[D66] [JD: 149] Žižek: 'Last Exit to Socialism' - WAR COMMUNISM

[R.O.]

jacobinmag.com
<https://jacobinmag.com/2021/07/slavoj-zizek-climate-change-global-warming-nature-ecological-crises-socialism-final-exit>



  Slavoj Žižek: Last Exit to Socialism

By Slavoj Žižek
13-16 minutes
------------------------------------------------------------------------

The latest data make it clear that, even after the (very uneven) spread
of vaccination, we cannot afford to relax and return to the old normal.

Not only is the pandemic not over (infection numbers are rising again,
new lockdowns are awaiting us), other catastrophes are on the horizon.
At the end of June 2021, a heat dome — a weather phenomenon where a
ridge of high pressure traps and compresses warm air, driving up
temperatures and baking the region — over the Northwest of the United
States and the Southwest of Canada caused temperatures to approach 50°C
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/06/27/heat-records-pacific-northwest/>
(122°F), so that Vancouver was hotter than the Middle East. 

This weather pathology is just the climax of a much wider process: in
the last years, northern Scandinavia and Siberia regularly see
temperatures over 30°C (86°F). The World Meteorological Organization had
a weather station in Siberia’s Verkhoyansk — north of the Arctic Circle
— record a 38°C (100.4°F) day
<https://edition.cnn.com/2021/07/04/world/canada-us-heatwave-northern-hemisphere-climate-change-cmd-intl/index.html>
on June 20. The town of Oymyakon in Russia, considered to be the coldest
inhabited place on Earth, was hotter (31.6°C [88.9°F]) than it has ever
been in June. In short: “Climate change is frying the Northern Hemisphere.”

True, the heat dome is a local phenomenon, but it is the result of a
global disturbance of patterns which clearly depend on human
interventions into natural cycles. The catastrophic consequences of this
heat wave for the life in the ocean are already palpable: “‘Heat dome’
probably killed 1bn marine animals on Canada coast,” experts say
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jul/08/heat-dome-canada-pacific-northwest-animal-deaths>.
“British Columbia scientist says heat essentially cooked mussels: ‘The
shore doesn’t usually crunch when you walk.’”

While weather is generally getting hotter, this process reaches a climax
in local extremes, and these local extremes will sooner or later
coalesce in a series of global tipping points. The catastrophic floods
<https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/07/germany-rhineland-floods-climate-change-green-transition-christian-democrats-merkel-laschet-gradualism>
in Germany and Belgium in July 2021 are another of these tipping points,
and who knows what will follow. The catastrophe is not something that
will begin in the near future, it is here, and it is also not in some
distant African or Asian country but right here, in the heart of the
developed West. To put it bluntly, we will have to get used to live with
multiple simultaneous crises.

Not only is a heat wave at least partially conditioned by reckless
industrial exploitation of nature, but its effects also depend on social
organization. At the beginning of July 2021 in southern Iraq,
temperatures swelled to over 50°C (122°F), and what occurred
simultaneously was a total collapse of the electricity supply (no air
conditioner, no refrigerator, no light), which made the place a living
hell. This catastrophic impact was clearly caused by the enormous state
corruption in Iraq, with billions in oil money disappearing to private
pockets.

If we access this (and numerous other) data soberly, there is one simple
conclusion to be drawn from them. For every living entity, collective or
individual, the final exit is death (which is why Derek Humphry was
right to entitle his 1992 pro–assisted suicide book /Final Exit/). The
ecological crises which are exploding lately open up a realistic
prospect of the final exit (collective suicide) of humanity itself. Is
there a last exit from the road to our perdition or is it already too
late, so that all we can do is find a way to painless suicide?


    Our Place in the World

So what should we do in such a predicament? We should above all avoid
the common wisdom according to which the lesson of the ecological crises
is that we are part of nature, not its center, so we have to change our
way of life — limit our individualism, develop new solidarity, and
accept our modest place among life on our planet. Or, as Judith Butler
put it, “An inhabitable world for humans depends on a flourishing earth
that does not have humans at its center. We oppose environmental toxins
not only**so that we humans can live and breathe without fear of being
poisoned, but also because the water and the air must have lives that
are not centered on our own.” 

But is it not that global warming and other ecological threats demand of
us collective interventions into our environment which will be
incredibly powerful, direct interventions into the fragile balance of
forms of life? When we say that the rise of average temperature has to
be kept below 2°C (35.6°F), we talk (and try to act) as general managers
of life on Earth, not as a modest species. The regeneration of the earth
obviously does not depend upon “our smaller and more mindful role” — it
depends on our gigantic role, which is the truth beneath all the talk
about our finitude and mortality. 

If we have to care also about the life of water and air, it means
precisely that we are what Marx called “universal beings,” as it were,
able to step outside ourselves, stand on our own shoulders, and perceive
ourselves as a minor moment of the natural totality. To escape into the
comfortable modesty of our finitude and mortality is not an option; it
is a false exit to a catastrophe. As universal beings, we should learn
to accept our environment in all its complex mixture, which includes
what we perceive as trash or pollution, as well as what we cannot
directly perceive since it is too large or too minuscule (Timothy
Morton’s “hyperobjects”). For Morton
<https://www.newyorker.com/culture/persons-of-interest/timothy-mortons-hyper-pandemic?fbclid=IwAR0qbxs2y57TIQsOloIW9MrBtqleIMIFK3SsfBQeCcWXiGIKRpnUmRAiNTk>,
being ecological

    is not about spending time in a pristine nature preserve but about
    appreciating the weed working its way through a crack in the
    concrete, and then appreciating the concrete. It’s also part of the
    world, and part of us. . . . 

