Zizek, Lenin and Ecology
I was struck by Canadian Cincinnatus's claim that Earth Day coincides with V.I. Lenin's birthday; moreover, that the first Earth Day coincided with the 100th anniversary of the inaugurating event of Lenin's gracing the world with his presence. As it happens, these facts are true. I'd never heard them before.
I've no truck with implicating liberals or even environmentalists as secret, witting Marxists. Nor do I take this to have been Cincinnatus's intention. We do well to steer clear of such conspiratorial or ad hominem innuendo -- mainly sovereign paths of the Left. Rather, I incline to Harry Jaffa's inimitable take on such matters:
Machiavelli’s bourgeois ménage is very much like the one about which Karl Marx waxed sarcastic. Karl Marx clearly saw that bourgeois immorality was only a half-way house to a “utopian state” in which there would be no forbidden pleasures, nor any reason for pleasures to be forbidden. It seems that, judged by this standard, present day America is closer to the ultimate communist ideal than was ever imagined by Lenin or Stalin.
--Letter from Jaffa to Harvey Mansfield; more here.
Libidinal freedom is the only real freedom in which liberals or environmentalists believe; absent any concrete guidance or wisdom, this freedom itself devolves into unfreedom as witness today Sandra Fluke, radical feminism, and same-sex marriage. (Curiously enough, the sexual act is the fundamental act of the division of labor, according to Marx: Bolsheviks keenly encouraged orgies, but proscribed erotic attachment. Today the term "making love" is almost contemptibly quaint, indeed antiquated, for sophisticated women, but lewdly entitled "Sex and the City" sells. The basic androgyny which is the deep subtext of today's same-sex marriage agenda is of a piece, wittingly or not, with Marxism). These movements militate against the distinction between church and state and so destroy, as Jaffa once succinctly articulated it in a conference on Progressivism, the only legitimizing basis for government's authority. Obama is putting the Church back in charge; the Founders understood that faith cannot be the basis of politics or of what I call the political.
Back to ecology. Some years ago I was reading Slavoj Zizek -- today's extremely popular, postmodern popularizer of some newfangled form of Marxism-Communism -- and the following passage leapt out and has always stuck in my memory:
The way to break out of this vicious circle is not to fight "irrational" ethnic particularism but to invent forms of political practice that contain a dimension of universality beyond Capital: the exemplary case today, of course, is ecology.
--Zizek, The Universal Exception, p. 27, emphases mine.
The dramatic story of the 20th century centers on the collapse of the idea of progress as a meaningful category of thought. (As I always mention, the sans pareil explanation of this, in succinct terms, is served up by William Voegeli, p. 67, Never Enough). Consciously or not, this vacancy of purpose -- or vacancy of meaning or truth -- reached full crystallization on the Left with the collapse of the Soviet Union. For those who hadn't followed Sartre and other socialists decades earlier, rational economics definitively had to be abandoned.
Since then, the Left -- whether liberal or socialist -- has been searching for various moralistic "causes" (identity politics, sexual liberation, animal liberation, gay liberation, etc.) to fill the void created by the collapse of everything from dialectical materialism to liberals’ notion of progress. Zizek is in fact saying, point blank, that ecology/environmentalism is a construct designed as a surrogate for dialectical materialism.
I really do love it when Leftists are radically honest. Such occasions are exceedingly rare, greatly to be savored.
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Comments:
Nov '11
Re: Zizek, Lenin and Ecology
Speaking of Lenin...This past year I was introduced to a a type of environmentalist that I didn't realize existed. The Garden Club Lady. Those growing up in the South will probably know the type, however they might be anywhere. Headed by the mayor or banker's wife, or in this case a retired school teacher. Their garden has expanded and they can be sweetly lethal.
Aug '11
Re: Zizek, Lenin and Ecology
So Zizek proves the authenticity of his Leninism by giving new scope to the term "useful idots".
Feb '12
Re: Zizek, Lenin and Ecology
Terrific quotations from Jaffe and Zizek.
I was going to object that libidinal freedom is not the only real freedom in which liberals or environmentalists believe - but it's true. The only other freedom in which they believe is the right to take other people's money, which is rather the opposite of a freedom (although that point escapes them).
And, in any case, the purpose of money, in their view, seems to be to satisfy libidinal pleasure - and if a pleasure isn't obviously libidinal, they will inform you by way of a smirk that actually it is. We're all slatterns and rakes, one way or another.
Aug '11
Re: Zizek, Lenin and Ecology
Marxism can't exist without a myth of exploitation to invigorate support and enervate the opposition. The entitlement state has placated the so called proletariat, so the myth that Capitalism poisons and despoils the planet and will lead to ruin is a perfect stand-in for labor exploitation. It is indemic and can only be stopped if Capitalism itself is outlawed (0r at least tamed and regulated out of existence.) Rousseau's pastoral affection, pre-communist views of property rights (none) and embrace of populous revolution presage not only Marxism but environmentalism as just another form of the same.
