Social Theory

A MARX BROTHERS VIEW ON EUROPEAN ELECTIONS

A MARX BROTHERS VIEW ON EUROPEAN ELECTIONS

Slavoj Žižek

The surprise of the European elections of June 2024 was that what we all expected to happen – the move to the Right – really happened. To explain this, we perhaps need Marx brothers more than Marx – to paraphrase the well-known joke of Groucho who plays a lawyer defending an idiot: Europe is talking and acting as if it is moving to the radical Right, but this shouldn’t deceive us, Europe is really moving to the radical Right.
So why should we insist that Europe is really moving to the radical Right? For a simple reason: although our big media verbally admit this turn to the radical Right, they as a rule downplay it and neutralize its importance: “OK, Marine le Pen, Giorgia Meloni or Alternative fuer Deutschland occasionally flirt with Fascist motifs, but there is no reason for panic because they still respect democratic rules and, once in power, they participate in European institutions (Meloni collaborates smoothly with Brussels administration)…” However, the actual function of this domestication of the new radical Right is much more troubling: it expresses the readiness of the traditional conservative parties to collaborate with the new radical Right. The axiom of the post-WWII European democracy “No collaboration with neo-Fascists!” is thus silently abandoned.
The message of the last European elections is clear: the split that cuts across the political space in most EU countries is no longer the traditional one between moderate Right and moderate Left but, to risk a drastic designation, a split between two forms of Fascism, the “soft” one embodied in the true big winner of the European elections, the European People’s Party (EPP) with Christian-democratic, liberal-conservative and conservative member parties, and the “hard” neo-Fascist Right (le Pen, Meloni, AfD…). The ultimate question is: will EPP be ready to bridge this gap and collaborate with the true no-Fascists? The choice is open. For Ursula von der Leyen, the elections were a triumph of the EPP against both extremes, Left and Right – but where does she see any Left extreme that could be even distantly compared with the neo-Fascist Right? Her “balanced” view already sends an ominous signal…
But are there not two big exceptions to this split, the UK and USA? Yes and no – in both cases, the situation is much more ambiguous. In the UK, Starmer’s Labour Party is effectively a modest-Right party confronting much more eccentric Conservative Party. The true exception are perhaps the US where there is no strong force similar to EPP but simply the opposition between neo-populists close to new Fascism and liberal democrats – a situation that has its own dangers, pushing the country towards a civil war.
Another caveat is necessary here: when we talk about Fascism today, we should not limit ourselves to the developed West. What one cannot but characterize as a new form of Fascism is on the rise in most of the BRICS countries. In his interpretation of what goes on in China, Domenico Losurdo۱Has China Turned to Capitalism? Reflections on the Transition from Capitalism to Socialism (redsails.org).(also known for his rehabilitation of Stalin) emphasizes the difference between economic and political power: Deng Xiaoping’s “reforms” introduced the split between the two. Following Lenin (from the NEP period) and Mao (from Yenan before 1949), Deng knew that elements of capitalism are necessary for the rapid development of productive forces, but he insisted that the political power should remain firmly in the hands of the workers and farmers represented by the Communist Party.
The roots of this approach reach deep into the past: for over a century, China has been following the so-called pan-Asianism which emerged towards the end of 19th century as a reaction against the Western imperialist domination and exploitation. From the very beginning, pan-Asianism was a complex project of economic and political emancipation based on the rejection of Western liberal individualism, not of capitalism as such. It came in many shades, but its main ingredient was anti(-Western)-imperialism, i.e., the idea that Asia does not have to follow the Western way of progress since it can appropriate its premodern traditions to organize its own industrial modernization in a way that will be even more dynamic than that of the West.
Along these lines, Viren Murthy۲Viren Murthy, Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution, Chicago: Chicago University Press 2023.proposes a Hegelian reading of pan-Asianism. While Hegel saw Asia as the domain of a substantial order with no space for free subjectivity, revolutionary Asian theorists propose a new Hegelian triad: the West offers abstract individualism which just negates Asian substantial order and leads to social disintegration, so that only a sublation (Aufhebung) of Western individualist subjectivity in a new collective agency can give rise to new freedom. A possible solution for our catastrophic situation thus resides not in Western freedoms but in the Asian creative radicalization of European subjectivity. However, did we not get with Japan’s militarization and colonialist expansion the first model of such new radicalized collective subjectivity? Does such subjectivity also not perfectly fit Fascism?
