Making his Marx; Zizek's theory of capitalism

Sublime Object (1989)

In this first work, Zizek establishes himself as a Lacanian analyst of contemporary ideology, in conjunction with a return to Hegel. Zizek’s treatment of Marx is mixed. He produces in-depth discussions around the concepts of commodity form/fetish, ideology and the symptom. These analyses are positive towards Marx only in regards to the symptom. Zizek contends that for Lacan, Marx invented the symptom, although Marx was not aware of the Lacanian connotations of his discovery.

Marx’s discovery of the symptom lies in his identification of a place with no place within a universal entity. Bourgeois ideology identifies this place as an external/contingent aberration to the normal functioning of capital, but, vitally, Marx contends that this symptomatic element contains the Truth of capital. As an example of this interpretative procedure, Zizek examines the relationship between freedom and labour. In capitalism, all men are free; there exists no formal inequality between citizens. However, as part of this freedom, workers are free to sell their labour on the market. This necessary act, without which there would be no formal/abstract freedom, removes the freedom of those selling their labour. This notion of a particular element that subverts its own universal foundation is later developed in the Lacanian notion of a symptom. Comparable examples are also found in private property (we are all free to own private property, but because others own private property, the majority are not able own property as a means of production and are forced to sell their labour). This latter point is expanded on in For they know not what they do.

According to Zizek, however, Marx’s mistake was to attempt to remove the symptom, yet maintain capitalist productivity in an attempt to produce a utopian socialism. This attempt at positivisation, which also affects the Marxist notions of commodity fetishism and ideology, is an incommensurable barrier between psychoanalysis and several elements of Marxist theory.

Conversely, Zizek notes the fundamental homology between the logics of surplus value (Marx/capital) and surplus enjoyment (Lacan/subjectivity), although he reminds the reader that this link is not one made by Marx, who was historically unaware of the ‘turn to language’ which has produced this homology.

Additionally, The Sublime Object of Ideology is also notable for Zizek’s construction of the Real. As he later notes in For They Know Not What They Do, in this early text Zizek takes a ‘transcendental’ approach to the Real, one that produces a defeatist/conservative political logic. In regards to capital, whilst Zizek conceives of an incommensurable structural deficit in capital (class struggle), his position (established in regards to democracy) is not that we should attempt to remove this antagonism ( a la Marxist utopian socialism), but rather “come to terms with it and establish one’s terms with it”

For they know not what they do (1991)

Like Sublime Object, Zizek introduces For they know not what they do by stating that the book is moulded by three centres “Hegelian dialectics, Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and contemporary criticism of ideology” all circulating around a symptom of Zizek’s personal enjoyment of pop culture. Ultimately, like Zizek’s previous book, he aims to use Lacanian psychoanalysis for political/ideological analysis.

This book features a long discussion on the relationship between Master signifiers and the commodity form, centring around money as a ‘general equivalent’ of all commodities. Commodity form is a central concept in all of Zizek main texts, although it is not a concept that I fully understand.

Perhaps the major step (in Zizek’s use of Marx) in this text is his identification of class struggle as the Real; “ the hitch which gives rise to ever-new symbolisations by means of which one endeavours to integrate and domesticate it, but which simultaneously condemns these endeavours to failure”.

Zizek states that class struggle is nowhere a positive entity (which perhaps explains why he never attempts to define the term?), yet it holds together society. Not as an ultimate guarantee allowing us to grasp society as a rational totality, but rather as a point of reference towards which all symbolisations point.

The Ticklish Subject (1999)

This book marks a major change in Zizek’s work, from ideological critique of social life (often directed at pop culture), to applied political critique, with, for the first time, an avowed anti-capitalist position;

“While this book is philosophical in its basic tenor, it is first and foremost an engaged political intervention, addressing the burning question of how we are to reformulate a leftist, anti-capitalist political project in our era of global capitalism and its ideological supplement, liberal democratic multi-culturalism”.

Despite the change in focus, there is no explicit focus on Marx. However, it is important to note that in the years between 1991 and 1999, Zizek produced the ‘Wo es war’ series, which states in it’s introductory blurb “The premise of the series is that the explosive combination of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Marxist tradition detonates a dynamic freedom that enables us to question the very presuppositions of the circuit of capital”. Interestingly, none of the major texts in this series (Did somebody say totalitarianism?, The plague of fantasies) feature any notable Marxist analyses. Perhaps the status of this series is that of vanishing mediator, allowing the transition between Zizek’s earlier and later projects.

Conversely, Zizek also begins to indicate a homology between his Hegelian position of (concrete) universality and Marx’s concept of the proletariat. The proletariat stand for the universal humanity, not because they are the lowest class, but because they are a symptom of the whole. True Universalists, states Zizek, do not preach tolerance and global unity, but rather fight passionately for universal Truth. As such, Badiou states that the task is not to translate the struggle into the existing order of being, but rather undermine the very under of positive positions. Here Zizek qua Marx makes an important distinction between the proletariat and the working class, because of the former’s subjective position in relation to Truth and the order of being.

Zizek again contends that capital (although, notably not class struggle) is the Real;
"In socioeconomic terms, we are tempted to say that capital is the Real of our age (not the contemporising contingency). Zizek sights the 'solipsistic' speculation on futures, first developed in Marx's interpretation of the self-enhancing circulation of capital, as an example of an operation of the real, an operation which is based upon the material environment and bodies of other people, and upon which it feeds like a giant parasite (although, we should not that this parasite also feeds many of those bodies, and many particularly well; no form of economic reproduction has ever managed to provide a better surplus).

