How will you spend your Thanksgiving break?
I recently ran across an NYU student carrying "First As Tragedy, Then As Farce," a book by Slavoj Zizek. When I asked him what it dealt with, he said, "Oh, it's about communism." That kind of floored me. This is 2009, after all, and communism is supposed to be so 20th century. Leaving aside China (which is nominally communist, but in fact quite capitalist) and places such as Cuba and Korea (whose "communist" days are arguably numbered), communism is pretty much done, right?
Not so fast. Zizek's book comes amid a slew of books dealing with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communism — and they're not all postscripts. The author, Tariq Ali — whom I interviewed recently for the History News Network about his book "The Idea of Communism" — said he wrote it explicitly because "there are young people, students who have only heard about these things in a very vague way, in sound bites." He wanted to whet their appetite to explore communism further. In other words, he thinks there's an audience for this.
Then there is Zizek himself. When he spoke at Cooper Union in October, he sold out the 900 seats well in advance. Zizek has a following among a budding generation of intellectuals.
In one of the sharper passages in his book, Zizek issues a kind of challenge. "Enemy propaganda against radical emancipatory politics is by definition cynical — not in the simple sense of not believing its own words, but at a much more basic level: It is cynical precisely insofar as it does believe its own words, since its message is a resigned conviction that the world we live in, even if not the best of all possible worlds, is the least bad, such that radical change will only make things worse."
I read that 4,000 children die every day because they don't have access to clean drinking water, according to a 2004 UNICEF report. Why is this so? To put it in simple terms, it's simply not profitable to solve such a problem. In that respect, to say this is the best of all possible worlds is the height of cynicism.
Unfortunately, when it comes to communism, there is still too much of a deadening and clichéd debate. There remains the exaggerated and ridiculous claims of classical anti-communism (e.g., that it is the same as fascism, that Stalin killed more people than Hitler, etc.). On the other side, there are still people extolling Trotsky or defending Stalin, speaking of communism as if it were a religion and stepping over any historic facts that don't suit them. None of this is helpful. Many of the once-secret archives are open, and such matters are no longer imponderables. We can know what happened, what was good about communism and what wasn't.
And we should do this. Because exploring this notion of communism is really a matter of figuring out if there's a better way for humanity to exist. Can life be organized around something other than the profit system — the expansion of capital via commodity circulation? Can this be the kind of society, contrary to the communism/socialism that has existed, that would set loose people's fullest potential instead of stifling it? These are tough questions without easy answers, but merely asking them is a certain commitment to trying to figure it out.
In that respect, the fact that there is a current of interest in this notion of communism — what Marx called the principle from each according to his ability to each according his need — is a fine thing indeed.
