What Does Europe Want? The Union and its Discontents. Slavoj Žižek

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      So yes, The Spectator, Ridley, Pinker etc. are in principle right, but the very facts that they emphasise are creating conditions for revolt and rebellion. Recall the classic cartoon scene of a cat who simply continues to walk over the edge of the precipice, ignoring that she no longer has ground under her feet – she falls down only when she looks down and notices she is hanging in the abyss. Is this not how ordinary people in Cyprus must feel these days? They are aware that Cyprus will never be the same, that there is a catastrophic fall in the standard of living ahead, but the full impact of this fall is not yet properly felt, so for a short period they can afford to go on with their normal daily lives like the cat who calmly walks in the empty air. And we should not condemn them: such delaying of the full crash is also a surviving strategy – the real impact will come silently when the panic will be over. This is why it is now, when the Cyprus crisis has largely disappeared from the media, that one should think and write about it.

      There is a well-known joke from the last decade of the Soviet Union about Rabinovitch, a Jew who wants to emigrate. The bureaucrat at the emigration office asks him why, and Rabinovitch answers: ‘There are two reasons why. The first is that I’m afraid that in the Soviet Union the communists will lose power, and the new power will put all the blame for the communist crimes on us Jews – there will again be anti-Jewish pogroms …’ The bureaucrat interrupts him: ‘But this is pure nonsense. Nothing can change in the Soviet Union; the power of the communists will last forever!’ Rabinovitch responds calmly: ‘Well, that’s my second reason.’

      It is easy to imagine a similar conversation between a European Union financial administrator and a Cypriote Rabinovitch today – Rabinovitch complains: ‘There are two reasons we are in a panic here. First, we are afraid that the EU will simply abandon Cyprus and let our economy collapse …’ The EU administrator interrupts him: ‘But you can trust us, we will not abandon you, we will tightly control you and advise you what to do!’ Rabinovitch responds calmly: ‘Well, that’s my second reason.’

      Such a deadlock effectively renders the core of the sad predicament of Cyprus: it cannot survive in prosperity without Europe, but also not with Europe – both options are worse, as Stalin would have put it. Recall the cruel joke from Lubitsch’s film To Be or Not to Be: when asked about the German concentration camps in occupied Poland, responsible Nazi officer ‘Concentration Camp Ehrhardt’ snaps back: ‘We do the concentrating, and the Poles do the camping.’ Does the same not hold for the ongoing financial crisis in Europe? The strong Northern Europe, focused in Germany, does the concentrating, while the weakened and vulnerable South does the camping. What is emerging on the horizon are thus the contours of a divided Europe: its Southern part will be more and more reduced to a zone with a cheaper labour force, outside the safety network of the welfare state, a domain appropriate for outsourcing and tourism. In short, the gap between the developed world and those lagging behind will now run within Europe itself.

      This gap is reflected in the two main stories about Cyprus which resemble the two earlier stories about Greece. There is what can be called the German story: free spending, debts and money laundering cannot go on indefinitely, etc. And there is the Cyprus story: the brutal EU measures amount to a new German occupation which is depriving Cyprus of its sovereignty. Both stories are wrong, and the demands they imply are nonsensical: Cyprus by definition cannot repay its debt, while Germany and the EU cannot simply go on throwing money to fill in the Cypriot financial hole. Both stories obfuscate the key fact: that there is something wrong with the entire system in which uncontrollable banking speculations can cause a whole country to go bankrupt. The Cyprus crisis is not a storm in the cup of a small marginal country; it is a symptom of what is wrong with the entire EU system.

      This is why the solution is not just more regulation to prevent money laundering etc., but (at least) a radical change in the entire banking system – to say the unsayable, some kind of socialisation of banks. The lesson to be taken from the crashes that accumulated worldwide from 2008 on (Wall Street, Iceland …) is clear: the whole network of financial funds and transactions, from individual deposits and retirement funds up to the functioning of all kinds of derivatives, will have to be somehow put under social control, streamlined and regulated. This may sound utopian, but the true utopia is the notion that we can somehow survive with small cosmetic changes.

      But there is a fatal trap to be avoided here: the socialisation of banks that is needed is not a compromise between wage labour and productive capital against the power of finance. Financial meltdowns and crises are obvious reminders that the circulation of capital is not a closed loop which can fully sustain itself, i.e., that this circulation points towards the reality of producing and selling actual goods that satisfy actual people’s needs. However, the more subtle lesson of crises and meltdowns is that there is no return to this reality – all the rhetoric of ‘let us move from the virtual space of financial speculations back to real people who produce and consume’ is deeply misleading; it is ideology at its purest. The paradox of capitalism is that you cannot throw out the dirty water of financial speculations and keep the healthy baby of real economy: the dirty water effectively is the ‘bloodline’ of the healthy baby.

      What this simply means is that the solution of the Cyprus crisis does not reside in Cyprus. For Cyprus to get a chance, something will have to change elsewhere. Otherwise we will all remain caught in the madness that distorts our behaviour in times of crises. Here is how Marx defines the traditional miser as ‘a capitalist gone mad’, hoarding his treasure in a secret hideout, in contrast to the ‘normal’ capitalist who augments his treasure by throwing it into circulation⁴:

      The restless never-ending process of profit-making alone is what he aims at. This boundless greed after riches, this passionate chase after exchange-value, is common to the capitalist and the miser; but while the miser is merely a capitalist gone mad, the capitalist is a rational miser. The never-ending augmentation of exchange-value, which the miser strives after, by seeking to save his money from circulation, is attained by the more acute capitalist, by constantly throwing it afresh into circulation.

      This madness of the miser is nonetheless not something which simply disappears with the rise of ‘normal’ capitalism, or its pathological deviation. It is rather inherent to it: the miser has his moment of triumph in the economic crisis. In a crisis, it is not – as one would expect – money which loses its value, and we have to resort to the ‘real’ value of commodities; commodities themselves (the embodiment of ‘real /use/ value’) become useless, because there is no-one to buy them. In a crisis, ‘money suddenly and immediately changes from its merely nominal shape, money of account, into hard cash. Profane commodities can no longer replace it. The use-value of commodities becomes value-less, and their value vanishes in the face of their own form of value. The bourgeois, drunk with prosperity and arrogantly certain of itself, has just declared that money is a purely imaginary creation. ‘Commodities alone are money,’ it said. But now the opposite cry resounds over the markets of the world: only money is a commodity … ‘In a crisis, the antithesis between commodities and their value-form, money, is raised to the level of an absolute contradiction.’⁵

      Does this not mean that at this moment, far from disintegrating, fetishism is fully asserted in its direct madness? In crisis, the underlying belief, disavowed and just practised, is thus directly asserted. And the same holds for today’s ongoing crisis: one of the spontaneous reactions to it is to turn to some commonsense guideline: ‘Debts have to be paid!’, ‘You cannot spend more than you produced!’, or something similar – and this, of course, is the worst thing one can do, since in this way, one gets caught in a downward spiral. First, such elementary wisdom is simply wrong – the United States was doing quite well for decades spending much more than it produced.

      At a more fundamental level, we should clearly perceive the paradox of debt: at the direct material level of social totality, debts are in СКАЧАТЬ