"It is the very success of capitalism (greater efficiency,
raised productivity etc) which produces unemployment, rendering more and more
workers useless: what should be a blessing – less hard labour needed – becomes
a curse."
This makes no sense. Increased productivity has no necessary
relation to the rate of unemployment. Capitalism redeploys workers rendered
redundant for whatever reason to other jobs. Capitalism is even capable of
inventing new types of work as technology, economy, society, and government
evolve. The only kink in the machine, the reason why the percentage of the
population that is employed has entered a period of decline in the rich world,
is the socialist interference in the capitalist system in the form of welfare
programs which induce an unwillingness to work in much of the population.
And the idea that labor is pricing itself out of the system, attributed to
Fredric Jameson, only occurs, once again, due to socialist interference in the
balance of demand and supply of labor. The socialists and their union base
demand wages above the market rate and consequently find that the number who
are employable declines. Effectively, the unions are a rentier class, who
collect their rents primarily from non-union workers, but also from each other.
Zizek wants holders of intellectual property rights to be considered rent
collectors, but doesn’t bother to explain the trade-off between such rights and
the incentive to create intellectual property in the first instance. This is
once again rudimentary economics. I wonder what percent of the advanced
economies now operate on the basis of IP income streams. Surely it increases,
and the structure of this part of the economy, including the legal structure,
becomes ever more important to abetting productivity and ensuring justice.
He is, at last, correct about the transition from the old
capitalism of small businessmen and small farmers (owners) to the new
capitalism of large businesses and big government employing the former class of
owners as salaried employees. This process is far from complete and may turn in
another direction, but the trend began with the industrial revolution and
gathered pace in the early years of the 20th century. He follows this
with a generally accurate summary:
This new bourgeoisie still appropriates surplus value, but in the (mystified) form of what has been called ‘surplus wage’: they are paid rather more than the proletarian ‘minimum wage’ (an often mythic point of reference whose only real example in today’s global economy is the wage of a sweatshop worker in China or Indonesia), and it is this distinction from common proletarians which determines their status. The bourgeoisie in the classic sense thus tends to disappear: capitalists reappear as a subset of salaried workers, as managers who are qualified to earn more by virtue of their competence (which is why pseudo-scientific ‘evaluation’ is crucial: it legitimises disparities). Far from being limited to managers, the category of workers earning a surplus wage extends to all sorts of experts, administrators, public servants, doctors, lawyers, journalists, intellectuals and artists. The surplus takes two forms: more money (for managers etc), but also less work and more free time (for – some – intellectuals, but also for state administrators etc).
Directly after this Zizek
presents the most interesting analysis offered in the essay (an analysis which
doesn't happen to be his):
The evaluative procedure used to decide which workers receive a surplus wage is an arbitrary mechanism of power and ideology, with no serious link to actual competence; the surplus wage exists not for economic but for political reasons: to maintain a ‘middle class’ for the purpose of social stability. The arbitrariness of social hierarchy is not a mistake, but the whole point, with the arbitrariness of evaluation playing an analogous role to the arbitrariness of market success. Violence threatens to explode not when there is too much contingency in the social space, but when one tries to eliminate contingency. In La Marque du sacré, Jean-Pierre Dupuy conceives hierarchy as one of four procedures (‘dispositifs symboliques’) whose function is to make the relationship of superiority non-humiliating: hierarchy itself (an externally imposed order that allows me to experience my lower social status as independent of my inherent value); demystification (the ideological procedure which demonstrates that society is not a meritocracy but the product of objective social struggles, enabling me to avoid the painful conclusion that someone else’s superiority is the result of his merit and achievements); contingency (a similar mechanism, by which we come to understand that our position on the social scale depends on a natural and social lottery; the lucky ones are those born with the right genes in rich families); and complexity (uncontrollable forces have unpredictable consequences; for instance, the invisible hand of the market may lead to my failure and my neighbour’s success, even if I work much harder and am much more intelligent). Contrary to appearances, these mechanisms don’t contest or threaten hierarchy, but make it palatable, since ‘what triggers the turmoil of envy is the idea that the other deserves his good luck and not the opposite idea – which is the only one that can be openly expressed.’ Dupuy draws from this premise the conclusion that it is a great mistake to think that a reasonably just society which also perceives itself as just will be free of resentment: on the contrary, it is in such societies that those who occupy inferior positions will find an outlet for their hurt pride in violent outbursts of resentment.
The first sentence above overstates the case that jobs are awarded without reference to competence—though I concede competence is rarely the only factor and increasingly in our “no-accountability” world not even the first priority. The problem is mainly confined to the large non-capitalist and anti-capitalist sectors of the economy, especially government, non-profits, and unions. Dupuy adopts a counterintuitive line of psychological analysis, but I think it contains much of the story. However, to complicate this perspective with a further injection of reality, it seems to me that in addition to these four procedures of justification most thinking people also sense that some part of most instances of socioeconomic superiority is grounded in superior merit, a merit that they recognize as reality, not a social construct. But these defenses against social humiliation are no doubt effectual at virtually every level of the social and intellectual scales. How far a strenuously merit-based system of social organization would incite envy and instability has never been tested. Most men, though, consider their lives to be just as valuable as the lives of more accomplished men—and this fundamental fact sets a limit to how much less they would consent to receive in power and status, regardless of externally derived measures of merit. Certainly, humiliation may lead to instability and revolution—recall the nationalist pride that was one of the main passions driving the collapse of the Soviet Empire, or the 2011 revolts against contemptuous dictators throughout the Arab world.
Zizek’s
concluding paragraph is useless. He’s conflating multiple problems as one issue
of capitalist instability. Instead, what we see is a typical example of
capitalism’s boom and bust logic, involving an especially severe bust for the
advanced economies (but decidedly not severe for most emerging economies). In
addition, we see the strains imposed on capitalism by excessive socialist
welfare policies and union protections—these parasitisms have grown so large in
many places as to be unaffordable. Finally, adding to the strain, we have the
quasi-capitalist (or state capitalist) competition of the emerging world’s
businesses with the rich world’s businesses. These are the three main factors
underlying our present economic malaise. The salary disparities Zizek mentioned
in his inane attempt at a conclusion have little to do with the problem,
howsoever unjustifiable they may be. On the whole, the only really useful part
of the essay was lifted entirely from good Monsieur Dupuy, Zizek having spent
most of his words playing the semi-clever malinterpreter of this incoherent
ramble through the remnants of Marxist thought processes.
