Endgame of capitalism Living in the End Times

Zizek (Verso hardback, £20), the Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic, is the latest in the spate of books unleashed by the Great Contraction of 2007-2009. It offers a reliable analysis of the crisis in a language, without the academic jargon, that the intelligent common reader can understand. Zizek has skillfully assembled all the elements of the crisis: its causes in financial deregulation and global imbalances, the pros and cons of amonetary versus fiscal stimulus and how difficult it is to design a system within the Anglo-Saxon model of capitalism that wants material abundance without paying the full price of life in a “risk society”. Zizek, in short, has seen the future of the capitalist world, and it doesn’t work.

What Zizek says is much the same as he said in his hugely successful Indian tour earlier this year. Global capitalism is in a state of terminal decline. Worldwide ecological crisis, imbalances within the economic system, the biogenetic revolution and exploding social divisions are all coming together to hasten its demise. But if the end of capitalism seems to many the end of the world, how is it possible for western society to face up to the end times? In his analysis of the “economic Armageddon”, as he puts it, Zizek borrows the model of the Swiss psychiatrist Elizabeth Ross of the five stages of grief which follows upon learning that one has terminal illness: denial (one simply refuses to accept the fact); anger (which explodes when one can no longer deny the fact); bargaining (in the hope we can somehow postpone or diminish the fact); depression; and finally acceptance (“If I can’t fight it, so I may as well accept it.”) The Swiss psychiatrist applied the same schema to any form of personal loss, emphasising that the five stages do not necessarily come in the same order. Zizek adapts the model to explain the present state of play in the capitalist world: ideological denial, explosions of anger and attempts at bargaining, followed by depression and acceptance.

The five chapters follow the same scheme but are interspersed by Interludes which elaborate the cultural and political forms of these stages from New Age obscurantism to violent religious fundamentalism. Zizek concludes his study with an argument for the return to a Marxian critique of political economy, though he detects the limitations of a potential communist culture after the failure of Soviet communism.

Zizek’s prognoses, which he has repeated in his lectures and his earlier two books — First as Tragedy, Then as Farce and The Object of Ideology —can’t be faulted because they are based on facts. What is new in the book is what Daniel Bell, the American sociologist, called “the cultural contradictions of capitalism”. Zizek says these “are at the origin of today’s ideological malaise: the progress of capitalism, which necessitates a consumerist ideology, is gradually undermining the very (Protestant ethical) attitude which rendered capitalism possible — today’s capitalism increasingly functions as ‘the institutionalisation of envy’”.

Zizek has borrowed heavily from Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ,Marx and others to elaborate his thesis on the inherent crisis of late capitalism. The contradictions which form the more interesting sections of the book are contained in the Interludes that take current cultural forms as examples of how consumerism, gone wild, is eating into the dynamics of capitalism. Take the opening chapter — Denial: The Liberal Utopia — where the Interlude deals with Hollywood films, the ultimate amnesia that makes you forget the world around you. Zizek takes Michael Apted’s Enigma (2001) as a case study of Hollywood’s “ideological universe”. The film, which is an adapted version of a Tom Stoppard play, is centred round the code breakers who work day and night to crack the German “enigma” code in the Second World War. But this, in itself, wouldn’t have been enough to attract audiences. So, a love story is put in which introduces two enigmas — the enigma of the German code and the enigma of love or the woman.

Zizek is saying that western audiences demand suspense and uncertainty till the play is over but there must be a happy ending to round it off. America as a social and political organisation was committed to a cheerful view of life; to be otherwise would be an invitation to commercial disaster. Zizek takes other films to substantiate his point that the Hollywood ideology is determined by what the market demands and not by the truth of the “situation” which encompasses everything, politics, economy, philosophy and so on.

The Interlude of the second section on Anger deals with the injustices of the new world order imposed by the capitalist world and is followed by the Interludes of Depression and Withdrawal. But Zizek believes that the crisis is so deep that it gives us a chance for a new beginning, and quotes Mao Zedong, “There is a great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent.” But he doesn’t elaborate the new directions that the West should take or even if it is politically feasible to do so.

There is a great deal with which you could agree (and disagree) with the book but all the same it will provoke you to take notice of Zizek, as the West is doing now.