So, we ended saying that "'class struggle' paradoxically precedes classes as determinate social groups: that is, that every class position and determination is already an effect of the 'class struggle'" and "one should always bear in mind that, for a true Marxist, 'classes' are not categories of positive social reality, parts of the social body, but categories of the real of a political struggle which cuts across the entire social body, preventing its 'totalization'" (198). As such, the way things have turned out in the global capitalistic world, with its growing discrepancy between the rich and poor, with third world countries bearing the weight of greedy monopolistic corporate greed, and with a political establishment in the US that anchors itself to corporate payrolls, we can rest assured this "is not an eternal fate, a universal ontological condition of man, but is a state that can be radically changed such that it will no longer be reducible to the interplay of private interests" (200). It's political, and politics can change. Doing so will not be the result of this individual's fight versus this individual, but will be the result of an embedded antagonism, or struggle, in Capitalism itself, which will constitute the revolutionary individual. So, as this happens, and it's publicized by the establishment as a purely objective social fact, understand that the struggle was built into the system itself. It will involve subjective engagement, but the subjective engagement was constituted by a corrupt interplay of private interests. As major world economies come closer to bankruptcy and foreclosure, it will be interesting to see what kinds of revolutionary actions unearth and what new forms of political economy unearth.
In the second half of this chapter, Zizek revisits Marx's "Labor Theory of Value." Zizek points out that in all other economic systems, there is a need for explicit social domination to keep things running smoothly, but not in Capitalism. In Capitalism, citizens enjoy personal freedom and equality. The reason is, in Capitalism, exploitation is "naturalized" - that is, it's "inscribed into the functioning of the economy" and "domination is already implicit in the structure of the production process" (207). How is this? With Marx, we must understand that in Capitalism, our labor-power always produces more value than it is itself worth. This extra-value is what we would call profit - the price for nothing. Think about the immense profits reported by oil companies. Profit does not refer at all to the labor of extracting the oil from the ground, the market value of oil, or the cost paid to lawyers and accountants and business executives, or the cost of cleaning up (or not cleaning up) devastated regions. Profit refers to the price of nothing, although it was made possible by the real labor of particular people. That is, the people in the oil industry produce more value than their labor itself is worth. And how does this make domination implicit into the structure of the production process? The Capitalists, those few who control the means of production, make their living on this profit, effectively hiring their workers from within a "big structural disadvantage." First, workers will more likely get a job if they're willing to work for less: "the lowest price will get universalized." If, out of twenty workers, one is willing to work for less, they will all have to match his wage if they have any hope of getting hired. And Zizek continues, "Therein resides the role of the reserve army of the unemployed: just a tiny percentage of unemployed can lower wages considerably, because their readiness to work for lower wages presents a threat to all those with jobs" (209). We can see, then, that exploitation and domination are not given explicitly, but are built into the system in a more subversive way. There's no need to threaten punishment: we all fight for lower and lower wages while the Capitalist aims to make more and more profit after all the costs are taken into account. Consider outsourcing - we have an army of unemployed, an army of workers willing to work for less, and they set the price of labor, a price we're currently unable to match. Consider automation: machines will always replace workers so long as their cost balances out to less per hour than the worker.
The 'nothing' that we pay for is the brand name. When we buy Coke over an anonymous cola drink, we are providing Coke with profit in exchange for their name. Zizek writes, "We can thus say that, when we pay more for a commodity due to its brand name, we are paying the extra price for Nothing, for the mere signifier, not for the positive qualities of the product. It is in the interest of the capitalist to maximize the part of the price of a product which covers the brand name, since this part is pure profit, payment for nothing; the ideal would be to sell a mere brand name and thus get money for nothing" (211). Of course, nobody would simply buy a name, so the marketing campaigns of companies do their best to give the consumer the appearance that buying a product with their specific brand name will give them a unique and incredible experience - like Nike shoes will make you jump higher, a fiction I believed when I was a kid desiring Air Jordans! In the end, corporations survive based on the price they're able to extract from the consumer for the nothing they are able to acquire after the workers have been paid.
