Karl Marx — Unwanted: Dead or alive.

“A specter is haunting the world — the specter of capitalism.”

The quote above is not Karl Marx’s, but it is a more suited one for a new outlook into Marx’s and Engels’ Communist Manifesto. History repeats itself, Marx said, “first as tragedy, then as farce.” In recent decades history has kept repeating itself, albeit more as tragedy and farce in unison than as tragedy first, and then and farce. Nothing is just a tragedy and nothing is just a farce in isolation any longer.

Tragedy unfolds as much in our realities as in our home screens. All binomial and binary oppositions in Marx have overflown and overgrown his conceptual framework, each imploding with a little bit of its opposite within, sometimes with the primacy of one; other times with the primacy of the other.

The question to ask, however, is still dual. Does Marx’s dialectics, from a materialist standpoint, still hold? Does Marx’s dialectics, from exploitation’s standpoint still hold too?

Marx’s dialectics no longer holds from any standpoint. And yet, this in no way means that materialism and exploitation are no longer valid operative concepts, they still are, only that they have lost their ontological weight in the ways Marx conceived them. Human history cannot be explained as a historical process of exploitation whose exploitative attributes finally come or are supposed to come to an end, for the first and definite time, at one particular time in history.

It is hard not to see Marx’s theory of exploitation as an all-embracing work of eschatology. Marx theoretical framework makes him not only the foreteller of a kind of final event of History’s class struggle, but also the forerunner of the ultimate destiny of humanity: for the first time human society would be free from exploitation not through a utopian paradise, but by virtue of a historical law that renders communism inevitable, a scientifically predictable outcome.

In that sense, Marx created a communist eschatology that has nothing to envy Christian eschatology, if only with a few exceptions: it has no God, nor promised land above, but it does claim the inevitability of communism here down on earth, in the land of the fallen.

There will be not a Judgment Day nor Paradise this time around, but a revolution and then the unfolding of the fulfillment of historically scientific necessity for a communist society. If there was ever something wrong about Christianity and Friedrich Hegel’s idealism, which they both shared with Marx’s scientific materialism, was not that they failed to prove that God, the Absolute Spirit or exploitation existed, but that they all turned, unashamedly, into a bull-headed determinism and high-handed eschatology.

For Marx, such determinism was based on the strong belief that something affecting human nature throughout its entire history — exploitation — , can be radically eradicated for the first time through a revolution, in order to create a society that we have never seen before — communism.

It would be unfair to criticize Marx for being mechanical. There is nothing mechanically predetermined or inevitable in Marx’s theory. Yet, the emphasis here is precisely in mechanical. Marx determinism is not mechanical, but it is self-assured of being dialectical, historical, materialist and, as such, scientific. Even if in Marx’s terms the class struggle might take a very long time to come to a resolution, in his view capitalism is fatally doomed to fail unless it would favor a revolution carried out under the resistance of the bourgeoisie and the pressure of the working class as the latter acquires more and more consciousness “for itself.”

If Marx’s theory of exploitation is no longer sustainable it is not because exploitation has not existed or does not exist. In fact, exploitation has existed and exists today as both an isolated and as a systemic problem of our social-economic structures. Exploitation, however, cannot exist as something that was always there before and that at some point in history can be eliminated as if it were a malign tumor that never allowed a truly healthy society to surface… until Marx.

There must be a connection between Adam Smith as the theoretical classical “father” of capitalism and Karl Marx as its sharpest “critic” that would allow for similar correlations as the one made between Newton as the “father” of classical Physics and Einstein as its sharpest “critic”. Were we unable to establish such continuity from an economic standpoint, then we would have to explain how Marx’s communism’s historical chasm would make any sense at all.

The problem with Marx is, first of a conceptual nature, and secondly, of a historical one. We can’t change the essence of something — e.g. private ownership of means of production — , without profoundly altering what property and ownership are. Marx wanted to change humanity, not to make it better, he wanted to make it another humanity, another different human species. The radical changes he envisioned for societies could be compared to turning army ants into termites by way of a revolution and not of evolution.

Obviously, this comparison is a long stretch, since humans have more capability to dramatically change themselves without resorting to DNA manipulations. However, Marx’s economic engineering was also a long stretch which contradicted the very terms of social existence that Marx himself attributed to societies’ historical evolution.

If the motor of societies’ historical evolution were to be Hegel’s Aufhebung , or sublation, translated as class struggle, we could not still make sense as to how such engine is meant to disappear in a final revolutionary stage leading us to communism.

If Marx ’s theory made any sense at all, not only class struggle would have to continue, but also exploitation. Yet, it is precisely such continuation what allows for the subversive and rather perverse nature of Marx’s theory, which has ended up asserting that instead of capitalism in its current state bringing betterments or upgrades. it just perpetuates society’s maladies as it simultaneously extends its adaptability ad infinitum, while we hope for its final collapse.

This is capitalism’s seal of foreverness: if it does not collapse, it still gets continuously worse, while we play along capitalism through a kind of pyrrhic stoicism. Then, if we adapt to it badly or even barely, it will never end, for it is our mortal enemy that never dies and that never fully kills us. We have to and we will naturally change our strategies of adaptabilities by stopping making zero-sum games the predominant end game to play with capitalism, as it plays back with us that same game.

