Zizek on the Emergence of "Sh*t for the Working Class" Capitalism

Slavoj Žižek, "Why Gorbachev Failed" (August 31, 2022)

Mikhail Gorbachev’s biological death is his second death. Symbolically, he died with the dissolution of the Soviet Union. His role was a purely negative one, that of a vanishing mediator: He “tore down the Wall,” he set in motion the disappearance of the Communist system, and he is remembered and praised for allowing this disappearance to take place in a peaceful way. Gorbachev played his role honestly—so what went wrong? Why did peretstroika turn into katastroika?

An explanation might be found in the process of de-Stalinization launched by Khrushchev in 1956 and continued through the Gorbachev era. Khrushchev, who made his wager amid the last gasp of Communist ardor, began by rehabilitating the military leaders shot in 1937, such as “the Red Napoleon” Mikhail Tukhachevsky. Meanwhile, the last to be rehabilitated—already in the Gorbachev era, just before the collapse of the regime—was Nikolai Bukharin. This was a telling omen of the turn toward capitalism: The Bukharin who was rehabilitated was the one who, in the 1920s, had opposed forced collectivization and advocated the pact between workers and peasants (owners of their land) with the famous slogan “Get rich!”

More telling still, for those wishing to understand perestroika’s failure, is the one figure who was never rehabilitated, excluded by the Communists and anti-Communist Russian nationalists alike: namely, Trotsky, the “wandering Jew” of the 1917 Revolution, the true anti-Stalin, the arch-enemy, opposing the idea of “building socialism in one country” with his vision of a permanent revolution.

Why was this? After Khrushchev’s fall in 1964, a resigned cynicism prevailed in the Soviet Union, up until Gorbachev’s attempt at a more radical confrontation with the past. However, Lenin remained for Gorbachev until the end an immovable landmark, and Trotsky continued to be a non-person—for good reason. For Trotsky had issued a bitter warning. As Christopher Hitchens noted in a 2004 essay, “at the very end of his life, cut off in Mexico and aware of his own declining health, [Trotsky] admitted, after the outbreak of the Second World War, that the conflict might just end without a socialist revolution. In that event, the whole Marxist-Leninist project would have to be abandoned.”

Here is a passage from Trotsky’s last text:

We would be compelled to acknowledge that [Stalinism] was rooted not in the backwardness of the country and not in the imperialist environment, but in the congenital incapacity of the proletariat to become a ruling class. Then it would be necessary to establish in retrospect that ... the present USSR was the precursor of a new and universal system of exploitation. 

Trotsky is clear here: One has to leave behind the very basic idea of the “proletarian power,” of the wretched of the earth able to organize alternate power. “In retrospect” means that this idea was from the very beginning doomed. This is the step Gorbachev wasn’t ready to make: When he lanced the slogans of glasnost and perestroika, he failed to see that he unleashed an avalanche that changed the world.

“Lenin remained for Gorbachev until the end an immovable landmark.” 

With Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, the Chinese proceeded in a radically different, almost opposite, way. While at the level of the economy (and, up to a point, culture) what is usually understood as “Communism” was abandoned, and the gates were opened wide to Western-style “liberalization” (private property, profit-making, hedonist individualism, etc.), the Chinese party nevertheless maintained its ideologico-political hegemony—not in the sense of doctrinal orthodoxy (in the official discourse, the Confucian reference to the “Harmonious Society” practically replaced any reference to Communism), but in the sense of maintaining the unconditional political hegemony of the Communist Party as the only guarantor of China’s stability and prosperity. This required a close monitoring and regulation of the ideological discourse on Chinese history, especially the history of the last two centuries: The story endlessly varied by the state media and textbooks is one of China’s humiliation from the Opium Wars onwards, which ended only with the Communist victory in 1949, leading to the conclusion that to be patriotic is to support the rule of the party.

When history is given such a legitimizing role, of course, it can’t tolerate any substantial self-critique. The Chinese had learned the lesson of Gorbachev’s failure: Full recognition of the “founding crimes” will only bring the entire system down. Those crimes thus have to remain disavowed. True, some Maoist “excesses” and “errors” are denounced (the Great Leap Forward and the devastating famine that followed; the Cultural Revolution), and Deng’s assessment of Mao’s role (70 percent positive, 30 percent negative) is enshrined as the official formula. But this assessment functions as a formal conclusion that renders any further elaboration superfluous: Even if Mao was 30 percent bad, the full symbolic impact of this admission is neutralized, so he can continue to be celebrated as the founding father of the nation, his body in a mausoleum and his image on every banknote. We are dealing here with a clear case of fetishistic disavowal: Although we know very well that Mao made errors and caused immense suffering, his figure is kept magically untainted by these facts. In this way, the Chinese Communists can have their cake and eat it: The radical changes brought about by economic liberalization are combined with the continuation of the same party rule as before.

Gorbachev could pull off no such maneuver. The saddest story I know about Gorbachev is a rumor that circulated in Germany in 1990s—who knows if it is true, but se non è vero, è molto ben trovato: 

On a visit to Berlin after he lost power, Gorbachev tried a surprise visit to Willy Brandt. However, when he (with his guards) approached Brandt’s house and rang a bell, Brandt refused to see him. Later, the ex-chancellor explained the snub to a friend: He never forgave Gorbachev for allowing the dissolution of the Communist bloc—not because Brandt was a secret believer in Soviet Communism, but because he was well aware that the disappearance of the Communist bloc would also entail the disappearance of Western Europe’s social-democratic welfare state. 

That is to say, Brandt knew that the capitalist system is ready to make considerable concessions to the workers and the poor only if there is a serious threat of an alternative, of a different mode of production that promises workers their rights. To retain its legitimacy, capitalism has to demonstrate how it works better even for the workers and the poor, and the moment this alternative vanishes, elites can proceed to dismantle the welfare state.

The ongoing global crisis clearly calls for radical social change. However, if we want to resuscitate the vision of a truly different Communism, it will have to be done on a totally different basis than the one imagined by Gorbachev (and Lenin).

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I'd conclude from the above graph that it all started with the Oil Embargo in '73, STAGflation, and then kept going from there, not the USSR collapse circa '89-91.  But then, in the absence of viable alternatives, it would appear that corporate Techno-Feudalism is here to stay.  I'd attribute the divergence to the emergence of "Cultural Capitalism" (which represented a "compromise" of capitalist values and practices with communism/ communihilism).  But yeah, hat's off to Zizek.  Now we're "locked in" unless the recently emergent multipolar "NWO" works out.  But then, I put little hope in State directed Mercantilism.  Been there (pre 1776), done that.

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^^What "Elite Over-Production" Looks Like^^