After a march to Washington Square Park from their headquarters in lower Manhattan, the latest in a line of notable individuals to show up in support of the fast-expanding economic justice movement led by Occupy Wall Street has been Slovenian political theorist and Motherboard philosophy favorite, Slavoj Zizek. Known for his zestful, sobering political critiques, Zizek spoke briefly of capitalism’s doomed relationship with democracy as well as the peculiar relationship between science and social justice.“On the one hand, in technology and sexuality, everything seems to be possible,” says Zizek, parotted and amplified by the crowd-facilitated ‘peoples mic.’ But when looking at society and the economy, he says, almost everything there is quagmired in a rhetoric of impossibility. After all, here we are inventing the most technologically sophisticated dildos of all time as we slowly approach (for better or worse) the possibility of straight becoming immortal. And yet we’ve got those with power up top telling us that taxing the rich a little bit and giving people jobs and health care is impossible, because it would be Communism, and Communism is bad.Zizek calls shenanigans.In reality, he says, today’s most ruthless communists, in China, are actually the most ruthless capitalists. The only difference between us (although we may not be far behind) is that in order to allow Capitalism to be immensely successful, China realized that democracy, whose ideas of liberty and equality run afoul of capitalist goals, must be cut out of the equation entirely. “The only sense in which we are communist is that we care for the commons,” says Zizek, referring to members of the social justice movement which has now expanded to dozens of cities across the US. “Communism failed absolutely, but the problems of the commons are here.”
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