We have deeply internalized the same malady we attribute to the system which we have made our enemy. So far, the enemy is so much within as we have fought it, that carrying on fighting it, just as an external entity, plays on us the same evil game we keep trying to destroy with the very means which feed it.

II

Today exploitation has changed considerably. Ownership of the means of production has changed. In fact, the main quality of today’s capital is that it is not as much owned as it is credited. We own credit by way of debts and market stock values, which regulate and also unsettle the management of the means of production.

Owning the means of production, however, is not what per se causes exploitation, but rather accumulating them without any mediator to make us accountable for the management and well-being of each of us as social individuals who live and belong to the public domain.

Our competitors, our enemies or even our mentors have changed. They are no longer so much our bosses, our work colleagues, our business rivals, big corporations or political parties. Our competitors, enemies, and mentors most of the time are ourselves. How each of us relates to him- or herself as his or her own opponent engages us in all sorts of conflicts which re-engineer all our external struggles with people in the real world.

If we can no longer afford to believe in a revolution that depends on many complex factors and agencies to bring about changes in which we would still be mere cogs of a giant and overwhelming machinery of power distribution, we might be better off with small steps and manageable clear conflicts which resonate with the wider context in due time and not by our coercive interventions to unbalance the “system.”

The source of our current exploitation, no doubt, can come from outside too. Yet, the peculiarity of exploitation today, when there is any, is that the principle of its existence can always be obliterated by three increasingly interconnected beliefs which are often valid in a case-by-case scenario.

1) We are not doing enough to increase the odds for finding better ways of living for ourselves as individuals.
2)Ultimately, many of us have accepted the principle that “impossible is nothing” and we can achieve anything if we really set our mind to it.
3) All that truly matters to each of us is our own SELF in isolation. Once we have that sorted, everything else is more likely to fall into place.

The three elements outlined above are not my beliefs. but the ones that dominate as much the market place as democratic politics in western societies. They are able to obliterate in good but also in bad ways the exploitation that comes from outside.

One thing is clear, the increase in complexity of our social, economic, and financial system, which is in place to make us and the society we live in more efficient and give us better living standards, conspires against itself and against us in ways which often clearly benefit a few people in simple ways, while clearly damage many in complex ways.

I say complex because the damage is not just local (homelessness, unemployment), but structural (expensive standards of living, demands of global workforces). The system cannot even afford a revolution, not because it does not have the material and spiritual conditions for it but because the way labor and capital are structured do not allow for a universal gathering of forces in a common good that would stay solid and universal for long enough to change the complex and changing structure of such system.

Any revolution, if it happened, is likely to bring us back to a different natural or default state previously outlived. We have come to the realization that revolution was not necessary after all, not because of its impossibility. Revolution is possible, but it would only bring more wasteful chaos and delay to the very inevitable evolutionary processes we are all part of as a species. The very structure of capital and labor at global levels is making more evident that the betterment of societies will come from slow processes which also contain dangerous and risky drawbacks.

What is happening at macroeconomic levels — hedge funds and high-frequency trading — behaves like weather’s patterns, resonating in unpredictable ways at microeconomic levels — innovations and job creation. Those who make constant decisions based on complex maths for delivering financial instruments which create markets, including self-evolving algorithms black boxed in ways that not even their makers can fully comprehend, are the ones who move the invisible strings of everything that affects us all. They all do it for a fair share of the spoils among those who also happen to deal with the astronomical amount of financial assets. But such spoils are not so fair, as they ripple down the financial system causing chaos
and heavy market instabilities that ultimately lead to job losses and deteriorating living standards.

If one of the fundamental market principles since the times of John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman is to keep money circulating as fast and as often as possible under fiscal and monetary policies, to truly own the means of production today is not to own factories, inventions or real estate, but rather to own financial instruments that can generate mobile capital exponentially faster. That is the dream but also the source of many economic disasters.

Exploitation in the Marxist sense of surplus value has become elusive while exploitation in the ordinary sense of castrating many employees’ chances to prosper has become common. Exploitation in the Marxist sense is both exploitation based on taking advantage of inherited wealth or/and taken advantage of earned merits through accumulated royalties and prestige.

Marx failed to see that we humans are able to self-exploit ourselves against ourselves under the hope that through sacrifices we would reap the rewards in the future. That set in motion the very foundations of Protestantism.

Perhaps there was nothing wrong about the exploitation we were blinded to in the past and perhaps exploitation of others and of ourselves is something we have to go through unconsciously as a rite of passage until in retrospect and without regret we get to acknowledge we can do better. It would be wrong to do today as we did in the past.

Thus, the source of our exploitation, the kind of exploitation Marx described, has two Hegelian moments of consciousness: an “in itself” and a “for itself”, in which the “in itself” represents false consciousness as our inability to recognize the exploitative nature of our labor exchange and our capacity to let in our default mechanisms to naturalize and legitimize it. Marx left us no choice but to only accept as true consciousness the moment of polarization
and to take as unnatural the exchange that so far our consciousness has taken for natural.

We should not forget, as many Marxists do, that Hegel saw the “for itself” of consciousness as a self-reflective state of consciousness in which it can trap itself in the endless recursive state of “unhappy consciousness”. Marx, however, took this polarized and belligerent state as the true state of consciousness of the working class.

