keeps the world economy running. (So much for the anti-Keynesian economic ideology that seems to predominate today!) This influx, which is effectively like the tithe paid to Rome in antiquity (or the gifts sacrificed to the Minotaur by the Ancient Greeks), relies on a complex economic mechanism: the US is “trusted” as the safe and stable center, so that all the others, from the oil-producing Arab countries to Western Europe and Japan, and now even the Chinese, invest their surplus profits in the US. Since this trust is primarily ideological and military, not economic, the problem for the US is how to justify its imperial role—it needs a permanent state of war, thus the “war on terror,” offering itself as the universal protector of all other “normal” (not “rogue”) states. The entire globe thus tends to function as a universal Sparta with its three classes, now emerging as the First, Second, and Third worlds: (1) the US as the military-political-ideological power; (2) Europe and parts of Asia and Latin America as the industrial-manufacturing regions (crucial here are Germany and Japan, the world’s leading exporters, plus rising China); (3) the undeveloped rest, today’s helots. In other words, global capitalism has brought about a new general trend towards oligarchy, masked as the celebration of the “diversity of cultures”: equality and universalism are increasingly disappearing as genuine political principles. Even before it has fully established itself, however, this neo-Spartan world system is breaking down. In contrast to the situation in 1945, the world does not need the US; it is the US that needs the rest of the world.
Against the background of this gigantic shadow, the European struggles—German leaders furious with Greece and reluctant to throw billions into a black hole; Greek leaders pathetically insisting on their sovereignty and comparing the pressure from Brussels to the German occupation during World War II—cannot but appear petty and ridiculous.
1 Karl Marx, “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy” (1859), Selected Writings, ed. Lawrence H. Simon, Indianapolis: Hackett 1994, p. 211.
2 See Jean-Claude Milner, Clartés de tout, Paris: Verdier 2011.
3 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude, New York: Penguin 2004.
4 There is also an interesting difference emerging between today’s China and Russia: in Russia, university cadres are ridiculously underpaid; they have de facto already joined the proletariat, while in China, they are well provided with a “surplus-wage” as a means to guarantee their docility.
5 True, part of the price paid for this hyper-remuneration is that managers have to be available twenty-four hours a day, thus living in a permanent emergency state.
6 One of Jacques Lacan’s more outrageous statements is that even if a jealous husband’s claim that his wife sleeps around turns out to be true, his jealousy is still pathological. Along the same lines, we could say that even if most of the Nazis’ claims about Jews were indeed true (which, of course, was not the case), their anti-Semitism would still be (and was) pathological, since it represses the true reason the Nazis required anti-Semitism, which was to sustain their ideological position. Exactly the same holds for the claim that the Greeks are lazy: even if this were the case, the accusation would be false, because it obfuscates the complex global economic mechanisms that drove Germany, France and others to finance the “lazy” Greeks.
7 “The Global Minotaur: An Interview with Yanis Varoufakis,” available at nakedcapitalism.com.
8 See Yanis Varoufakis, The Global Minotaur, London: Zed Books 2011.
9 “The Global Minotaur: An Interview with Yanis Varoufakis, naked capitalism.com.”
10 See Emmanuel Todd, After the Empire, London: Constable 2004.
The “Dream-Work” of Political Representation
In his analyses of the French Revolution of 1848 and its aftermath (in The Eighteenth Brumaire and Class Struggles in France), Marx “complicated” in a properly dialectical way the logic of social representation (political agents representing economic classes and forces), going much further than the usual conception of these “complications,” according to which political representation never directly mirrors social structure. (A single political agent can represent different social groups; a class can renounce its direct representation and leave to another class the task of securing the politico-juridical conditions of its rule, as the English capitalist class did by leaving the exercise of political power to the aristocracy, and so on.) Marx’s analyses point towards what, more than a century later, Lacan articulated as the “logic of the signifier.” There are four principal versions of Marx’s “complication”—let us begin with his analysis of the Party of Order, which took power when the 1848 revolutionary élan in France had dwindled. The secret of its existence was
the coalition of Orléanists and Legitimists into one party, disclosed. The bourgeois class fell apart into two big factions which alternately—the big landed proprietors under the restored monarchy and the finance aristocracy and the industrial bourgeoisie under the July Monarchy—had maintained a monopoly of power. Bourbon was the royal name for the predominant influence of the interests of the one faction, Orléans the royal name for the predominant influence of the interests of the other faction—the nameless realm of the republic was the only one in which both factions could maintain with equal power the common class interest without giving up their mutual rivalry.1
This, then, is the first complication: when we are dealing with two or more socio-economic groups, their common interest can only be represented in the guise of the negation of their shared premise—the common denominator of the two royalist factions is not royalism, but republicanism. And, in the same way today, the only political agent that consequently represents the collective interests of Capital as such, in its universality, above its particular factions, is “Third Way” Social Democracy (which is why Wall Street supports Obama), and, in contemporary China, it is the Communist Party. In The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx goes on to extend this logic to the whole of society, as is clear from his acerbic description of the “Society of December 10,” Napoleon III’s private army of thugs:
Alongside decayed roués with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin, alongside ruined and adventurous offshoots of the bourgeoisie, were vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, escaped galley slaves, swindlers, mountebanks, lazzaroni, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux, brothel keepers, porters, literati, organ grinders, ragpickers, knife grinders, tinkers, beggars—in short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French call la bohême; from this kindred element Bonaparte formed the core of the Society of December 10 … This Bonaparte, who constitutes himself chief of the lumpen proletariat, who here alone rediscovers in mass form the interests which he personally pursues, who recognizes in this scum, offal, refuse of all classes the only class upon which he can base himself unconditionally, is the real Bonaparte, the Bonaparte sans phrase.2
The logic of the Party of Order is here brought to its radical conclusion: the only common denominator of all classes is the excremental excess, the refuse/remainder of all classes. In other words, insofar as Napoleon III perceived himself as standing above class interests, for the reconciliation of all classes, his immediate class base can only be the excremental remainder of all classes, the rejected non-class of each class. So, in a properly Hegelian dialectical reversal, it is precisely the non-representable excess of society, the scum, the plebs, which is by definition left out in any organic system of social representation, which becomes the medium of universal representation. And it is this support in the “socially abject” that enables Napoleon to run around, constantly shifting his position, representing in turn each class against all others:
The people are to be given employment: initiation of public works. But the public works increase the people’s tax obligations: hence reduction of taxes by an attack on the rentiers, by conversion of the 5 percent bonds into 4½ percent. But the middle class must again receive a sweetening: hence a doubling of the wine tax for the people, who buy wine retail, and a halving of the wine tax for the middle class, which drinks it wholesale;