Left Turn Ahead

Rs 200

Two recent books by two good scholars The Red Flag: A History of Communism by David Priestland and The Left at War by Michael Bérube frame the Left between its two salient facts: the irreversible fate of communism as a spent historical force and the failure of the Left to engage pertinently with our own times through a critique of Noam Chomsky,et al respectively. Slavoj Zizek shows why he is a philosopher,and Chomsky a close-minded,ranting absolutist,by his ability to re-invent or be inconsistent as his detractors would say and yet defend his argument. Zizek forewarns and justifies that this book is not a neutral analysis,but an engaged and extremely partial one for truth is partial,accessible only when one takes sides,and is no less universal for this reason.

The tragedy and the farce of the title refer to 9/11 and the financial slump of 2008 respectively. If Marx qualified Hegels idea of history repeating itself with the first occurrence as tragedy and the second as farce,and Herbert Marcuse further nuanced Marx that the farce is often more terrible than the original tragedy,for Zizek,Francis Fukuyamas end of history utopia had to die twice: with the farce of 2008 ending the economic face of Fukuyamas dream whose political face had turned dark post-9/11. The first chapter of the book analyses our state of politico-economic being,with a critique of the utopian core of capitalist ideology,while the second and last chapter offers prospects for new forms of communist praxis.

Lacanian Zizek,who ran for the Slovenian presidency within Yugoslavia on a liberal-democratic ticket,who fought for democracy after quitting the communist party in 1988 and who had Titos Yugoslavia victimise him for his non-Marxist research interests,is no friend of either left liberals or left radicals,or liberal democrats. His rejection of all their discourses hinges not only on their hypocrisy but also on their intellectual fallacies and laziness. But then,whats the scope for a new communist praxis here?

It is routed through Theodor Adornos refutation of the Benedetto Croce-like approach to the past of the tendency to ask what a dead philosopher or philosophy might still tell us,if at all. Zizek,a la Adorno,would rather we asked a Hegel or a Marx how he sees us now. Not,in other words,the obvious question of how relevant communism is to us,but how our current predicament sits in the perspective of the communist idea: The only way to grasp the true novelty of the New is to analyse the world through the lenses of what was eternal in the Old. Thus continues the dialectic,and communism regains its relevance not as a series of abstract-universal features applicable everywhere but as re-invented in each new historical situation.

The pleasure of reading Zizek is not because one would be favourably predisposed towards his worldview,but because he engages and entertains. Never read him very seriously,have a little fun,and see how his is always an argument in the making. How many of us knew,for instance,that socialist Lulas Sao Paolo had 250 heliports to insulate the rich from the dangers of mingling with ordinary people down in the streets?