Zizek in Wall Street — Transcript

11 October 2011
By

We are all losers, but the true losers are down there on Wall Street. They were bailed out by bil­lions of our money. We are called social­ists, but here there is always social­ism for the rich. They say we don’t respect private prop­erty, but in the 2008 fin­an­cial crash-​down more hard-​earned private prop­erty was des­troyed than if all of us here were to be des­troy­ing it night and day for weeks. They tell you we are dream­ers. The true dream­ers are those who think things can go on indef­in­itely the way they are. We are not dream­ers. We are the awaken­ing from a dream that is turn­ing into a nightmare.

We are not des­troy­ing any­thing. We are only wit­ness­ing how the sys­tem is des­troy­ing itself. We all know the clas­sic scene from car­toons. The cat reaches a pre­cip­ice but it goes on walk­ing, ignor­ing the fact that there is noth­ing beneath this ground. Only when it looks down and notices it, it falls down. This is what we are doing here. We are telling the guys there on Wall Street, “Hey, look down!”

In mid-​April 2011, the Chinese gov­ern­ment pro­hib­ited on TV, films, and nov­els all stor­ies that con­tain altern­ate real­ity or time travel. This is a good sign for China. These people still dream about altern­at­ives, so you have to pro­hibit this dream­ing. Here, we don’t need a pro­hib­i­tion because the rul­ing sys­tem has even oppressed our capa­city to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to ima­gine the end of the world. An aster­oid des­troy­ing all life and so on. But you can­not ima­gine the end of capitalism.

So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a won­der­ful, old joke from Com­mun­ist times. A guy was sent from East Ger­many to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by cen­sors, so he told his friends: “Let’s estab­lish a code. If a let­ter you get from me is writ­ten in blue ink, it is true what I say. If it is writ­ten in red ink, it is false.” After a month, his friends get the first let­ter. Everything is in blue. It says, this let­ter: “Everything is won­der­ful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theatres show good films from the west. Apart­ments are large and lux­uri­ous. The only thing you can­not buy is red ink.” This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are miss­ing is red ink: the lan­guage to artic­u­late our non-​freedom. The way we are taught to speak about free­dom— war on ter­ror and so on — fals­i­fies free­dom. And this is what you are doing here. You are giv­ing all of us red ink.

There is a danger. Don’t fall in love with yourselves. We have a nice time here. But remem­ber, car­ni­vals come cheap. What mat­ters is the day after, when we will have to return to nor­mal lives. Will there be any changes then? I don’t want you to remem­ber these days, you know, like “Oh. we were young and it was beau­ti­ful.” Remem­ber that our basic mes­sage is “We are allowed to think about altern­at­ives.” If the rule is broken, we do not live in the best pos­sible world. But there is a long road ahead. There are truly dif­fi­cult ques­tions that con­front us. We know what we do not want. But what do we want? What social organ­iz­a­tion can replace cap­it­al­ism? What type of new lead­ers do we want?

Remem­ber. The prob­lem is not cor­rup­tion or greed. The prob­lem is the sys­tem. It forces you to be cor­rupt. Beware not only of the enemies, but also of false friends who are already work­ing to dilute this pro­cess. In the same way you get cof­fee without caf­feine, beer without alco­hol, ice cream without fat, they will try to make this into a harm­less, moral protest. A decaf­fi­en­ated pro­cess. But the reason we are here is that we have had enough of a world where, to recycle Coke cans, to give a couple of dol­lars for char­ity, or to buy a Star­bucks cap­puccino where 1% goes to third world starving chil­dren is enough to make us feel good. After out­sourcing work and tor­ture, after mar­riage agen­cies are now out­sourcing our love life, we can see that for a long time, we allow our polit­ical engage­ment also to be out­sourced. We want it back.

