What is a liberal communist?

Like all oxymorons, the oxymoron (literally:”sharp-blunt”), “liberal communist”, seems to combine the impossible. And yet, as every lover knows, Shakespeare’s “sweet sorrow” of Romeo and Juliet’s parting is all too real. So, too, the fact that liberal communists, who ironically call themselves by that phrase, are an all too tangible part of our world. As I shall try to show, with the help of that inimitable Slovene, Zizek, that is not where the appropriate use of oxymorons stops — liberal communists are also a sugar-coated (or, as Zizek would say, chocolate-coated) pill in relation to society.

In a nutshell, the adoption of this self-description is supposed to indicate that one way of seeing the function or justification of socialism (or communism, for that matter), namely, to provide in the needs of a broader society than that catered for by capitalism, can indeed be met by capitalists (note: not capitalism per se) themselves — hence liberal communist as description of the individual agents capable of giving the notion content.

So who are these individual agents who think of themselves as liberal communists, and why is this not a directly systemic function of capitalism, but something wholly dependent on the agency — in fact, the whims — of individuals? Slavoj Zizek (in Violence, 2009) points out that the global entrepreneurs who are among the global elites that regularly attend the meetings (in a virtual “state of siege”) at the Swiss resort of Davos to discuss the global economy (pg. 13-14):

” … no longer accept the opposition between Davos (global capitalism) and Porto Alegre (the new social movements alternative to global capitalism). Their claim is that we can have the global capitalist cake, i.e. thrive as profitable entrepreneurs, and eat it, too, ie. endorse the anti-capitalist causes of social responsibility and ecological concern. No need for Porto Alegre, since Davos itself can become Porto Davos … The new liberal communists are, of course, our usual suspects: Bill Gates and George Soros, the CEOs of Google, IBM, Intel, eBay, as well as their court philosophers, most notably the journalist Thomas Friedman.”

In light of the Hegelian/Marxist dialectical transmutation of opposites unveiled here by Zizek, it stands to reason that the old oppositions — in terms of which most people (including commentators here on TL) still think — are no longer valid. Instead of what Zizek refers to as the “true conservatives” of today, to wit, “the old right, with its ridiculous belief in authority and order and parochial patriotism, and the old left with its capitalised Struggle against Capitalism”, who have not woken up to the true new oppositions of the contemporary era, we have the new synthesis embodied in “liberal communists”. Zizek articulates the new oppositions, which correspond with the oxymoronic fusion of the previous opposition between “liberal” and “communist” (pg 14): “The signifier of this new reality in the liberal communist Newspeak is ‘smart’: smart indicates the dynamic and nomadic as against centralised bureaucracy; dialogue and cooperation against hierarchical authority; flexibility against routine; culture and knowledge against old industrial production; spontaneous interaction and autopoiesis against fixed hierarchy.”

In the new society where these structuring principles are increasingly visible — one even witnesses greater tolerance, by “management”, of flexible working hours and patterns among academics at universities — the embodiments of an older social reality are yielding to incarnations of the new. Zizek points to the emergence of the “young nerd” (think of Mark Zuckerberg) who is in the process of replacing the “older dark-suited manager”, as well as to the society where we witness the “end of labour”, and where company headquarters no longer display signs of “external discipline”, but are populated by former hackers whose long hours of work no longer fit the nine to five pattern, and who “enjoy free drinks in green surroundings”.

It is significant, here, that Bill Gates, who is known as a former hacker, is the icon of this “frictionless capitalism” (as he himself has called the new social dispensation) — after all, a hacker is endowed, as Zizek reminds us, with “subversive/marginal/anti-establishment connotations”. A hacker is not content to leave the traditional, bureaucratic way in which corporations have operated, undisturbed, and at a certain level, Zizek suggests, Gates is perceived as a subversive agent who has executed a coup of sorts. To quote Zizek again (pg. 15): “Liberal communists are big executives recuperating the spirit of contest, or, to put it the other way round, counter-cultural geeks who take over big corporations. Their dogma is a new, postmodernised version of Adam Smith’s old invisible hand of the market. Market and social responsibility here are not opposites. They can be reunited for mutual benefit. As Thomas Friedman, one of their gurus, puts it, nobody has to be vile in order to do business …”

Elaborating on this statement, he enumerates the manifestations of fusing the market with conscientious social engagement. For example, liberal communists are pragmatic, insofar as they do not adopt a generalised doctrine on any particular exploited class, but concentrate on the concrete problems to be solved, such as starvation in specific countries or the suffering of women in certain cultures. They especially like instances of this such as the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, he remarks, where international companies doing business in South Africa ignored apartheid legislation by getting rid of segregation and equalising pay for whites and blacks. This contributed to the downfall of apartheid as much as direct political confrontation.

