Zizek, Zabala and the communist horizon

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Santiago Zabala is ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona. he wrote an opinion piece on Al Jazeera - in response to the Slovenian marxist critic Slavoc Zizek. Zizek is a mischievous iconoclast who still claims to be a communist even though allegedly he lives in Dubai. 

This was my response to Zabala's piece and the comments below it:

As an 'anti-capitalist' by nature - gosh, I must be lazy preferring not to slave away for 50 hours a week for someone else! - I don't see the 4 points presented by the author as actually signifying fundamental obstacles to capitalist reproduction. The most important trends that can lead to capitalist breakdown in the longer term are:

1) the substitution of technology for human labour, leading to wage suppression, mass unemployment and a slowdown in economic growth. This is the most fundamental challenge to capitalism. When agriculture advanced through new capitalist techniques, the proportion of the labour force in agriculture fell from 70% to 2% in countries like the UK; the same will happen to industry. Industrial workers have fallen to 10% of the workforce in some countries; human services are the remaining sector where employment growth lies.

However technology is removing the need for skilled labour - and has been for some time. Once the reproduction of society is separated from productive employment, capitalism breaks down because capitalism is based on the labour-capitalist relationship. If the wage labour class - all those who live primarily through paid work - is diminished beyond a certain point, capitalist growth becomes impossible UNLESS an agency outside the market relationship - ie the state (or the people's collective will) steps in to revive the process of circulation by putting money into people's pockets. We have seen this recently with bank bailouts, quantitative easing etc BUT this is putting money into the hands of finance capitalists, rather than ordinary people. 

Capitalism has to be reproduced artificially because wages are insufficient to consume the economy's new output. The state or some other non-market agency must step in to ensure the circulation of capital. Free marketeers believe that by cutting back the state and welfare the market will automatically right itself and everyone will make hay, but there is very little evidence for this now or in the past.

2) Uncontrolled fiat money growth, debt expansion and deflation caused by a decline in the rate of profit in advanced countries, combined with financial monopolisation of the economy. For 15 years western governments allowed debt - public and private - to replace income growth. This economic model is now bust and so we have austerity and government money creation. Austerity can exacerbate point (1) by further cutting wages and increasing unemployment. We now have a dictatorship of finance, which to my mind, is as totalitarian as any other kind of dictatorship.

I believe that a non-capitalist solution to these problems could be found that is far more sustainable and humanistic than the artificial reproduction of capitalism through state manipulation and taxpayer debt bailouts. This would require measures to restrict asset bubble growth, redistribute liabilities to bond holders, writing off debt, introducing such measures as citizen's income, and returning large parts of our social life - and land - to the commons - deprivatisation but via democratic means so that bureaucrats do not take charge of assets.

3) As a point of historical accuracy, the mythology of capitalism ignores the fundamental role of the state as handmaid of market development, expropriation of the commons, and the creation of a wage labour force. This false view of history as presented here by Dave Small is what prevents an understanding of how we got here and where we might go. Would the 'free market' exist in America if the US and colonial governments had not systematically expropriated native common land and handed it over to capitalists and private farmers? Of course not!

Future alternatives are possible, once we abandon the prison of neoliberal ideology. Crucially, we must develop new ways to revive the commons and revive democratic control of the economy. The internet means we can get rid of the monopoly of career politicians and put the decision making directly in the hands of the people through a real time permanent democracy - replacing the plutocratic 18th century model now dominant in the US, Europe and elsewhere. Parliaments should, in my view be made up of people's tribunes chosen at random like juries, with fixed paid terms to prevent capture by lobbyists. See Iceland banking and democratic reform as an example we should all follow.

