ŽIŽEK 4/18 – [SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK is a professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School, is International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London and the author; 4/18/22; “War in a World that Stands for Nothing”; https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/russia-ukraine-war-highlights-truths-about-global-capitalism-by-slavoj-zizek-2022-04; accessed: 7/6/22; Lowell-JL]
Vladimir Putin’s war engine is being sustained not just by European payments for Russian oil and gas but also by a complicit class of “lumpen-bourgeoisie” motivated solely by the trappings of material wealth. Ukrainians, and everyone else, are learning the hard way how global capitalism trumps democracy and human rights. LJUBLJANA – The so-called oligarchs in Russia and other ex-communist countries are a bourgeois counterpart to what Marx called the lumpen-proletariat: an unthinking cohort susceptible to political manipulation because its members have no class consciousness or revolutionary potential of their own. Unlike the proletariat, however, the lumpen-bourgeoisie who emerged in these countries from the late 1980s onward control capital – lots of it – thanks to wild “privatization” of state-owned assets.
An exemplary case is Rok Snežič, a collaborator and friend of Slovenia’s right-wing prime minister, Janez Janša. An “independent tax adviser,” Snežič helps Slovene companies redomicile in the lower-tax jurisdiction of Republika Srpska (the Serb part of Bosnia and Herzegovina). He apparently has no private possessions, and he has erased his own past tax bills by declaring bankruptcy.
Yet Snežič also cruises around in new luxury cars and has the means to pay for jumbo billboard ads. He is officially employed by a company owned by his wife, where he receives a monthly salary of €37,362 ($40,346) in cash.
But “normal” capitalism also generates a lumpen-bourgeoisie. Snežič is not so different from Donald Trump, who similarly thrives precisely because he stands for nothing, motivated solely by money and the trappings of material wealth.
Market values have also determined the contours of Russia’s war in Ukraine, whose president, Volodymyr Zelensky, appears to have had a crash course in how global capitalism and democracy really work. Since the start of the war, Europe has sent Russia almost $40 billion in payments for oil and gas, prompting his observation that Western countries are more concerned about rising energy prices than Ukrainian lives. The capitalist market – the one that has been fueling the Russian war engine – has forsaken Ukraine.
Ending this bloody trade would require governments to abandon their reliance on market mechanisms and start organizing energy supply directly, as would addressing the global food crises that Russia’s war is generating. (In addition to being two of the world’s biggest wheat exporters, Russia and Ukraine are also major sources of chemical fertilizers for Europe.) Paradoxically, only measures recalling the newborn Soviet Union’s “war communism” can save Ukraine and preserve Western power. After all, Russia is coordinating with China not only to challenge the West geopolitically but also to depose the US dollar and the euro as global currencies.