    . . . Reality, Morton writes, is populated with ‘strange strangers’
    — things that are ‘knowable yet uncanny.’ This strange strangeness,
    Morton writes, is an irreducible part of every rock, tree,
    terrarium, plastic Statue of Liberty, quasar, black hole, or
    marmoset one might encounter; by acknowledging it, we shift away
    from trying to master objects and toward learning to respect them in
    their elusiveness. Whereas the Romantic poets rhapsodized about
    nature’s beauty and sublimity, Morton responds to its all-pervading
    weirdness; they include in the category of the natural everything
    that is scary, ugly, artificial, harmful, and disturbing.

Is this not a perfect example of such a mixture as the fate of rats in
Manhattan during the pandemic? Manhattan is a living system of humans,
cockroaches, . . . and millions of rats. Lockdown at the peak of the
pandemic meant that, since all restaurants were closed, rats that lived
off the trash from restaurants were deprived of the source of their
food. This caused mass starvation: many rats were found eating their
offspring. A closure of restaurants which changed the eating habits of
humans but posed no threat to them was a catastrophe for rats, rats as
comrades. 

Another similar accident from recent history could be called “sparrow as
comrade.” In 1958, at the beginning of the Great Leap Forward
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward%22%20%5Co%20%22Great%20Leap%20Forward>,
the Chinese government declared that “birds are public animals of
capitalism” and set in motion a large campaign to eliminate sparrows,
suspected of consuming approximately four pounds of grain per sparrow
per year. Sparrow nests were destroyed, eggs were broken, and chicks
were killed; millions of people organized into groups, and hit noisy
pots and pans to prevent sparrows from resting in their nests, with the
goal of causing them to drop dead from exhaustion.

These mass attacks depleted the sparrow population, pushing it to near
extinction. However, by April 1960, Chinese leaders were forced to
realize that sparrows also ate a large number of insects in the fields,
so, rather than being increased, rice yields after the campaign were
substantially decreased: the extermination of sparrows upset the
ecological balance, and insects destroyed crops as a result of the
absence of natural predators. By this time, however, it was too late:
with no sparrows to eat them, locust populations ballooned, swarming the
country and compounding the ecological problems already caused by
the Great Leap Forward
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward>, including widespread
deforestation and misuse of poisons and pesticides. Ecological imbalance
is credited with exacerbating the Great Chinese Famine
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine%22%20%5Co%20%22Chinese%20language>
in which millions died of starvation. The Chinese government eventually
resorted to importing
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign> 250,000 sparrows
from the Soviet Union to replenish their population.

So, again, what can and should we do in this unbearable situation —
unbearable because we have to accept that we are one among the species
on Earth, but we are at the same time burdened by the impossible task to
act as universal managers of the life on Earth? Since we failed to take
other, perhaps easier, exits (global temperatures are rising, oceans are
more and more polluted . . .), it looks more and more that the last exit
before the final one will be some version of what was once called “*war
communism.*”


    By Any Means Necessary

What I have in mind here is not any kind of rehabilitation of or
continuity with the twentieth-century “really existing socialism,” even
less the global adoption of the Chinese model, but a series of measures
which are imposed by the situation itself. When (not just a country but)
all of us are facing a threat to our survival, we enter a warlike
emergency state which will last for decades at least. To simply
guarantee the minimal conditions of our survival, mobilizing all our
resources is inevitable to deal with unheard-of challenges, including
displacements of dozens, maybe hundreds, of millions of people due to
global warming. 

The answer to the heat dome in the United States and Canada is not just
to help the affected areas but to attack its global causes. And, as the
ongoing catastrophe in southern Iraq makes clear, a state apparatus
capable of maintaining a minimal welfare of the people in catastrophic
conditions will be needed to prevent social explosions.

All these things can — hopefully — be achieved only through strong and
obligatory international cooperation, social control and regulation of
agriculture and industry, changes in our basic eating habits (less
beef), global health care, etc. Upon a closer look, it is clear that
representative political democracy alone will not be sufficient for this
task. A much stronger executive power capable of enforcing long-term
commitments will have to be combined with local self-organizations of
people, as well as with a strong international body capable of
overriding the will of dissenting nations.

I am not talking here about a new world government — such an entity
would give opportunity to immense corruption. And I am not talking about
communism in the sense of abolishing markets — market competition should
play a role, although a role regulated and controlled by state and
society. Why, then, use the term “communism”? Because what we will have
to do contains four aspects of every truly radical regime. 

First, there is voluntarism: changes that will be needed are not
grounded in any historical necessity; they will be done against the
spontaneous tendency of history — as Walter Benjamin put it, we have to
pull the emergency brake on the train of history. Then, there is
egalitarianism: global solidarity, health care, and a minimum of decent
life for all. Then, there are elements of what cannot but appear to
die-hard liberals as “terror,” a taste of which we got with measures to
cope with the ongoing pandemic: limitation of many personal freedoms and
new modes of control and regulation. Finally, there is trust in the
people: everything will be lost without the active participation of
ordinary people.


    The Way Forward

All this is not a morbid dystopian vision but the result of the simple
realistic assessment of our predicament. If we don’t take this path,
what will happen is the totally crazy situation which is already taking
place in the United States and Russia: the power elite is preparing for
its survival in gigantic underground bunkers in which thousands can
survive for months, with the excuse that the government should function
even in such conditions. In short, government should continue to work
even when there are no people alive on the earth over whom it should
exert its authority. 

Our governments and business elites are already preparing for this
scenario, which means they know the alarm bell is ringing. Although the
prospect of the mega-rich living somewhere in space outside of our Earth
is not a realist one, one cannot avoid the conclusion that the attempts
of some mega-rich individuals (Musk, Bezos, Branson) to organize private
flights into space also express the fantasy to escape the catastrophe
that threatens our survival on Earth. So what awaits us who have nowhere
to escape?

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