The current ‘crisis’ is in fact the failure of the capitalist utopia that has reigned for the twenty years following the collapse of the Soviet Empire: the utopia of the perfect self-regulation of the free market and of the possibility of organizing all forms of human life according to the logic of that market. A rethinking of communism today must take into account the unheard-of situation of the failure of the capitalist utopia. The same situation forces us to question another form of contemporary Marxist discourse. I am thinking of the pervasive description of a final state of capitalism producing the triumph of a global petite bourgeoisie embodying the Nietzschean prophecy about the ‘last man’: a world entirely devoted to the service of goods, the cult of the commodity and the spectacle, the obedience to the superego injunction of ‘jouissance’, the narcissistic consumption of forms of self-experimentation, etc. This global triumph of so-called mass individualism is given in those narrations the name of democracy. Democracy then appears as the lived world built by the domination of Capital and the increasing capitalist destruction of forms of community and universality. This narrative can thus construct a simple alternative: either democracy-meaning the despicable reign of the ‘last man’ - or a ‘beyond democracy’ for which communism turns out to be the suitable name.
Jacques Ranciere (via zizekianrevolution)
02/21/12 at 8:55pm
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