In his “Phenomenology of Spirit”, Hegel tells us not only about the Master/Slave dialectics but also about the Lordship and Bondage dialectics. If Marx gave us the historical context to flesh out the Master/Slave dialectics in the social structure of classes, he, however, ascribed to it such a contradictory polarizing development that it remained trapped in the very “unhappy consciousness” it was supposed to overturn. This, simply, because Marx’s theory did not allow for a conscious internalization of the enemy as part of the struggle to sublate it in a positive way. For Marx, the sublation can only be negative.

Exploitation is harbored in us by us not as a kind of a priori evil nature in us, but rather as a kind of posterior discovery once we transition to a better socio-economic state and look in retrospect towards our past.

Exploitation exists and has existed in human history. Its origins are multivariate, and those affected by exploitation include as much those dispossessed of property as those who own them. Exploitation, in the Marxist sense, is today part of the very fabric of the working class, precisely because the concept of “working class” has not only become a mobile one but also
one in which you can be a temporal homeless but also a temporal employee while owning some stocks in the market. Obviously, this hardly ever applies to the mega-rich.

III

Exploitation, in the Marxist sense, is no longer just an external malady to eliminate caused by those who own the means of production. The “working class” has become so embroidered with “owning” the means of production and “owning” them while being indebted that Marx’s “working class” and “bourgeoisie” can no longer be put in a meaningful horizon of discussion, let alone of political activism, unless we question, as Marx himself did and now
Slavoj Žižek does in his recently issued in English The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto (Polity Press, 2019), the meaning and status of ownership and property themselves. We will come back to this.

Marx’s treatment of the working class is not any different from that of Friday in Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe is the European man and Friday the colored savage native. Crusoe represents the enlightened European trying to save the colored Friday from his barbarous ways. In a similar manner, Marx’s theory tried to save the working class from its barbarous “in itself” relationship to capital and the means of production in order to raise workers to the true consciousness of their “for itself”.

What we are missing from Marx’s theory is an internalization process of exploitation in which, through the very Hegelian Aufhebung, exploitation itself vanishes when in its concrete ways of historical manifestation the Marxist metaphysical polarization and the Hegelian metaphysical reconciliation have already become moments left behind, whose respective
Aufhebungs are embodied neither through a Marxist nor through a Hegelian ontology but through less polarized and less reconciliatory ontologies. These are ontologies of ideas and ontologies of actions which bring about as much new hopes as new dangers. Once internalized, dealing with exploitation gets easier but it also gets tougher, since we have the chance to become not only our worst critic but also our worst enemy.

How have we transitioned to this unaccounted for and left unchecked responsibility? This is not a kind of “clean up your room” à la Jordan Peterson’s 12-rules-for-success kind of responsibility. We suffer while we smile and we often smile to bury our sorrow. When a pure smile showers our face somehow and somewhere is at the cost of someone’s suffering. We smile regardless, not because ignorance is bliss, but because somehow somewhere even in suffering bliss sometimes overwhelms us in its purest form.

History repeats itself as a farce, Marx said, but this time as a twisted farce. The very attempt at building communism keeps sending societies back to a capitalism ever so stronger and yet ever so weaker. That is the kind of Marxist oxymoron we will have to make sense of if we ever wanted to make sense of Marx at all. For communists and lefties, communism is a society that never comes to be but that is always good to hope for. Capitalism, meanwhile, is for them a society that is always on the brink of dying and they hope that it is always so, but only without ever ending.

We live in times of zombies, very much alive zombies, with a promised apocalypse which looks more like a carnival with endless upcoming after-parties. Our pain is real, our suffering too. Our joy is real, our happiness is too, but somehow, pain and pleasure, right and wrong, male and female have blurred their dividing lines. Life and death, for many, no longer matter while staying alive or committing suicide is treated with an equal level of indifference or relevance.

When living is a disposable bonus — success and failure come to the same, and dying is a replaceable extra — , we quickly move on from loved ones gone, as we struggle against impossible odds. What we classify as impossible is an absolute refusal to accept the impossible as real. That is precisely when annihilation and not alienation sets in and Marx’s concepts of exploitation and surplus value feel archaic, extremely heavy and obsolete.

In alienation, we have a clear divide between those great things we have the right to possess but we are alienated from — the means of production, as agents with no access or deprived of the access to our own potentials to forge those great things. Annihilation is different. Physically, annihilation means the conversion of matter into energy by the conversion of a particle and an antiparticle into radiation. That would be the physical side of it. Conceptually — when meaning and its opposite dissolve, emotionally — when having a bigotry of low expectation, and ultimately biologically — when having detached suicidal tendencies, we are witnessing a different kind of annihilation.

Alex Garland’s film Annihilation describes vividly what annihilation means biologically, mentally, and psychologically. The annihilation the film portraits is vis-a-vis with the annihilation it causes in the viewer. The way it conveys its message clearly tells us that our self-content or even obliviousness for self-destruction is very powerful and yet, somehow in the film, it turns powerless and self-destructive by its inane bio-cellular posturing. Biology, truly, does not operate that way. If we, as a species, were heading to self-destruction more than to suicide — the difference lies in the pleasure of dying through the first one — , and such drive were grounded on our biological-cellular makeup, such metaphors have a very poor ontological footing to deliver any powerful warning regarding our own humanity. It only tells us vividly about the narcissistic self-destructive mirroring to which we, as a species, are too complacently and happily oblivious to be able to promote it in us.