Edited on April 23, 2012 at 6:11pmOct '10
Re: Zizek, Lenin and Ecology
It's good to learn of this Zizek. And the quote is so perfectly self-incriminating. My younger son is headed toward a career in biology and making him aware of the basis of radical environmentalism will, I hope, inoculate him against it.
As Jeeves said when Bertie ask him how he came to know so much leftist dogma: "It is as well to know exactly what tunes the devil is playing, sir."
Sep '10
Re: Zizek, Lenin and Ecology
I like to think of it as Kant's Pelvic Imperative (KPI) which coincidentally is Key Performance Indicator in the business world.
Nov '10
Re: Zizek, Lenin and Ecology
Amusing, Miss Practical Mary. And to be sure, those Garden Clubs exist in southern California too -- my mom's a member of one. She's a Brentwood lady. By odd paradox, seeing how this is the Left Coast, several of them are also members of a conservative women's club and I'm happy to report that my mom is now happily engaged in reading Breitbart's book (a rather lewd book, in some parts I might say! Gasp).
Edited on April 23, 2012 at 8:03pmOct '10
Re: Zizek, Lenin and Ecology
Pseudo, I've waited a while for understanding to dawn, but I don't have a clue.
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Sep '10
Re: Zizek, Lenin and Ecology
Severely Ltd.
Pseudo, I've waited a while for understanding to dawn, but I don't have a clue.
----?---- · 24 minutes ago
When Catholics dissent from church teaching it eventually comes down to pelvic autonomy, which caused the wry comment one day: "Why, look, its Kant's Pelvic Imperative" a play on words of Kant's Categorical Imperative.
Jul '11
Re: Zizek, Lenin and Ecology
Lenin wanted control of the "Commanding Heights" of the economy. Transportation, currency, businesses etc. Add in health care and environmental concerns and the government runs it all, whoopee!
Dec '10
Re: Zizek, Lenin and Ecology
Robert,
Your arguments are elegant. I have a few elegant arguments to add fuel to your fire but I also have a few relevant memories.
When I was a freshman in the distant past of 1970, on campus there was the remnent of a strange organization that had been in full flower the year before I got there. "The Revolutionary Alliance" as they called themselves still with about 500 members camped out would have swallowed the OWS gang in a single gulp. They were worse by far. I, like everyone else trying to get an education, ignored them as best we could. You would see them sitting together at the student union in large circles with clip boards planning 'the revolution'. I was planning to get through physics-calculus and having a hard time doing it.
What I remember most significantly was what happened to these people by the end of my stay at college. Almost all had become either Green or Gay. Mr. Delingpole's watermelons have never been a great surprise to me for this reason.
You know I enjoy an elegant argument but sometimes a vivid experience can teach also.
Regards,
Jim
Edited on April 24, 2012 at 4:15amOct '10
Re: Zizek, Lenin and Ecology
Leftists and nihilists using the culture wars and the environment to attack capitalism and society is nothing new. It's disgusting, and it hurts the very people they claim to "stand up and fight for," but that's the American left for you.
Oct '10
Re: Zizek, Lenin and Ecology
Though I try to remain somewhat agnostic on the issue of global warming, it is awfully coincidental that the issue really gained traction in the nineties after the implosion of the Soviet Union. It's as if at the moment that the club used to bludgeon Capitalism disintegrated in the Left's hand, this new tool that exactly fit the same purpose suddenly fell from heaven. Very suspect.
Nov '11
Re: Zizek, Lenin and Ecology
I don't have anything to add to this discussion, except for this hilarious "pronunciation" of Zizek's name. If you find that amusing, you might also enjoy this one, of "darkness".
Nov '10
Re: Zizek, Lenin and Ecology
Leporello: Terrific quotations from Jaffe and Zizek.
I was going to object that libidinal freedom isnot the only real freedom in which liberals or environmentalists believe - but it's true.
Funny, I was actually going to say that taking other people's money perhaps qualifies as another freedom in which they believe. But like you say, it really is in the service of mainly libidinal pleasure -- that, and the pleasure of feeding their ressentiment: liberals' notion of help of the "poor" and "oppressed" is simply an exercise of liberals' will to power. If they were consistent with their nihilist presuppositions then they would have to acknowledge, with Nietzsche and Heideggger, that there is nothing but will.
Of course, they also believe in open borders -- but this, again, is simply their politicizing amorality.
But it's really of a piece with the foregoing. Fundamentally liberalism is about how we must affirm and protect people's ultimately aimless sensual desires: the sensual is "the real" for these people.
Feb '12
Re: Zizek, Lenin and Ecology
Very well said, Robert. In part, the left's embrace of immediate libidinal satisfaction as the purpose of life is the result of a natural tendency in an egalitarian age. As Prof. Mansfield put it in a First Things essay:
Of course, libido is not the only bodily desire, but it has been deemed as such by Freud and others. Indeed, low sensualism is now so much in the air that one can hardly refer to the body and expect the conversation to remain innocent.