[Marxism] Zizek think-piece

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

In the latest LRB, there's a more interesting than usual offering from the 
celebrated theorist. He addresses the question of why we have different 
attitudes toward Stalinists than Nazis. This subject obviously has 
relevance to the "historian's debate" that took place in German in the mid 
1980s around the question of whether Hitler's genocide was inspired by 
Stalin's crimes, etc. I am sympathetic to Zizek when he writes in this article:

"In the late 1980s, Nolte was Habermas?s principal opponent in the 
so-called Revisionismusstreit, arguing that Nazism should not be regarded 
as the incomparable evil of the 20th century. Not only did Nazism, 
reprehensible as it was, appear after Communism: it was an excessive 
reaction to the Communist threat, and all its horrors were merely copies of 
those already perpetrated under Soviet Communism. Nolte?s idea is that 
Communism and Nazism share the same totalitarian form, and the difference 
between them consists only in the difference between the empirical agents 
which fill their respective structural roles (?Jews? instead of ?class 
enemy?). The usual liberal reaction to Nolte is that he relativises Nazism, 
reducing it to a secondary echo of the Communist evil. However, even if we 
leave aside the unhelpful comparison between Communism ? a thwarted attempt 
at liberation ? and the radical evil of Nazism, we should still concede 
Nolte?s central point. Nazism was effectively a reaction to the Communist 
threat; it did effectively replace class struggle with the struggle between 
Aryans and Jews. What we are dealing with here is displacement in the 
Freudian sense of the term (Verschiebung): Nazism displaces class struggle 
onto racial struggle and in doing so obfuscates its true nature. What 
changes in the passage from Communism to Nazism is a matter of form, and it 
is in this that the Nazi ideological mystification resides: the political 
struggle is naturalised as racial conflict, the class antagonism inherent 
in the social structure reduced to the invasion of a foreign (Jewish) body 
which disturbs the harmony of the Aryan community. It is not, as Nolte 
claims, that there is in both cases the same formal antagonistic structure, 
but that the place of the enemy is filled by a different element (class, 
race). Class antagonism, unlike racial difference and conflict, is 
absolutely inherent to and constitutive of the social field; Fascism 
displaces this essential antagonism."

I am less sympathetic when he writes:

"We should also admit that we still lack a satisfactory theory of 
Stalinism. It is, in this respect, a scandal that the Frankfurt School 
failed to produce a systematic and thorough analysis of the phenomenon."

You don't really need a theory of Stalinism as such insofar as it is merely 
an expression of Thermidor, a tendency in all social revolutions to retreat 
as old social layers of the defeated ruling classes reassert themselves in 
alliance with an ascending class. For example, Reconstruction in the USA 
was defeated under similar circumstances. When the victorious industrial 
bourgeoisie grew wary of working class struggles in the North and ex-slave 
land struggles in the South, it turned back the clock *partially*. Jim Crow 
and the KKK helped to keep a lid on social struggles while stopping short 
of the reinstitution of slavery.

In any case, there are more good things than bad in this article and you 
won't be wasting your time by reading it in its entirety at: 
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n06/zize01_.html



Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org 


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