source of value. So this means that we need to rethink the category of exploitation. Marx is absolutely clear here – he even uses oil as an example – that all new value is created by labor. So where do the big profits used to finance the revolution of Chávez come from? From selling the oil and getting money from the United States. So my argument is that we have totally to
rethink
the notion of exploitation and all other features. Everything has to be rethought again.

If we are all potentially Homo Sacer, in the sense that the Marxist notion of the agent is no longer appropriate for this globalized era, how can the selection of who is included and who excluded be done ethically? Some must be excluded as agents of revolution – the notion of fundamental exclusion. Is there a contradiction between your seeking an ethical, self-critical subject/agent (the barred subject) of revolution, and your ideas of perpetual revolution? To make a revolution, we need a powerful agent, but at the same time that agent has to be able to renounce his power. (The revolutionary state should both use and renounce power at the same time.) What if you were considered to be among the excluded, and threatened with death by the revolutionaries?

SŽ:
One thing that still works from the idea of Marx is that, with capitalism, there exists this radical
gap
. On the one hand, we have reality, real people working and consuming, and, on the other, we have this virtual circulation of capital, which goes on and on. There is a gap between the two. The whole country can effectively be in ruin and people starving, and then a financial expert comes and tells you the economy is in a good state.

We saw just this after the 2008 crisis. The shock was that nothing happened in reality, but all of a sudden we realized that we were in a terrible crisis. I think the problem will be that the crisis will become much more metaphysical and
economically spiritual
. There will be no catastrophe and everything will go on as normal, then, all of a sudden, we will learn that it’s catastrophic and everything is wrong. This gap between financial circulation, which follows its own speculative rules, and reality is growing rapidly. I think where we are now is extremely dangerous. I think we are moving toward a much more authoritarian
global apartheid society
.

There are multiple levels. I even tried to enumerate them. I see this problem of
exclusion
, which is no longer about the old class division between workers and capitalists, but simply about not allowing some people to participate in
public life
. They are considered as the invisible ones. In a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance.

So we might say that new forms of
apartheid
are appearing. When we read the book
Planet of Slums
, written by Mike Davis, it’s shocking to learn that more than one billion people already live in slums. Slums are exploding, even in China. So we have those who are “
part of no-part
,” the “supernumerary” element of society, in slums, which is a very interesting phenomenon because, contrary to what people say, that we live in a society of total control, there are larger and larger populations outside the control of the state. It is as if states allow large parts of their state territory to become off limits. I see a tremendous problem here.

If you go to Los Angeles, everybody knows where the slums are. They are, of course, around the airport. You have huge slums in Inglewood. Do you know why they are there? Because no one cares if there’s a lot of noise where only poor people live, so they built the airport there. LA International Airport is located in a perfect place: not far from the airport to the north, for example, is Beverly Hills, which is the richest part of the city. But at the same time, it’s a slum area.

In addition to this slum situation, there are other big problems, which I think are economically insolvable. One of them is so-called
intellectual property
. Intellectual products are, in a very naive sense,
communist
by nature. Everybody knows this. Take a bottle of water, for example: when I drink it, then you will not drink it – and vice versa. When we use it, it loses its utility. But with knowledge, it’s exactly the opposite. The more it circulates, the more it grows. It’s a totally different logic. The difficult task for companies is how to prevent the free circulation of knowledge. Sometimes they spend more money and time trying to prevent free copying than they do on developing products. This is why what is happening now is totally arbitrary.

So it is clear that what Bill Gates did is one big kidnapping. The problem is the following: with physical products, at least up to a certain level, who owns what? You can see this book. I bought it and it’s a material object. But when you talk about intellectual products, which circulate, it’s always very arbitrary to say they are private property, especially when you apply patents.

Indian farmers – they explained it to me in India – have discovered that certain agricultural methods and materials, which they have been using for centuries, are now owned by American companies, just because an American company patented them. So this American company wants the Indian farmers to pay for what they’ve been doing for 2,000 years. The next problem will be that when the biogenetic companies patent genes, we will all discover that parts of ourselves, our genetic components, are already copyrighted, owned by others. In the end, your genes will literally be owned by a certain company. So what is you, which is not owned, is just pure Cartesian
cogito
. This paradox is totally absurd.

