Demanding the Impossible by Slavoj Žižek Read Free Book Online Page A

of communism – that it reached a certain level of primitive industrialization, but when the moment (postmodernism, digital technology, or whatever we like to call it) that we are now passing arrived, it didn’t work anymore. The irony is that traditional Marxist dogma – the means of production change more rapidly than the relations of production – is absolutely the best way to explain the fall of communism . You can also see this very nicely in the book on the communist economy of East Germany.
    I know a guy who was a dissident and who worked for one of the top Western journals, whose problem was how to adapt to the digital revolution. He told me that their approach was totally wrong. They didn’t see the social dimension of the digital revolution: the local interaction. But their idea was the traditional one. They thought they would be able to make centralized planning more efficient with perfect mega computers. You know, even if bureaucrats have a good plan, when it cannot react fast enough, then it doesn’t function. It simply didn’t work. This is the irony of the failure, literally, of totalitarian communism in the twentieth-century sense.
    East Germany was also doing relatively well in the 1950s and the early ’60s. Mostly, they were working in a ruined country where reconstruction had to happen fast. In the same way, after 1953, North Korea reconstructed, but in a much more efficient totalitarian way. But then after a certain point, it simply doesn’t work any more.
    What I’d like to do about North Korea is work out how to interpret this in a way that is not racist, because a typical European answer would have been: “Ha ha, you Koreans are primitive. Here is my answer.” No, I don’t think so. I think that this has to do with the specificity of the communist way of doing things, which can make us arrive implicitly at the true dimension. And this kind of religious dimension has already been seen with Mao and Stalin.
    Also, late communist regimes have a tendency to become monarchic. It even happened in Europe, with Nicolae Ceaus¸escu. Far from being a result of the radical break occurring now in Eastern Europe, the obsessive adherence to the national Cause is precisely what remains the same throughout this process. And this attachment was all the more exclusive the more the power structure was “totalitarian.” So, why this unexpected disappointment? Why does authoritarian nationalism overshadow democratic pluralism? The leftist thesis was that ethnic tensions were instigated and manipulated by the ruling party bureaucracy as a means of legitimizing the party’s hold on power. In Romania, for example, the nationalist obsession, the dream of Great Romania, the forceful assimilation of Hungarian and other minorities, created a constant tension which legitimized Ceaus¸escu’s hold on power
    Nonetheless, whatever you say about classical communist regimes, at one point they were honest and good. They never allowed direct family succession. For example, what about Stalin’s children? Did they have any power? No. This was an absolute prohibition. Succession should not be a family matter. Even Mao: of course they took care of their children, but were they privileged? They sent their children to study abroad and gave them the right to travel, but these were just small corruptions. There was never a question of Mao’s son becoming his successor.
    This tendency, I claim, has something to do with how communism reacted to its decay. It happened in Europe. And in a non-communist way, it also happened in all those crazy countries like Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan. You know who became the father of the nation? Heydar Aliyev, who was the chief of the KGB in the Brezhnev years, a total communist apparatchik. He reinvented himself as the father of the nation [Azerbaijan]. He died about a couple of years ago, and now his son is the president, which is total madness. Again, I really don’t want to go into this false