We are not Com­mun­ists if Com­mun­ism means a sys­tem which col­lapsed in 1990. Remem­ber that today those Com­mun­ists are the most effi­cient, ruth­less Cap­it­al­ists. In China today, we have Cap­it­al­ism which is even more dynamic than your Amer­ican Cap­it­al­ism, but doesn’t need demo­cracy. Which means when you cri­ti­cize Cap­it­al­ism, don’t allow your­self to be black­mailed that you are against demo­cracy. The mar­riage between demo­cracy and Cap­it­al­ism is over. The change is possible.

What do we per­ceive today as pos­sible? Just fol­low the media. On the one hand, in tech­no­logy and sexu­al­ity, everything seems to be pos­sible. You can travel to the moon, you can become immor­tal by bio­gen­et­ics, you can have sex with anim­als or whatever, but look at the field of soci­ety and eco­nomy. There, almost everything is con­sidered impossible. You want to raise taxes by little bit for the rich. They tell you it’s impossible. We lose com­pet­it­iv­ity. You want more money for health care, they tell you, “Impossible, this means total­it­arian state.” There’s some­thing wrong in the world, where you are prom­ised to be immor­tal but can­not spend a little bit more for health­care. Maybe we need to set our pri­or­it­ies straight here. We don’t want higher stand­ard of liv­ing. We want a bet­ter stand­ard of liv­ing. The only sense in which we are Com­mun­ists is that we care for the com­mons. The com­mons of nature. The com­mons of privat­ized by intel­lec­tual prop­erty. The com­mons of bio­gen­et­ics. For this, and only for this, we should fight.

Com­mun­ism failed abso­lutely, but the prob­lems of the com­mons are here. They are telling you we are not Amer­ican here. But the con­ser­vat­ives fun­da­ment­al­ists who claim they really are Amer­ican have to be reminded of some­thing: What is Chris­tian­ity? It’s the holy spirit. What is the holy spirit? It’s an egal­it­arian com­munity of believ­ers who are linked by love for each other, and who only have their own free­dom and respons­ib­il­ity to do it. In this sense, the holy spirit is here now. And down there on Wall Street, there are pagans who are wor­ship­ping blas­phem­ous idols. So all we need is patience. The only thing I’m afraid of is that we will someday just go home and then we will meet once a year, drink­ing beer, and nos­t­a­li­gic­ally remem­ber­ing “What a nice time we had here.” Prom­ise yourselves that this will not be the case. We know that people often desire some­thing but do not really want it. Don’t be afraid to really want what you desire. Thank you very much.

Thanks to Impose for this tran­scrip­tion, video avail­able here and here.

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This entry was posted on 11 October 2011 at 8:04 am and is filed under Political Philosophy, Radical Politics. Published under Creative Commons (CC) Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License: You are welcome to share and remix this content for non-commercial purposes. Kindly acknowledge and hyperlink the source.

25 Responses

  1. Lui on 12 October 2011 at 8:41 am

    Simply PERFECT!

    Reply
  2. Ernesto on 12 October 2011 at 7:05 pm

    Amer­ica needs Peronism

    Reply
  3. JoseManuelBarreto on 12 October 2011 at 11:16 pm

    Lui: What does it mean in this con­text ‘per­fect’? What ‘simply’?

    Reply
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  14. Eduardo on 25 October 2011 at 1:54 am

    While I do agree that the Russian/​Chinese model of Marx­ist Eco­nom­ics failed, lots of people’s lives in places like Chiapas, Yugoslavia, etc. were improved dra­mat­ic­ally because of authen­tic­ally anti-​capitalist move­ments. An altern­at­ive that includes eco­nomic demo­cracy is still pos­sible. Other than that, great piece.

    Reply
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  22. Raymond Lotta on 21 January 2012 at 4:11 pm

    Events of the past year, from Egypt to the Occupy move­ments, are open­ing new vis­tas and throw­ing up big issues for debate. Can you break out of the frame­work of cap­it­al­ism? Is there a rel­ev­ant Marx­ist vis­ion and strategy that speaks to the enorm­ity of the prob­lems human­ity con­fronts and that yields lib­er­at­ory solu­tions? In short, is a rad­ic­ally dif­fer­ent, and bet­ter, world possible?

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    Reply
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