Slavoj Zizek remained a consistent left-wing Hegelian with his position on Ukraine and the Russian invasion, but turned to partisan politics and economic history when writing about Trump’s intervention on Venezuela. In his very long years of deep philosophical research and writing, Zizek was the only Marxist philosopher to preach that dialectics weren’t loyal to moral platitudes least of all to economic theories. His ramblings on oil sound like an uncle’s opinion about the Christmas dinner table, clearly opinionated on matters that are beyond him: ExxonMobil doesn’t even want to invest in Venezuela and oil companies are horrified at President Trump’s prospect of smashing the oil price down to $50.
Zizek’s default email reply: “I’m old and tired” isn’t ironic, and there’s probably (and sadly) a lot of truth in it. Zizek has produced massive amounts of philosophical works and his best years are behind him. Perhaps, Zizek’s assessment of Trump a few years back would be more accurate. Before getting elected for the first time, Zizek said in an interview with Democracy Now!, that Trump was going to destabilise the global status quo and open the window for change that the left had failed to bring about. Zizek also said back then, that the results of this destabilisation were uncertain but fascism was also possible.
So, even, by Zizekian dialectics, we can easily acknowledge that in Venezuela there is an opening for democracy, brought by Trump’s destablisation (a new window of opportunity): this is not unusual even if the Trump is resorting to fascism and old-fashioned imperialism. Zizek himself, however is forgetting his own assessment which underlined that at this exact moment, the left was supposed to change, reform and build something new from the emerging window of historic opportunity. However, we don’t see this in the European left and what we see instead is a bizarre left-wing orthodoxy taken straight from different old-fashioned communist texts from the Cold War era. When the left wanted to build a new world order alternative from the two existing super-powers (the USA and the USSR), the left turned to China. Today, it’s as if the political reactions to the Sino-Soviet Split have become a mainstream response to global trauma.
When Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest in 1956 and up to 30,000 Hungarians were massacred, Jean-Paul Sartre and many other academics condemned the USSR and started believing in China. Just like in the 1950s, today we have the brick-headed and foolish socialists such as Yannis Varoufakis who can’t come to terms with the fact that they were wrong about Russia. Those on the left who disagree with Varoufakis on Russia are agreeing with him on China. As Trump is pushing buttons and threatening Europe over Greenland, most of the left from the radicals to the moderates are rushing to China’s arms. For President Emmanuel Macron, Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez and Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney, the immediate price for this appeasement is the sacrifice of Taiwan. And in the long-run, perhaps, China’s status as a global super-power especially after it takes control of maritime highways in the far east.
That’s quite a big price to pay for our defeat in the propaganda war in the hands of the Kremlin: an international order of dystopia run by toy-communists. Russia has successfully divided the West and destabilised our democracies: instead of being alarmed at the rapid rate of increasing European weakness, European leaders are now in discussions on potentially discussing with Vladimir Putin.
Europe should not capitulate to Trump’s provocations over the emerging imperialist world order. Instead of playing his game, Europe should double down on preserving the international rules-based order by separating President Trump himself from the United States and dealing with them separately: effectively beginning political intervention in the US, just as the US is doing in Europe and just as Russia is doing in the US. Europe has to become the imperialist in the room to suppress rival imperialisms and this is why the left is holding us back from successfully challenging both Trump, Russia and China. The left wants to play cards with China while China keeps a loaded gun aimed at the world and the other card players.
The pace to international dystopia will be accelerated if the far-right in Europe takes power, and this means that somehow the left will still remain important for coalition politics to prevent the collapse of Europe. The far-right is completely and criminally corrupted by the Kremlin and with the Trump administration supporting them, the far-right in Europe have become nothing more but traitorous vessels of foreign billionaires and dictatorships.
Yet, it is the failure of the left in Europe that is also partially prompting the rise of the far-right lunatics, and Zizek himself admits to this. Unless we shake up the left across Europe and prompt it to change, we are going to see more of the same with the far-right filling the gaps created by mainstream politics.
Zizek has been the most influential left-wing philosopher of our time so far, yet there seems to be no one poised to carry his dialectical thought forward. Most likely, left-wing philosophy will either stagnate or the left will increasingly become an appendix of Moscow and Beijing. For left-wing philosophy to remain valid at all, it must regain a degree of intellectual independence, and this is not happening under current circumstances, in which much of the left appears subscribed to a dystopian world order. It is highly likely that the next generation of philosophers will emerge from places such as Ukraine and Taiwan, as they have direct experience of the consequences of the Western left’s positions on their countries — much as Zizek himself emerged from the lived reality of Yugoslav communism.
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