The alien, the shimmer, the prism, it is not really an alien, it is not even the Other nor Otherness; it is our human, too human Otherness screaming, trying to reach out for that Other that it keeps finding only in itself. Apparently, the prism wants to annihilate human biology and rebuild it from the ground up at a molecular level. If Karl Marx were alive, he would have taken the prism as the driving force of a molecular proletarian movement ready to promote radical changes via a microbial revolution of the entire human species. The film, in that sense, is a cry out of Marxism of a higher order as annihilation symbolizes a punishment for the failures of alienation to turn into Aufhebung.

While alienation still hopes for a Hegelian Aufhebung — sublation, in which the negative self-negates twice to purge — that is, sublate — , it and from its heart to emerge as a force of affirmation, annihilation has no Aufhebung but rather sinks us in an infinite regression into the negative until by cheer repetition it forces us to feel the negative as positive — bigotry of low expectation, or it sinks us in an infinite progression towards the positive until it forces us to constantly bypass the negative and feel the positive hyper-positive — New Age’s Law of Attraction, as an insurance policy against the negative.

The two movements of annihilation are supposed to be tactical moves to get us back to dealing with alienation and resolve it via Hegel’s Aufhebung. We, however, will have to differentiate between Hegel’s and Marx’s Aufhebung. Hegel’s was not supposed to be idealist nor materialist. Marx’s is obviously Hegel’s with a materialistic twist. Marx was known to claim to have turned Hegel on his head, but did he? Is dialectic materialism the only alternative to Hegel’s dialectics, were we to leave aside Hegel’s idealism?

Hegel did actually see the dialectic process as a historical process embodied in real human history and not just as a history of the Idea as spirit. Christians, in principle, could reconcile Darwin with God under the belief that God just set in motion the engine of evolution. This wouldn’t hinder Darwin’s theory simply because evolution per se does not include nor requires God’s presence or absence as an ontological principle of validation.

In the same way, philosophy, in principle, could reconcile Hegel’s dialectic with idealism or materialism under the belief that the Idea or Matter just set in motion dialectic processes. This wouldn’t hinder Hegel’s dialectics simply because dialectics per se does not include nor require the Idea nor Matter as an ontological principle of validation.

IV

Coming back to Žižek, he gives us some dirty tricks to carry on mixing Hegel and Marx in a dialectic dance from which it is hard not to repeat Marx’s paralysis through the concept of property. Furthermore, Žižek repeats Lacan’s paralysis through the concept of the signifier. But let’s forget Lacan for the moment, Hegel and Marx will suffice.

In The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto, Žižek is back, one more time, with his Marxist-Hegelian-Lacanian pirouettes. Unfortunately, his ghosting and spectral analysis of the Communist Manifesto starts off on the wrong foot. He offers us a great example, but his analogy poorly fills the bill. He tells us, and I quote:

“A listener [of radio Erevan] asks: ‘Is it true that Rabinovitch won a new car on the lottery?’ The radio answers: ‘In principle yes, it’s true, only it wasn’t a new car but an old bicycle, and he didn’t win it but it was stolen from him.’ Does exactly the same not hold for The Communist Manifesto? Let’s ask radio Erevan: ‘Is this text still actual today?’”

Žižek is asking the wrong question to radio Erevan. Let’s ask radio Erevan again: Is it true that capitalism is an exploitative society? The radio answers: In principle yes, it’s true, only that for Marx it wasn’t capitalism, but any society since the beginnings of time, and it was not really about ending exploitation but about creating a society without private property.”

That would be more accurate to Marx’s spirit in the Communist Manifesto considering how spectral that book was and the histrionic and farce-like spectrality that Žižek reopens now with Marx.

Žižek not only ghosts Marx out accurately but, sneakily, he brings in Hegel and Lacan in all the wrong ways. It would actually be worth spending some time in the Freud’s passage quoted by Lacan quoted by Žižek, which says much more about Žižek’s approach to the topic of capitalism than about capitalism itself.

Let’s recall the old Jewish joke as Freud tells it in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious:

“[T]wo Jews meet in a railway carriage at a station in Galicia. ‘Where are you traveling?’ asked the one. ‘To Cracow,’ comes the answer. ‘Look what a liar you are!’ the other protests. ‘When you say you’re going to Cracow you want me to believe that you’re going to Lemberg. But I know that you’re really going to Cracow. So why are you lying?”

Out of the above passage, Žižek creates a fanciful analogy that does not quite add up.

He tells us of billionaires such as Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk. “They all warn that ‘capitalism as we know it’ is approaching its end and advocate countermeasures such as minimal income. “This is obviously as much an irony and it is a lie for, so Žižek re-arranges the old joke as told by Freud and later quoted by Lacan to say:

“Why are you telling us that capitalism is coming to an end when capitalism is really coming to an end?”

Žižek, however, not only ignores the endless trap of Freudian and Lacanian passages on the old Jewish joke but also gets his example wrong. Elon Musk’s statement is not consciously participating in the lie of the factual truth that Lacan asserts. In other words, when Elon Musk affirms the end of capitalism he is not trying to make us believe that capitalism is not coming to an end by an arranged trickery of his own so that he can actually affirm its end.