China bashing and the myth of democracy

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Listening to Damian Gramaticus, the BBC's man in Beijing, describing the Chinese system as authoritarian, secretive and corrupt on Radio Four this morning, I once again felt the power of our media to tell us what to think about the world.
The propaganda message is unrelenting. In the run-up to the People's Congress in China, which will anoint the new party leaders, we are being constantly reminded how flawed and undemocratic their system is. It is as if they need to keep telling us that the Chinese desperately want our democracy and are being cruelly denied it by the Communist party. So Cold War, it's like the 1980s all over again.
Are BBC journalists telling the truth? I don't think so, not when they so assiduously paint a picture of a 'regime' denying its people's aspirations. For when it comes to aspirations, I find it hard for any Western government to claim that it is democratic in the sense as representing the people's will. In Europe, Britain and North America, we have a system that constantly enriches the 1% richest, while imposing austerity on the majority.
This is done in the wake of a financial crisis caused by the deregulation of the banking system over many years, carried out on 'our' behalf, but which the 'people' never asked for.
An economic system built on debt was hoisted on western electorates without it ever being put to the electorate. Of course, we can easily see the faults of China's model of 'democratic people's dictatorship' in which a pyramid of bodies each chooses their leaders, giving the people little or no say in who rules them.
But democracy is not, as our media would have us believe, simply a matter of having a choice of personalities at an election every four years. Americans just 'chose' Barack Obama over Mitt Romney, but this was the 'choice' between two candidates backed by the millions of dollars donated by corporations, and from two parties that each uphold a system of debt-based capitalism that has seen the gains of growth go into the hands of the 0.1% for the last three decades.
So the question isn't as facile as how you choose your president or parliament. It is how accountable are these representatives. If they are hardly accountable at all, then how real is the democracy we have? Yes, to some extent we have 'freedom of speech' - mostly thanks to the internet - but media is controlled by billionaires, whose message is overwhelmingly in favour of the system as it is. We do not have a free flow of ideas accessible to the majority about what kind of system they would like to live in. Education is increasingly a matter of privilege and birth - money buys access to the best schools for the wealthy.
I would wager that for most countries, the higher the liabilities of the banking system, and the more 'open' it is to the free flow of capital in and out of the country, the more likely that conditions for the masses will stagnate, the more inequality will intensify, the more indebted the state will become, and the more eviscerated and elite-manipulated will become the system of democracy.
If you live in a country where capital movement is restricted, and banks' liabilities cannot exceed a certain amount, that is a country whose wealth is based on real economic activity, where the state has a reasonable degree of control over the flow of finance and over the ownership of assets within the country's borders, it is more likely that state policy will have a beneficial impact on the majority of the population.
China has adopted many elements of capitalism, including fee payment for public services such as education and healthcare, private housing developments and massive wealth inequality. Billionaires are now integral to the Communist elite, which means that potentially they can exert a stranglehold over policy, as the party moves further away from socialism and marxism. But for more than three decades reform and growth did raise millions out of poverty in a way not witnessed in that splendid democracy, India.
However, the clamour from the west is now for 'reform' in China - and when they say reform they mean a combination of mass privatisation of state assets and the introduction of the western system of representative democracy. The thing about the latter, it is not government of the people for the people, but it is mostly government of the rich for the rich. Look how it worked out in Russia to get an idea of what China could have in future - how different it would be from now is questionable. The people simply get to choose which representatives of the owning class they prefer. This is what the BBC - as the state broadcaster under a monarchichal democratic oligarchy - will never tell you.
Further, the social contract under a dictatorship may well be more honest than under a democracy, since the deal is 'we will let you continue to rule if you provide benefits for the people, but if you simply enrich your elite families and leave us in poverty we will rise up and attempt to overthrow you'.
This is what happened in Syria - the ruling family forgot the deal and the people rose up. This is why in dictatorships there has to be a deal, because the stakes are very high, whereas in democracies, the deal breaks down because the leaders leave office every four years and thus avoid accountability - and take cushy directorships in industry. While in office, they are under no obligation to do what they said during the elections since 'representative' does not mean delegate, and most members of parliament are placemen under the thumb of party whips and hacks. Rather like in China.