Liberal communists also love to point to what they see as the embodiment of young, creative energy in the may ’68 student protests in France, which destroyed bureaucratic fixity and revolutionised society, as a precursor to the way it stimulated (according to the libcoms’ way of looking at things) social and economic change, subsequent to the disappearance of these erstwhile students’ political illusions.

But first and foremost, Zizek points out, liberal communists are “true citizens of the world … good people who worry” (about the fact that it is poverty that leads to “fundamentalist terror”, for example).

Then he gets to the crux of the matter (pg 17): “So their goal is not to earn money, but to change the world, and if this makes them more money as a by-product, who’s to complain? … The catch, of course, is that in order to give, first you have to take — or, as some would put it, create.”

What Zizek argues here (with his tongue in his cheek most of the way), corresponds to Jacques Lacan’s incisive characterisation of what he terms the “discourse of the capitalist”, which has the outer appearance of having the same structure as what he calls the “discourse of the hysteric” (the revolutionary who questions the dominant powers in society). That is, the capitalist adopts the discursive stance which pretends to be just as, if not more revolutionary than, the hysteric’s, but … in reality he is still (cleverly) serving the dominant powers, of which he is a part, without transforming society as such.

Zizek hastens to allude to the obvious justification of their modus operandi on the part of liberal communists, namely, that to be able to help people, you must have the means, and that their own, private initiative — like Bill Gates or George Soros giving away millions for education of the underprivileged — has proved to be more efficient than the efforts of all collectivist and state-centralised agencies. This gives such liberal communist philanthropists every reason to object to state regulation and high taxes, which, they can conveniently point out, would be an obstacle to their goal of improving the lives of the needy.

This is where the metaphor of the chocolate-coated pill comes in handy. Zizek points to an American chocolate-coated laxative which effectively encourages people to eat more of the very thing that causes constipation in the first place. The same structure, he argues, is visible in the activities of the liberal communists: both George Soros and Bill Gates display the Janus face of this laxative. Both are ruthless businessmen, but/and also philanthropists and humanitarians.

In the case of Soros, he remarks, his daily routine neatly captures these two faces, pointing in different directions — one half of his work-time is dedicated to ruthless financial speculation (which can, at the click of his mouse, sink an entire region’s economy, with immeasurable suffering for many people), and the other half, like a neat counterpoint, concentrates on his humanitarian efforts, which are at odds, ironically, with at least some of the outcomes of his monetary speculation.

With Gates it is no different — on the one hand, he takes over or destroys competitors mercilessly, inclining towards virtual monopoly, while, on the other, Zizek points out, this great philanthropist “quaintly asks” what use it is to have computers if people are suffering from malnutrition or from other diseases. “In liberal communist ethics”, Zizek remarks (pg 19), “the ruthless pursuit of profit is counteracted by charity. Charity is the humanitarian mask hiding the face of economic exploitation. In a superego blackmail of gigantic proportions, the developed countries ‘help’ the undeveloped with aid, credits and so on, and thereby avoid the key issue, namely their complicity in and co-responsibility for the miserable situation of the undeveloped.”

In being the agents of this double-handed strategy, liberal communists (regardless of whether they are hypocritical or sincere, Zizek points out) contribute to something that is necessary, if not indispensable, from a purely economic standpoint: they enable the capitalist system to postpone its crisis by allowing an ad hoc “redistribution of wealth” among the most needy and miserable. Zizek also reminds one of the paradox, that today’s capitalism cannot reproduce itself by itself any longer — it requires “extra-economic charity” to do so.

Whether this is sufficient for the system to continue will have to be seen. For one thing, the growth, in India, of the Maoist Naxals, which now (according to reports) control about a third of the country, signals the failure of capitalism to live up to its empty promises of “wealth for all” there. Indian officials have admitted that the Indian government does not govern the slums where the Maoists rule. This is as much as admitting that its growing capitalist economy is failing its citizens. And it is doubtful whether the liberal communists can change this.