In Lacan’s passage on the joke as told by Freud one traveler wants to go to Cracow and does not want the other passenger to know it, so, since the arranged code is that when he says Cracow he means Lemberg, he says the truth to deceive the other passenger.

Assuming that Elon Musk has an arranged code, he would rather be saying “I do not want the end of capitalism” to make others think that he wants it while in reality he does not want it.

However, Žižek deliberately twists and distorts Lacan. He says, and I repeat:

“Why are you telling us that capitalism is coming to an end when capitalism is really coming to an end?”

The Elon Musk’s example does not really apply because by using Lacan’s example what Žižek is doing is this:

“When you say you’re going to Cracow you want me to believe that you’re going to Lemberg. But I know that you’re really going to Cracow*”.

So the asterisk above Cracow* indicates two things. The first, that Lacan’s passage is equally applied to Žižek in this way:

“Why Žižek is telling us that Marxism is coming to an end when Marxism is really coming to an end?”

The asterisk above Cracow* also indicates that Žižek is referring to two capitalisms, Elon Musk’s capitalism and Žižek’s capitalism*.

Žižek’s operation does a second thing with Lacan’s passage. By Žižek insinuating an asterisk, further layers of telling lies when telling the truth are created through Lacan’s logic.

Žižek would be the one currently lying while telling us his truths. Does not Žižek’s thinking have an arranged code to tell Lacanian lies? Let’s play with Žižek the same Lacanian game he plays with Elon Musk.

Let’s first, however, make some clarifications. Žižek plays the Lacanian phrase on Elon Musk because Žižek thinks that Elon Musk’s capitalism is not Marx’s capitalism and Žižek assumes that Musk knows, hence Musk is lying. Yet, it is to be proven that Musk knows he is lying when telling the truth. Žižek does not deliver such proof. Thus, the game on Musk has false premises.

Let’s try to play with Žižek. Why is Žižek pretending to be an old Marxist when he is really an old Marxist? He wants us to believe that he is not really an old Marxist so that he can really be an old Marxist.

The problem and riddle with Lacan, and Žižek is perfectly aware of it, is that if you are going to use Lacan on others it will most certainly backfire like a boomerang which you won’t be able to catch and throw it back again. Lacan’s structural semantics will hit you back and leave you “castrated.” That is the heavy price Žižek’s Lacanian dialectics is forced to pay.

However, Žižek’s new book deserves to be approached like the work of a surgeon aided by an endoscopic camera. Let’s be clear about one thing. Žižek does not intend to question Marx whatsoever. Most of his efforts in this book are summoned to either “update” Marx’s vision and adapt it to the economic and technological nuances of our current state or to create a few fancies and self-indulgent “paradoxes” which try too hard to make Marxism all the younger and fresh as yesterday.

V

Žižek’s work feels like a painting restoration work done by an artisan plasticizer who tries to ‘haute couture’ the craquelure of the old Marxist theory as its dense cracking comes to surface right in the open under siege by a rainstorm. Žižek’s most speculative antics revolve around the Hegelian logic of dialectical reversal, which, no doubt, deserve patient scrutinizing.

He introduces three dialectical reversals in regard to the ways the Communist Manifesto answered to the bourgeois reproach that what communists want is to abolish freedom, property, and family. The first one related to crime, the second one to freedom, and the last one to property. We will go through each of them and expose exactly where Žižek, rather than putting forward valid elements of Marx’s Hegelian influences, misrepresents Hegel and, even when asserting some valid points about Marx, still makes Marx look self-complacent using Hegel’s dialectical acrobatics.

Dialectics, of course, is far more than just the use of fancy oxymorons in language to generate outlandish opposite meanings in which one thing and its opposite come to be the same one way around and in reverse. However, a question is worth asking. Is Žižek trying to revamp Hegel’s dialectics of opposites by the use of fanciful and lousy oxymorons? But first, let’s get the story straight about the oxymorons. An oxymoron is “a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction.” Oxymorons are also used in practical situations to describe a thing which shares mutual taxonomical attributes from two opposite meanings, like in jumbo shrimp. In this case, the word shrimp means both something small and a bigger than usual marine crustacean. When the marine crustacean is far bigger than its average size we call it jumbo shrimp. If the marine crustacean were far too big, it would probably be lobster or something else, but not a jumbo shrimp; if it were too small it would probably be a krill or zooplankton but not a shrimp. Hence, the use of oxymorons in taxonomy has clear demarcated thresholds without any metaphysical or literary lousy twist. Even when we use oxymorons in common parlance, their opposite meanings are not lost in dialectical trickery and fabricated paradoxes. They don’t come to be the same and different at the same time. If there is a fundamental approach Hegel had to dialectics to avoid sophistry pitfalls was to put dialectics in the context of historical evolution. In the above case, the jumbo shrimp would not be big and small at the same time, but big in the context of the average shrimp but still small in the context of other marine crustaceans. Now that we have gotten all that clear, let’s analyze Žižek’s dialectic acrobatics with both Hegel and Marx.

