Slavoj Žižek's commentary on recent events in Egypt and Tunisia highlights what much of the mainstream western press, and especially statements by US and UK politicians, have ignored—the universal nature of the protests, and the popular will for freedom. Speaking on Al Jazeera last week, he said:
Where we are fighting a tyrant, we are all universalists. We are immediately in solidarity with each other. That's how you build universal solidarity ... it's the struggle for freedom. Here we have a direct proof that a) freedom is universal and b) especially proof against the cynical idea that Muslim crowds prefer some kind of religiously fundamentalist dictatorship or whatever, no! What happened in Tunisia, what happens now in Egypt, it's precisely this universal revolution for dignity, human rights, economic justice. This is universalism at work.
Speaking to Al Jazeera English today about the future of Egypt and whether the revolt can lead to real change, Slavoj Žižek, author of Living in the End Times, states that Western powers may be afraid to acknowledge it, but what we see today in Egypt is "direct proof that freedom is universal."
The Guardian's Comment is Free presents the idea of communism to its readers with an edited extract entitled "Reclaim the common in communism" from Michael Hardt's chapter in The Idea of Communism. The book, edited by Slavoj Zizek and Costas Douzinas, is a collection of writings by leading radical intellectuals to reimagine communism for the 21st century.
Hardt examines the concept of the common in relation to communism, arguing that the
notion of the common can help us understand what communism means - or what it could mean. Marx argues in his early writings against any conception of communism that involves abolishing private property only to make goods the property of the community. Instead communism properly conceived is the abolition not only of private property but of property as such. It is difficult, though, for us to imagine our world and ourselves outside of property relations. "Private property has made us so stupid and one-sided," he writes, "that an object is only ours when we have it." What would it mean for something to be ours when we do not possess it? What would it mean to regard ourselves and our world not as property? Has private property made us so stupid that we cannot see that? Marx tries to grasp communism, rather awkwardly and romantically, in terms of the creation of a new way of seeing, a new hearing, a new thinking, a new loving - in short, the production of a new humanity.
Marx here is searching here for the common, or, really a form of biopolitical production put in the hands of the common. The open access and sharing that characterise use of the common are outside of and inimical to property relations. We have been made so stupid that we can only recognise the world as private or public. We have become blind to the common. Communism should be defined not only by the abolition of property but also by the affirmation of the common - the affirmation of open and autonomous production of subjectivity, social relations, and the forms of life; the self-governed continuous creation of new humanity. In the most synthetic terms, what private property is to capitalism and what state property is to socialism, the common is to communism.
Visit the Guardian to read the article in full.
"Why fear the Arab revolutionary spirit?"—Slavoj Žižek, writing for the Guardian, takes on the "breathtaking" hypocrisy of western liberals in prioritising stability over democracy in the Arab world.
Here, then, is the moment of truth: one cannot claim, as in the case of Algeria a decade ago, that allowing truly free elections equals delivering power to Muslim fundamentalists. Another liberal worry is that there is no organised political power to take over if Mubarak goes. Of course there is not; Mubarak took care of that by reducing all opposition to marginal ornaments, so that the result is like the title of the famous Agatha Christie novel, And Then There Were None. The argument for Mubarak - it's either him or chaos - is an argument against him.
Continuing his exploration of the wilder shores of political debate, Slavoj Žižek, author of Living in the End Times, offers a thought-provoking take on the WikiLeaks affair in the London Review of Books.