Zizek claims that this is the difference between Lacanian reality and the real. Reality is the social reality of the actual people/environment involved in the interactive production process, the real the abstract spectral logic of capital which determines what goes on in social reality. Note the different between class struggle as an unseen antagonism which operates as the Real and abstract financial capital as the Real.

Zizek also produces an (impossible) challenge, one that could perhaps be read as directed to himself;

"This is our situation today; after the breakdown of the Marxist notion that capitalism itself generates the force that will destroy it in the guise of the proletariat, none of the critics of capitalism, none of those who describe so convincingly the deadly vortex into which the so-called process of globalisation is drawing us, has any well-defined notion of how we can get rid of capitalism. In short, I am not preaching a simple return to the old notions of class struggle and socialist revolution: the question of how it is really possible to undermine the global capitalist system is not a rhetorical one- maybe it is not really possible, at least not in the foreseeable future"

" So, there are two attitudes left, either today's Left nostalgically engages in the ritualistic incarnation of old formulas, be it those of revolutionary communism or welfare state social democracy dismissing postmodernism as a guise for capitalism, or it accepts capitalism as the only game in town through the third way"

Zizek states that the biggest move of the 'end of ideology' era is the rapid depoliticisation of the sphere of the economy; the way the economic functions is explicitly taken to be the objective state of things. He contends that as long as the depoliticisation of the economy is accepted, all other talk of rights is empty. There needs to be a subordination of the process of production to social control - the radical repolicisation of the economy.

Thus, today's ‘postmodern/post-marxist’ politics cannot be universal because they silently exclude the domain of the economy. Zizek suggests that rather than focusing on what is changing in politics and society, we should see the point around which they are rotating - the economy, profit and class struggle.However, Zizek does not want to downplay these 'tremendous advances' in favour of some economic essentialism;


"In short, I (Zizek) am pleading for a 'return to the primacy of the economy' not to the detriment of the issues raised by post-modern forms of politicisation, but precisely in order to create the conditions for the more effective realisation of feminist, ecological and so on, demands"

The Parallax View (2006)

In this latest text, Zizek appears to move back to his roots via a reformulated notion of ideological critique. The Parallax View is the first major text in his new ‘short-circuit’ series, which aims to confront a text with its disavowed foundations “The reader should not have simply learned something new, the point is, rather, to make them aware of another – disturbing- side of something they knew all the time”. In doing so Zizek hopes to combine ideological critique with Hegelian/Lacanian psychoanalysis for political ends. However, notions of a ‘new universal’ and the explicitly anti-capitalism of The Ticklish Subject have disappeared.

Zizek’s main theoretical device in this text is the notion of a parallax – “the confrontation of two closely linked perspectives between which no neutral ground is possible”. Zizek contends that the parallax is vital to a rehabilitation of dialectical materialism (in contrast to a Kantian antinomy, between which no dialectical transition is possible). The restoration of dialectical materialism, in turn, is vital to a restoration of Marxism. In this statement, Zizek returns to his ever-present relationship with the Marxist tradition, without getting too close to his subject.

The Parallax View does feature an in depth discussion of Marxism through the notion of parallax, but is one that is both enlightening and confounding. Zizek provides a productive discussion on the parallax of consumption and production, arguing that post-Marx Marxism made an error in separating the (illusory) domain of consumption/appearance and production/essence. Instead, Zizek views consumption and production as a parallax within capital; neither is the deeper truth of the other. On the other hand, Zizek utilisation of the parallax view leads him to a division between politics and the economy, which appears to be in contradistinction with the call for a repolicisation of the economy found in his earlier work;

"Is not the ultimate Marxian parallax, however, the one between economy and politics - between the 'critique of political economy' with its logic of commodities and the political struggle, with its logic of antagonism? Both logics are transcendental, not ontico-empirical; and they are both irreducible to each other (class struggle is inscribed into the very heart of economy, yet has to remain absent, nonthematised- recall how the manuscript of capital Vol.II abruptly ends with it; and class struggle is ultimately 'about' economic power relations) but this very mutual implication is twisted so that it prevents any direct contact (any direct translation of political struggle into a mere mirroring of economic interests is doomed to fail, as is any reduction of the sphere of economic production to a secondary reified sedimentation of an underlying founding political process)”.

Zizek states that practioners of 'pure politics' like Badiou, Ranciere, Balibar and Laclau aim to reduce the economy to an 'ontic' sphere, deprived of its ontological dignity. There is no place for a Marxian critique of political economy. But does one have to make a choice between them? Either we have a critique of the economy and the political as a theatre of appearances, or the political, with the economy simply the servicing of goods.

Certainly in contemporary society the latter is the case, but this does not fit with Zizek's previous comments that we must repoliticise the economy, resist the current depoliticisation of the economy. I am unsure whether Zizek is describing a current, ontic-empirical parallax caused by the Real of class struggle or a transcendental logic. If it is the former, are we to attempt to bring the two sides together? Or is it a matter of repolicising the economy in a different manner; Not a positivised construction of the economy, but rather the economy as class struggle? Or are they two positions (that of a parallax between the economy and politics, and the call for a repolicisation of the economy evident in The Ticklish Subject) a parallax within Zizek’s work? Or an antinomy?

Additionally, Zizek usefully suggests that the prime candidate for today’s universal singular is those in the slums of large 3rd world cities. This mass of people (by no means a minority) are not an excess, a redundant surplus, they are incorporated into the global economy (the main reason for the sudden rise in population is the entry of 3rd world agriculture producers into the global economy, being beaten down by the 1st world). These people are the lumpen proletariat; Zizek calls for a more detailed analysis of their role in the global economy. However, Zizek does note that while Marx's working class are defined in terms of economic exploitation, the defining feature of slum dwellers is socio-political; they are the living dead of capitalism; a refugees refugee.