In all these domains, I think, we can find proletarian positions. Frankly, I don’t see any easy way out. But it’s clear that the liberal capitalist way will not work. This became evident after the 2008 crisis. Everybody would agree with it now. It’s also clear that, in ecology, old-fashioned state regulation will not work. Communism proved that state communism, the way it was, will not work. If there is something clear, it was that communism was even worse ecologically. It’s incredible how much worse communism was in that respect.

These are problems of the commons, the resources we collectively own or share. The commons contains nature, biogenetics, intellectual property. So when intellectual property is appropriated by private property we have a new enclosure of the commons. This has given a new boost to capitalism, but in the long term, it will not work. It’s out of control.

Particularly in Latin American countries, there have been various attempts to solve the problem of exclusion. Could we find the possibility of emancipatory politics of some sort there? Will it just end up as a failed Latin American populism?

SŽ:
There is another problem here. People often take me to be against democracy. I was in England during the 2005 elections when the Labour Party won. And you know what happened? A week before the elections, there was a big TV talk show on the BBC and people were voting about “who is the most hated person in Britain?” Tony Blair won. But a week later, he won the election. This is a very dangerous sign for me. Obviously there is some strong level of dissatisfaction, which cannot be captured by the electoral system. I’m not against democracy. The point is not to criticize democracy in the sense that we need an authoritarian regime. The key is to ask questions about the representative democracy we have today: is it still able to capture the social discontent or formulate the relevant public demands? Or is it getting more and more sterile? We should search for solutions.

In Latin America, for example, the solution they give is to combine representative democracy (the model of Lula or Morales) with social movements. If we vote, do we really even debate what is needed to make big economic decisions, like world trade agreements or crucial economic agreements like NAFTA in the United States? Nobody votes about that. Specialists give you their opinions in a way you cannot judge. But, somehow, the decision is made by them. What we vote about are mostly stupid cultural matters: immigrants, abortion, and all that stuff. This should worry us. It will create an explosive situation. Even after democratic multiparty elections that have been fairly fought, there can still be an extreme level of dissatisfaction which explodes. It’s a big challenge. And it’s time to start questioning whether this system is really what we aspire to? And if even the experts often cheat, are they really honest?

Another thing that worries me is the reason why China weathered this financial crisis much more easily than elsewhere. The great danger is that all of a sudden, because of its virtual nature, crisis erupts. What is needed more and more are big radical decisions. In the democracy we have now, it’s difficult. You have to go through all the mechanisms. But I read a book on China, which is very critical of China, but which nonetheless admits that, when the fiasco happened in 2008, the banks generally put a limit on borrowing because people were not paying back loans, and it was this that eventually pushed the economy further down. But in China, the communist political power bureau gave an order: “No, you should give people even more credit.” And it worked perfectly. It is somehow very sad to discover that authoritarian power is much more efficient in these conditions. It also worries me that capitalism is entering a state in which it can still be formally seen as a democracy, but it’s really just a ritual, where an actual authoritarian power will work better.

There was one very good argument for capitalism. Let’s be frank. Until now, capitalism has always inextricably generated a demand for democracy. It’s true there were, from time to time, episodes of direct dictatorship, but, after a decade or two, democracy again imposed itself – like in South Korea or in Chile after Pinochet. But then, things started to move. But I wonder if this so-called “capitalism with Asian values,” a Chinese-Singaporean authoritarian capitalism, is not a new form of capitalism, which is economically even more dynamic. It’s productive and it functions even better. But it doesn’t generate a long-term demand for democracy. Now, however, the link between democracy and capitalism has been broken.

I really think that this is what should worry us, this big divorce slowly developing between democracy and today’s capitalism: the success of Chinese communist-run capitalism is an ominous sign that the marriage between capitalism and democracy is approaching a divorce. And here, I’m not into leftist paranoia saying that this is some kind of dark plot. I think it is economic logic
itself
. How to get out of this problem is a big task. I don’t have any easy solutions. I just see the problem and urge everyone to look for the solution.