Žižek makes a long reference to G. K. Chesterton’s novel, The Man Who Was Thursday, in his attempt to dialecticize crime. This time the elements in opposition are crime and law. Let’s just keep in mind two oxymorons, lawful crime, and criminal law, to keep track of what Žižek is about to do. Chesterton’s novel gives the first of what Žižek considers a half-baked dialectic movement. Chesterton’s passage states:

“We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession. Bigamists respect marriage or they would not go through the highly ceremonial and even ritualistic formality of bigamy. But philosophers despise marriage as marriage. Murderers respect human life; they merely wish to attain a greater fullness of human life in themselves by the sacrifice of what seems to them to be lesser lives. But philosophers hate life itself, their own as much as other people’s.”

In Žižek’s view Chesterton was not Hegelian enough and “what he doesn’t get is that universal(ized) crime is no longer a crime — it sublates (negates or overcomes) itself as crime and turns from transgression into a new order.” Žižek is referring in here to lawful crime, the first oxymoron above mentioned; the second one, criminal law, is the one Chesterton refers in his passage. Yet, before we go into the details of Žižek’s semantic acrobatics with these terms, we need to clarify a few things about their usage. Žižek overlooks another short-sightedness in Chesterton’s passage. We need to differentiate between legal men and moral men, which Chesterton’s passage and Žižek’s analysis completely ignore. When Chesterton refers to the “lawless modern philosopher” and compares him with thieves, he does not recognize that philosophers just break the law of thought while thieves break the law enforced by a police-state society which is supposed to protect citizens. A crime is a violation of the law and immorality is a violation of civic duty. We could use phrases like criminal morality or moral criminality and the dialectic acrobatics between them would still agree with logical order, but we will still have to decide if the definition that calls to action legally violates the laws enforced by a police-state society. Once we do so, we truly will know where the boundaries of crime and morals are and how much the dialectic exchange can be stretched.

This, however, does not exclude that an entire police-state apparatus can be at the service of crime under the veil of protecting citizens in a given society. However, this is not the type of “universal crime” Žižek refers to. Žižek tells us, and I quote: “crime is, qua crime, essentially moral (…)it wants just a particular, illegal reordering of a global moral order, while order itself should remain.” Then, further down Žižek does the Hegelian reversal: “morality itself is essentially criminal — again, not only in the sense that the universal moral order necessarily ‘negates itself’ in particular crimes but, more radically, in the sense that the way morality (in the case of theft, property), asserts itself is already in itself a crime: ‘property is theft’.”

Žižek gives us two oxymorons, moral criminality, and its reversal, criminal morality. He puts criminal morality as the last movement of Hegel’s Aufhebung, but is it really? We need to ask before two questions. First, how does crime become moral? Second, how does morality become criminal? To answer the first one Žižek tells us:

“[A thief]doesn’t deny property qua property, just wants more of it for him or herself and is then quite ready to respect it.”

The problem here is that Žižek, arbitrarily, attributes a moral quality to the relationship between human beings and property. If a thief respects property, as Žižek assumes, then this would imply that the thief has a moral relationship with property, yet morality qua morality is a relationship between humans. We can only have a moral relationship with subjects who have agency and not with objects. When Žižek repeats that “‘property is theft’, as they used to say in the nineteenth century” he is already presupposing that property belongs to someone from whom it was stolen. If property required to be owned by humans in order to be robbed, theft would not spill out taxonomically nor dialectically into non-human domains unless we use theft in a metaphorical way.

This is one of the fundamental flaws and inconsistencies that Hegel’s heritage has inflicted on those inspired and guided by his dialectics. The metaphorical operations we do with meanings in literature do not scale up equally to the dialectical operations we do with meanings in philosophy. If property qua property does not exist, then Žižek cannot prove so by repeating that ‘property is theft’, unless theft is used in a metaphorical but not in a philosophical way. Property qua property could be disowned or dispossessed but it cannot be stolen.

Hence, following Žižek’s dialectics, property would be dispossession and not theft. Yet, even with property as dispossession we would still need to go through the validity of Žižek’s dialectic movement. We would have two negations. One, the negation of property in a concrete way as dispossession — when property is removed from someone, including by theft, inheritance transfer, etc. Two, the negation of property qua property in an abstract way as non-property — when someone is systematically dispossessed of everything until completely annihilated or else, sublated in the Hegelian sense.

In this case, we would have to go back to the distinction between alienation, annihilation, and sublation — Aufhebung, and along the way answer to the second question: How does morality become criminal?

Criminality becomes moral in the hands of outlaw mobsters and individuals who organize gangs in ideologies and cultures, not yet involving governments and politicians, but rich individuals with power. This would be represented in a fictional narrative by the character of The Joker in Batman and not by Chesterton’s imaginary evil philosopher as Žižek would have it. The philosopher would still be too deep to represent the shallowness of evil. A cartoon character, even one created only to amuse, would be the best representation of evil’s shallowness.

Morality becomes criminal, however, when the social system, geared by the government, orchestrates organized crime and make it the ad hoc and unwritten law in a society. We have these examples with tyrannies, dictatorships, and totalitarian societies.

Thus, going back to Žižek’s ideas on property, we would have to ask ourselves if, following Žižek, property qua property would be dispossession instead of theft since we can’t technically steal from nature nor steal from ourselves?