Murthy himself points out that pan-Asianism oscillated between its socialist and fascist versions (with the two often not even clearly divided). We should not forget that “anti-imperialism” is not as innocent as it may appear: both the Japanese and the German fascists regularly used this motto, presenting themselves as defenders against American, British and French imperialism – even Sun Yat Sen, the hero of the progressive pan-Asianism, occasionally expressed sympathies for the nascent European fascism, preferring it to liberalism which he dismissed as unfit for Asian circumstances.
This tendency is clearly discernible even in post-Deng China: A. James Gregor’s developed in detail the thesis that today’s People’s Republic of China is best classified as “a variant of contemporary fascism.”۳A.James Gregor, A Place in the Sun: Marxism and Fascism in China’s Long Revolution, New York: Routledge 2000.A capitalist economy controlled and regulated by a strong authoritarian state legitimized in the terms of a great ethnic tradition – this is Fascism recognizable in China, India, Russia, Turkey… No wonder Xi Jinping recently lauded Chinese civilization for its long and continuous history that stretches back to antiquity, saying that it has shaped the great Chinese nation; he emphasized that it is imperative to comprehensively improve the protection and utilization of cultural relics and better preserve and carry forward cultural heritage.۴Xi’s article on cultural heritage, fine traditional Chinese culture to be published-Xinhua (news.cn).
One should not take this just as a negative fact: there are good arguments for the claim that China avoided the chaotic disintegration of the USSR in the early 1990s because Deng’s economic ”liberalization” did not succumb to the temptation to abandon the Communist Party power and pass over into Western-style multiparty democracy. No wonder the basic argument of the Leftists who support China today is that in Europe and in the US, capital reigns directly, with the state apparatus mostly just serving it (even the support of Ukraine is done to multiply the profits of the military-industrial complex), while in China the movement of capital is subordinated to state control and regulation… (Incidentally, for the same reason, Giorgio Agamben totally rejects today’s China since, in his eyes, it combines the worst of both worlds: capitalist market economy and authoritarian state power.)
Two things nonetheless complicate this picture. First, in what precise sense does the Chinese Communist Party represent the interests of the working class and the poor? Second, how does the phenomenon called by Yanis Varoufakis “techno-feudalism” (the extraordinary economic and political power of big corporations and their owners) fit the new Fascism? The only serious interlocutor of the Communist Party of China in the West is for a long time the new feudal capital – when, on June 16 2023, Xi Jinping met Bill Gates in Beijing, he called Gates “an old friend” and said he hoped they could cooperate in a way that would benefit both China and the United States.
There is, however, another political trend which is really helping neo-Fascism: much more than Marine le Pen, the true winner of the European elections is Fidias Panayiotou, a Cypriot youtuber who, on October 8, 2022, began on a mission to hug Elon Musk after having hugged 99 other celebrities. While waiting outside Twitter’s headquarters for Musk to appear almost every day, he encouraged his followers to “spam” Elon’s mother, Maye Musk, with his request, which she described as “malicious”. On January 21, 2023, Elon Musk would meet and hug Panayiotou in the headquarters building. After a series of similar eccentric acts, on April 2024 Panayiotou announced his candidacy to the European Parliament, running on an anti-partisan platform, and he finished third with 19.4% of the popular vote, securing a seat in the European Parliament.۵Fidias Panayiotou – Wikipedia.Similar candidates appeared also in France, UK and Slovenia; they justified their candidacy by the “Leftist” argument that, since parliaments in EU are already empty spectacles of clowns, the only thing to do is to bring out this nonsense comedy that we call democratic politics, to stage it openly. To engage in this game is extremely dangerous because such a withdrawal into buffoonery immobilizes emancipatory efforts and leaves the space open to neo-Fascism.
This is why what is urgently needed today are acts. With all my distances towards Emmanuel Macron’s politics, I think his reaction to the Rightist victory comes close to an authentic act. Less than an hour after the results were announced, Macron declared the dissolution of the National Assembly and scheduling of new legislative elections. The announcement caught almost everyone on the back foot – even Macron himself “could not foresee his decision, insisting as late as last month that the EU election had political consequences only for Europe, not France.”۶France’s Snap Parliamentary Elections: What Was Macron Thinking? (foreignpolicy.com).Macron’s move was risky, but well worth taking: if le Pen wins and decides who will be the next prime minister of France, Macron will remain president and retain the ability to eventually mobilize a new majority against the government. Today the battle against new Fascism must be fought with all force and as fast as possible.

About the main image:

‘Eurovotes’ being counted in Dublin during the 1979 European elections © European Communities, 1979

This text has been prepared exclusively for Praxis Publication.

To read the Farsi translation of this article, refer to the link below:

برادران مارکس و انتخابات اتحادیه اروپا

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