Zizek considers some interesting radical economic theories which aim to solve this embedded exploitation. One that I found interesting was that of Philippe Van Parijs' "'Third Way' beyond capitalism and socialism" (235). His idea is that the basic principles of capitalism can be combined with John Rawls's notion of a just society. Here is a very simplified version of Rawls's thought experiment and its bearing on a theory of justice:
Imagine that there is a room full of people of differing ages, races, income brackets, ideologies, etc. and you put them in a "state of ignorance". While maintaining their variety of differences, they can no longer remember anything about themselves. They understand what race/age/gender/income/etc. means, but they don't know which categories they fall under. In this state of ignorance, they must collectively decide what kind of society they want to form. Rawls's notion is that people will look after their own private interests, and so, in this state of ignorance, they will collectively create laws that will ensure that all have equal access to the most important resources such as good schools, libraries, some kind of basic healthcare, housing, etc. They do this because they don't know if they'll wake up the poorest person in the country. They will also ensure that equal opportunities will be shared by all, so of course laws would protect them from racial or gender discrimination. And they will also create a society where there is inequality, because if they were to wake up hard-working and strongly motivated, they would want the opportunity to get paid more for their efforts. So, Rawls essentially comes up with two guiding principles for the just society:
- Rights of Basic Liberty: “each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others."
- Social and Economic Rights: “social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably expected to be to everyone’s advantage, and (b) attached to positions and offices open to all.”
Parijs aims to combine Rawls's notion of the just society with Capitalism and so his "Third Way" is this: to tax the profit-seeking process which sustains capitalist productivity. This striving towards payment for nothing is to be taxed to provide freedom from exploitation for workers.
So, the idea is this: if workers are truly free, as a Capitalist system says they are, the freedom not to work should be included among their genuine life options. Right now most people cannot really choose to stay home and raise children or direct their effort toward starting a business because most everyone exists in a pool of workers all striving toward the "'scarce' commodity of well-paid jobs" (235). We either take a job that just gets us by, or we endure all the hardships of being jobless and impoverished. This is the case of most of the working class. Parijs argues that, put in a state of ignorance, we would want to ensure that we had the choice to do otherwise. We would count the choice to not work and still earn a subsistence level of income as a 'real freedom'. To ensure that we do have this freedom, and to provide protection from the embedded exploitative nature of Capitalism, we should tax the scarce commodity of well-paid jobs. We would thus, as I already noted, tax the profit-seeking process embedded within Capitalism. All citizens would enjoy a minimum income, and this income would would help increase a worker's negotiating power because they would be able to reject any job that offered a wage that, in contrast, just wasn't worth it. Parijs also argues that this minimum income would support consumption which would help the economy thrive. The people not working, living in the bottom income bracket of society, would not be considered as parasites, but rather just the bottom of the income bracket. They provide a stabilizing and empowering platform by which those choosing to work can rely on when vying for respect and a decent wage from potential employers. This would, of course, cut deep into the profits of corporations as they would need to substantially increase workers' wages. Zizek writes, "In short, the only possible moral justification for capitalism would lie in its productivity being harnessed to provide the highest sustainable basic income" (235). Capitalism would no longer be justified in self-referential terms: for its efficiency in increasing profits and productivity year after year.
Zizek ends his chapter on Bargaining asking us to re-envision Marx and his labor theory of value. A radical theory such as Van Parijs', with its practical conclusion of a basic sustainable income for all citizens, justifies capitalism by making it serve the social-democratic Welfare State. It's one of many efforts which indicate an end to the classic capitalism Marx was criticizing where the worker is indispensable to the production process, in favor of an era where the capitalist worker (the proletariat) can now be replaced by machines or through outsourcing. For Marx, the labor theory of value marked the internal paradox by which the worker would one day rise up and exert a physical struggle against and eventually over their local Master. This was the communist revolution. In these days, as labor strikes are no longer motivated by efforts to get better wages or working conditions, as these demands themselves would be easily solved through outsourcing, workers strike in an effort to "raise consciousness" (your typical strike today occurs after the plant is shut down as a bad publicity stunt to hurt outsourcing companies). The revolution of the worker will not be to "become a collective master over nature," (as in, control collectively the means of production), but rather to identify the ideological notions that hold us down, and to thereby "recognize the imposture in the very notion of the Master" (243). Our struggle today is not as local and physical as it was in Marx's time, and it can therefore be much more elusive. Our struggle today is still about social domination, but much more cerebral. It's an ideological struggle.
Work Cited:
Zizek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. New York: Verso, 2010.
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