We could say that we own, somehow, ourselves from birth. I say somehow because we haven’t yet reached a threshold of self-awareness to shape any sense of freedom or rights for ourselves when we are born.

If we have any ownership over our body and our life from birth, it has to do with the self-replicating biological organism we are through the awareness of other people as adults which keeps us together as signaling our autonomous individuation without us having yet gained such awareness, autonomy or self-ownership.

Hence, we possess a body and a life at birth from the perspective of other people’s awareness. Our body and life do exist without our awareness, but not quite yet as a possession. Possession is gained as much as it is lost as we go through life.

So, in which Hegelian sense property qua property would be dispossession in the direction Žižek is pointing at? Let’s start with freedom. Žižek tells us, and I quote:

“Capitalist freedom is, in effect, the kind of freedom that one can buy and sell on the market, hence it is this freedom that represents the very form of unfreedom for those who have nothing but their labor force to sell.”

Žižek is confusing two types of freedom here, ontological freedom — freedom qua freedom, and practical freedom — freedom with attributes, like Spinoza’s attributes. When we give a particular thing or object attributes, those attributes can work in favor or against that thing. Yet, that would be the case for any attribute. Capitalist freedom would not be any more limiting or liberating than any other freedom when the freedom we are referring to is freedom qua freedom.

Žižek first raises the question of property qua property, crime qua crime, marriage qua marriage and freedom qua freedom, but then he assumes that by giving them the attribute of being capitalist such attribute would be the only one restricting and confabulating with the given meaning into a Marxist alienation we have fallen trapped in and for which we probably will never find an Aufhebung.

The problem Žižek is posing, which is a valid philosophical problem, comes down to the following: Any attribute given to property, crime, marriage or freedom will attest to the same problem, its confabulation with alienation and the possibility either of an Aufhebung that would improve them or a mere annihilation that would destroy them.

Žižek, however, tries to locate a faulty attribute and call it capitalist, even when, by his own logic and following Hegel, any attribute will attest to the very process of alienation against anything “in itself” qua thing before and during becoming “for itself.”

Žižek’s Hegelian-Marxist logical debacle leads us to ask: Is it possible to agree with Hegel’s alienation, which contains as many chances for Aufhebung as for annihilation, without such process referring to an essential terrible natural malady to purge or to exorcize in order to arrive at a final destination?

Žižek insists:

“One should note that, in this conception of Hegel’s negation of negation, the unity encompassing the two opposite terms is the lowest, the transgressive one. It is not crime that represents a moment in law’s self-mediation, and it is not theft that represents a moment in property’s self-mediation; the opposition between crime and law is inherent in crime, hence law is a subspecies of crime, crime’s self-relating negation, in the same way in which property is theft’s self-relating negation. And does not the same hold, ultimately, of nature itself?”

There are two relevant moments in the previous passage:

1) “[T]he unity encompassing the two opposite terms is the lowest, the transgressive one.”

2) “[L]aw is a subspecies of crime.”

Žižek formalizes Hegel’s logic more than Hegel’s would allow it. If there is something that separates Hegel from the formal logic of his predecessors, particularly Spinoza and Kant, is that his dialectic should not be separated from the very historical processes that explain it. In other words, Hegel’s logic is a “living” and “breathing” organism and so contradictions, which are formalized, run parallel and sometimes ahead or backward in relation to contradictions which are not. Hence, Aufhebung does not necessary runs in a progressive or regressive way at all times.

The unity encompassing two opposite terms is led by the transgressive one but that which is transgressive is not always a crime, and that which is transgressive also can and often ends up in annihilation and not in asserting the unity through Aufhebung.

Furthermore, for the law to become a subspecies of crime or, as Žižek calls it, for property to be theft (or rather dispossession), law qua law and property qua property have to share elements with crime qua crime and dispossession qua dispossession.

From the moment that crime can be organized it can also be legalized and as such become law. The law of crime becomes a reality and the history of human civilizations become a history of crime progressive steady evolution. Then, if the law can be a subspecies of crime and crime be a subspecies of law, how in Žižek’s understanding of Hegel only law is a subspecies of crime? Does crime become the only transgressive leading element and creator of unity?

Is there any historical validity for Žižek to give crime an ontological transgressive footing as the last step, which rather appears with a cynical celebratory sense of annihilation and frustration because of the broken Marxist dreams?

Žižek tells us:

“Here negation of negation is the shift from the idea that we are violating some naturally balanced order to the idea that imposing on the real such a notion of balanced order is in itself the greatest violation… which is why the premise — or even the first axiom — of every radical ecology is that there is no nature.”

Žižek exaggerates to make his point all the more obvious. It is a long stretch to say that “imposing on the real such a notion of balanced order is in itself the greatest violation.” It is not the greatest violation, it is just one of the violations of the natural dialectic process of Aufhebung.

Furthermore, there is Nature, and not because Nature is negated that means that Nature does not exist or it does not return. Žižek is playing an agonic crepuscular Hegelian stuck in Hegel’s own unhappy consciousness translated as a Marxism-Capitalist conflict extended ad infinitum.

Žižek is a Hegelian having tantrums and shouting into the very deaf ears of Hegel’s negation of negation as if the dialectic process never had the possibility of running ad infinitum in reverse and not necessarily always on the side of Žižek’s beloved transgressiveness.

