The Year of Dreaming Dangerously. Slavoj Žižek

is becoming progressively non-functional, we should qualify this statement with the question non-functional for whom? For capitalism itself. That is to say, if the old capitalism ideally involved an entrepreneur investing (her own or borrowed) money into a venture organized and run by herself, thereby reaping the profit, a new ideal type is emerging today: no longer the entrepreneur who owns her own company, but the expert manager (or a managerial board presided over by a CEO) who runs a company owned by banks (also run by managers who do not own the bank itself) or dispersed investors. In this new ideal type of capitalism without the bourgeoisie, the old bourgeoisie, rendered non-functional, becomes re-functionalized as a class of salaried managers—the new bourgeoisie itself receives a salary, and even if its members own part of their company, they earn their stock as part of the remuneration for their work (“bonuses” for their “successful” management).

      This new bourgeoisie still appropriates surplus-value, but in the (mystified) form of what Milner calls the “surplus-wage”: in general, its members are paid more than the proletarian “minimum wage” (this imaginary—often mythical—point of reference whose only real example in today’s global economy is the salary of a worker in a sweatshop in China or Indonesia), and it is this difference from common proletarians, this distinction, which determines their status. The bourgeoisie in the classic sense thus tend to disappear: capitalists reappear as a subset of salaried workers—managers who are qualified to earn more by their competence (which is why the pseudo-scientific “evaluation” which legitimizes their higher earnings is so crucial today). The category of workers earning a surplus-wage is, of course, not limited to managers: it is extended to all sorts of experts, administrators, public servants, doctors, lawyers, journalists, intellectuals, and artists. The surplus they receive has two forms: more money (for managers, and so on), but also less work, that is, more free time (for some intellectuals, but also for some members of the state administration, etcetera). The evaluative procedure that qualifies some workers to receive a surplus-wage is, of course, an arbitrary mechanism of power and ideology, with no serious link to actual competence—or, as Milner puts it, the necessity of the surplus-wage is not economic, but political: to maintain a “middle class” for the purpose of social stability. The arbitrariness of the social hierarchy is not a mistake, but its whole point, for the arbitrariness of evaluation plays a role homologous to the arbitrariness of market success. In other words, violence threatens to explode not when there is too much contingency in the social sphere, but when one tries to eliminate this contingency.

      Therein lies one of the impasses faced by China today: the goal of Deng’s reforms was to introduce capitalism without a bourgeoisie (as the new ruling class); now, however, Chinese leaders are becoming painfully aware that capitalism without a stable hierarchy (brought by the bourgeoisie as a new class) generates permanent instability. So what path will China take? More generally, this is also arguably the reason why (ex-)Communists are re-emerging as the most efficient managers of capitalism: their historical enmity towards the bourgeoisie as a class fits perfectly with the progress of contemporary capitalism towards a managerial system without the bourgeoisie—in both cases, as Stalin put it long ago, “cadres decide everything.”⁴

      This notion of the surplus-wage also allows us to throw new light on the ongoing “anti-capitalist” protests. In times of crisis, the obvious candidates for a “tightening of belts” are the lower levels of the salaried bourgeoisie: since their surplus-wages play no immanent economic role, the only thing that stands in the way of their joining the proletarians is their power of political protest. Although these protests are nominally directed at the brutal logic of the market, they are in reality protesting the gradual erosion of their (politically) privileged economic position. Recall Ayn Rand’s favorite ideological fantasy (from Atlas Shrugged), that of (“creative”) capitalists going on strike—does this fantasy not find a perverted realization in many strikes today, which are often strikes of the privileged “salaried bourgeoisie” driven by the fear of losing their privileges (the surplus over the minimal wage)? They are not proletarian protests, but protests against the threat of being reduced to a proletarian status. In other words, who dares to strike today, when having the security of a permanent job is itself becoming a privilege? These are not the low-paid workers in (what remains of) the textile industry and so on, but that strata of privileged workers with guaranteed jobs (mostly in the civil service: police and other law enforcers, teachers, public transport workers, etcetera). This also accounts for the new wave of student protests: their main motivation is arguably the fear that higher education will no longer guarantee them a surplus-wage in later life.

      Of course, the great revival of protest—from the Arab Spring to Western Europe, from Occupy Wall Street to China, from Spain to Greece—should not be dismissed as merely a revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie. It harbors a much more radical potential, one that requires a concrete, case-by-case analysis. The student protests against university reforms in the UK, for example, were clearly different from the UK riots of August 2011—that consumerist carnival of destruction, a genuine outburst from those excluded from the system. As to the uprising in Egypt, one could argue that it did begin as a revolt of the salaried bourgeoisie (the young and educated protesting at the lack of prospects), but quickly became part of a larger protest against an oppressive regime. But to what extent did the protest mobilize poor workers and peasants? Does not the electoral victory of the Islamists indicate the narrow social base of the original secular protest? Greece is a special case here: over the last few decades, a new salaried bourgeoisie (especially in the over-extended state administration) has been created, with EU financial help, and much of the ongoing protest is a response to the threat of losing these privileges.

      This proletarianization of the lower salaried bourgeoisie is accompanied by an excess in the opposite direction: the irrationally high pay of top managers and bankers, a level of remuneration that is economically irrational since, as investigations in the US have demonstrated, it tends to be inversely proportional to the company’s success.⁵ Instead of submitting these trends to moralizing criticism, we should rather read them as indications of how the capitalist system itself is no longer able to find an immanent level of self-regulated stability; that is, of how its circuit threatens to run out of control.

      The good old Marxist-Hegelian notion of totality comes into its own here: it is crucial to grasp the ongoing economic crisis in its totality and not be blinded by its partial aspects. The first step towards grasping this totality is to focus on those singular moments that stick out as symptoms of the present economic predicament. For example, everyone knows that the “rescue package” for Greece will not work, but nonetheless new rescue packages are imposed on Greece over and over again in a weird example of the logic of “I know very well, but …” Two dominant stories about the Greek crisis circulate in the mass media: the German-European one (the irresponsible, lazy, free-spending, tax-dodging Greeks must be brought under control and taught financial discipline), and the Greek one (their national sovereignty is threatened by the neoliberal technocracy in Brussels).⁶ When it became impossible to ignore the plight of ordinary Greeks, a third story emerged: they are increasingly presented as humanitarian victims in need of help, as if some natural catastrophe or war had hit the country. While all three stories are false, the third is arguably the most disgusting: it conceals the fact that the Greeks are not passive victims; they are fighting back, they are at war with the European economic establishment and what they need is solidarity in their struggle, because this is our fight as well. Greece is not an exception; it is a testing ground for the imposition of a new socio-economic model with a universal claim: the depoliticized technocratic model wherein bankers and other experts are allowed to squash democracy.

      Imagine a scene from a dystopian movie depicting our society in the near future: ordinary people walking the streets carry a special whistle; whenever they see something suspicious—an immigrant, say, or a homeless person—they blow the whistle, and a special guard comes running to brutalize the intruders … What seems like a cheap Hollywood fiction is a reality in today’s Greece. Members of the Fascist Golden Dawn movement are distributing whistles on the streets of Athens—when someone sees a suspicious foreigner, he is invited to blow the whistle, and the Golden Dawn special guards patrolling the streets will arrive to check out the suspect. This is how one defends Europe in the Spring of 2012. These anti-immigrant vigilantes are not the principal danger, however; they are merely collateral damage accompanying