“What Ghosts are Haunting us Today?” Slavoj Žižek’s The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto in Post-Pandemic Capitalist Realism. The Revolutionary Subject and Work

Vlad-Eugen Neagu

doi:10.31178/ubr.11.1.7

Abstract

However controversial a topic, Marxist thought still remains the most complex tool for the critique of Capitalism. Derrida calls Marxism “hauntological”, always reappearing as a spectre of the past, always quasipresent, but also as a potential lost future. After the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, the relevance of The Communist Manifesto seemed to have slowly waned, in a world that adopted the tenets of Neoliberalism partly as a defense against authoritarian regimes, and partly as a mean to converge toward the countries at the forefront of the global system, that had already accrued a massive lead in economic and social development. The Covid-19 virus has shocked the world to its core, but it remains to be seen whether it has brought about a paradigm shift or it has merely accentuated some of the past problems, while also triggering a kind of forced nostalgia for the apparent normality of a system that was already ridden with issues. Mark Fisher points out that “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (Fisher 1), thus indicating the need for criticism and measures against a neoliberal monopoly on thought itself. As for Žižek’s The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto, it remains to be analyzed whether it can revive the interest in the original text, as to begin compounding a viable alternative for a postpandemic global system that does not yet seem to fully grasp that it is running out of time.

Highlights

Controversial a topic, Marxist thought still remains the most complex tool for the critique of Capitalism
The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto can be seen as a title meant to question rather than answer; as for Derridean hauntology, Slavoj Žižek, of all people, presumably knows that ghosts tend to live on indefinitely, especially in a world that, due to the circumstances described above, is actively haunted by a way of life that, not so long ago, was considered so unbelievably normal that it was barely due any thinking over
Though Eagleton would claim that the “middle class, in image if not in reality” is “a truly universal subject” (Eagleton 19), this is precisely the bipolar logic of capitalism at work; at the same time, the ideal image of the capitalist subject is that of the middle class bourgeoise, but there is a “fragmenting of subjectivity in the face of the emerging entertainment industrial complex” (Fisher 25), as the subject is reduced to “a diffuse network of passing libidinal attachments” (Eagleton 377), which more often than not revolve around the act of consumption