Žižek tells us:

“The solution is a negative one: it is capitalism itself that offers a negative substantive determination.”

In other words, Žižek gets stagnated in Hegel’s unhappy consciousness, hoping that the magic of consciousness’ spurious infinity would resolve itself in Marx’s bewitched communist paradise.

Žižek’s offering is clear. We should stoically withstand the annihilation inflicted upon us by the capitalist system and maybe “pray” that by the miraculous magic of Hegel’s logic the promised Marxist Aufhebung will give us the true communism that has failed.

But there is a detail Žižek is eager to inform us about:

“However, a properly dialectical reversal intervenes here: at this very moment of full actuality, the limitation has to appear; the moment of triumph is that of defeat; after the overcoming of external obstacles, the new threat comes from within, signaling an immanent inconsistency. When reality fully reaches up to its notion, this notion itself has to be transformed. Therein resides the properly dialectical paradox: Marx was not simply wrong, he was often right, but more literally than he himself expected to be.”

The above is pure sophistry at its best. Žižek is trying too hard to convince us of an old trick long ago practiced by Marquis De Sade’s main characters. De Sade characters motto was: Torture and give extreme pleasure to the flesh until eventually and by its own accord, it will deliver the spirit from evil’s pure excesses.

In Žižek’s view, the Marxist capitalism is at its best ready for communism when it has pushed itself to its best, which magically ends up at its worst. All revolutionary spirit, when in decline, shares this same metaphysical posturing of reversal of opposite elements, be it Marxist or Sadist.

The best is the worst, property is theft, freedom is slavery and everything is the same, but simulated behind differences. Right at that point, Žižek hopes for a complete purge of the human race carried out by its natural immanent movement as a kind of a collective antichrist of the very social system.

VI

Žižek’s Hegelian logic is unacceptable not because of Hegel, but because of Žižek’s own sophistry. The conception that “the shift from the idea that we are violating some naturally balanced order to the idea that imposing on the real such a notion of balanced order is in itself the greatest violation” is just unacceptable.

In Hegelian terms, both order and disorder would be violations, in one way or another, as part of the historical dialectic process they are in. Žižek cannot afford to philosophize with a vision of reality that encourages ending up in smoking mirrors and sacrificing any sense of reality. As a good Marxist, he owes to Marx’s materialism abiding by some fundamental laws of Physics, in particular, the second law of thermodynamics.

Žižek has all the ingredients to appear as posing real philosophical problems but for every word that he spares for Hegel and Marx he is rather ideological, philosophically anarchist and conceptually promiscuous towards Hegel.

To consider, as Žižek does, the violation of order as “the greatest violation” has ideological underpinnings which do not help much Žižek’s Marxist cause. It is in Žižek’s political interest that the existing capitalist order is questioned to its core not just as capitalist but as order qua order since, following Žižek, order qua order is capitalist order.

Žižek wants to de-naturalize order, to make it appear as the greatest impostor causing the highest of violations. Yet, such “philosophical” view does not scale up very well to our understanding of thermodynamics. Order exists in the universe since its origins, yet we know that such an order is constantly and irreversibly falling apart. The universe is decaying away, and such fact does not prove quite yet that disorder is the driving force of its existence.

Life, on the other hand, is not so much a creator of order. Life is a process by which entropy is delayed, circumvented, dodged or even sublated in a Hegelian way. Life is a pocket, a cocoon of order, and it is so right through devastating plagues and even through human massacre and violence. However, to put such violence and disorder as the active force against the weak and unnatural force of order is just to ignore basic laws of physics for the benefit of fancy political-philosophical speculations.

The order and disorder of the physical universe are in tandem with the order and disorder of the human universe. In other words, both universes, the human and the physical, are affected by the same entropy and order. Order is not the greatest violation in human societies nor in the universe, but rather part and parcel of their very origins.

Marx never accepted Hegel’s dialectics for what it was, a movement in reality and in thought which goes through stages of zig zags, progress, regress, alienation, annihilation and even self-destruction with no other indifferent purpose than to continue the journey of entropy while in the process extend itself in pockets of order forever more stretchable. To extend those pockets of order is similar to creating a better society, but if creating a better society is only possible by considering that all previous societies until now were inherently wrong and that only now, for the first time in history, is possible to create a new society completely different from all previous ones, we will have to conclude that the entire Marxist framework is a Christian eschatology without Christ and without religion but still with a promised land that can only come either through a revolution as Lenin’s project did and failed or through Žižek’s inverse social Spinozism in which the social substance of capitalism would self-destroy itself by its own accord and bring about in a non-Marxist way the Marxist promised land.

It is an evidence of Marxism’s corpse and its denial that for Žižek “the only way to remain faithful to Marx today is to stop being a Marxist and to repeat instead Marx’s grounding gesture in a new way,” which truly only means: to repeat Hegel’s unhappy consciousness ad infinitum and make capitalism your stoic masochist platform for a fight as we feed such substance, and hopefully all its exacerbated evil will deliver us paradise.

Žižek’s thinking is a recipe for the biggest slavery in thought. The forces of Hegel’s Aufhebung were not in the culmination of any Absolute Spirit, but in the certainty that whatever path such Aufhebung takes it is naturally driven to the best in us and to the best in society even if and when the price of alienation might sometimes be total annihilation.