I am the first to admit that the Communist dream of the XXth cen-tury is over. And I am as far as imaginable from the old stupid mantra that Communism was a good idea which just got corrupted by totalitarian perverts – no, there are problems already in the original vision, so one should submit to severe reassessment also Marx himself. Yes, Communists in power did some good things, we know the litany – education, health, fight against Fascism -, but overall the only real triumph of Communists in power is what hap-pened in China in the last decades, arguably the greatest econom-ic success story in human history – hundreds of millions were raised from poverty into middle-class existence. How did China achieve it? The 20th century Left was defined by its opposition to two fundamental tendencies of modernity: the reign of capital with its aggressive individualism and alienating dynamics; the authoritarian-bureaucratic state power. What we get in today’s China is exactly the combination of these two features in its ex-treme form: strong authoritarian state, wild capitalist dynamics – and this is the most efficient form of Socialism today… But is this what I want?  

China today is becoming the model of what Henry Farell called “networked authoritarianism”: the idea is that, “if a state spies on people enough and allows machine-learning systems to incorporate their behavior and respond to it, it is possible to create "a more efficient competitor that can beat democracy at its home game" - providing for everyone's needs better than a de-mocracy could. /…/ China is a good example of this: both its pro-ponents and its detractors say that with machine learning and ubiquitous surveillance, China is creating a sustainable autocra-cy, capable of solving the "basic authoritarian dilemma": "gath-ering and collating information and being sufficiently responsive to its citizens’ needs to remain stable." But Farrell claims this isn't actually what's happening - China is very unstable (wildcat strikes, unstoppable pro-democracy movements, concentration camps, debt bubbles, manufacturing collapse, routine kidnappings, massive corruption, etc.).”  The liberal West has found a better use of digital control: networked democracy called by some “sur-veillance capitalism” – democracy and freedom tolerated but ren-dered inefficient.

The instability of China was signaled by a strange event in mid-October 2019: the Chinese media launched an offensive promoting the claim that “demonstrations in Europe and South America are the direct result of Western tolerance of Hong Kong unrest”: “There are many problems in the West and all kinds of undercur-rents of dissatisfaction. Many of them will eventually manifest in the way the Hong Kong protests did." Two weird facts cannot but strike the eye here. First, the “Communist” China discreetly plays on the solidarity of those in power all around the world against the rebellious populace, warning the West not to underes-timate the dissatisfaction in their own countries – as if, be-neath all ideological and geo-political tensions, they all share the same basic interest in holding onto power… Second, the “trou-ble in paradise” aspect: protests are not taking place only in poor and desolate countries like Iran but also in countries of (relative, at least) prosperity, countries which were till now presented as (economic, at least) success stories. These protests express a growing dissatisfaction that cannot be channeled into established modes of political representation - what awaits us is a society of permanent state of exception and civil unrest. This strange protest wave enables us to take a fresh look at the Fall of the Berlin Wall.

It is a commonplace to emphasize the “miraculous” nature of the fall of the Wall 30 years ago: it was like a dream come true, something unimaginable happened, something one couldn’t consider possible even a couple of months earlier – the disintegration of the Communist regimes which collapsed like a house of cards. Who in Poland could have imagined free elections with Lech Walensa as president? However, one should add that an even greater “miracle” happened only a couple of years later: the return of the ex-Communists to power through free democratic elections, Walensa totally marginalized and much less popular than General Wojcieh Jaruzelski who, a decade and half earlier, crushed Solidarity with the military coup d’etat. Two decades later came the third surprise: Poland is now in the grip of Rightist populists who re-ject both Communism and liberal democracy… so what goes on?

When people protested against the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, what the large majority had in mind was not capitalism. They wanted social security, solidarity, a rough kind of justice; they wanted the freedom to live their own life outside the state control, to come together and talk as they please; they wanted a life of simple honesty and sincerity, liberated from the primi-tive ideological indoctrination and the prevailing cynical hypoc-risy… in short, the vague ideals that led the protesters were to a large extent taken from Socialist ideology itself. And, as we learned from Freud, what is repressed returns in a distorted form – in our case, what was repressed from the dissident imaginary returned in the guise of rightist populism.

In his interpretation of the fall of East European Communism, Jurgen Habermas proved to be the ultimate Left Fukuyamaist, si-lently accepting that the existing liberal-democratic order is the best possible, and that, while we should strive to make it more just, we should not challenge its basic premises. This is why he welcomed precisely what many Leftists saw as the big defi-ciency of the anti-Communist protests in Eastern Europe: the fact that this protests were not motivated by any new visions of the post-Communist future – as he put it, the central and eastern Eu-ropean revolutions were just what he called “rectifying” or “catch-up” revolutions: their aim was to enable central and east-ern European societies to gain what the western Europeans already possessed, i.e., to rejoin the West European normality.

However, the Yellow Vests and other similar protests are definitely NOT catch-up movements. Here, then, is the paradox we have to confront: the populist disappointment at liberal democracy is the proof that 1990 was not just a catch-up revolution, that it aimed at more than the liberal-capitalist normality. Freud spoke about Unbehagen in der Kultur, the discontent/unease in culture; today, 30 years after the fall of the Wall, the ongoing new wave of protests bears witness of a kind of Unbehagen in liberal capitalism, and the key question is: who will articulate this discontent? Will it be left to na-tionalist populists to exploit it? Therein resides the big task of the Left.

How to do it? In the final scene of V for Vendetta, thousands of un-armed Londoners wearing Guy Fawkes masks march towards Parliament; without or-ders, the military allows the crowd to pass the Parliament, and the people take over… OK, a nice ecstatic moment, but I am ready to sell my mother into slavery in order to see V for Vendetta, part 2: what would have happened the day after the victory of the people, how would they (re)organize daily life? In short, I am not fascinated by hundreds of thousands assembling on a large square in Athens or Istanbul or… - what interests me is the morning after when the ecstatic passion is over and when things return to normal daily life: how will ordinary people experience the change?

Thomas Piketty tries to address this question. In his Capital and Ide-ology, he proposes a radicalized social democracy. Piketty is right in his ac-cent on ideology – ideology plays a key today, in an age which praises itself as post-ideological. But Piketty’s focus on ideology is all too naïve – he un-derstands this in a quite literal way: it was possible for the Left to go on further implementing social-democratic welfare state, but from 1970s onwards it missed this chance due to ideological blindness. Piketty’s proposal is to implement again and radicalize the welfare state – not t to nationalize all wealth like a Soviet-style communism but to maintain capitalism and redistrib-ute assets by giving every adult a lump sum at the age of 25. The progressive income taxes he proposes would be allow governments to give everyone a basic income equivalent to 60% of the average wage in wealthy nations and cover the costs of decarbonizing the economy. Furthermore, employees should have 50% of the seats on company boards; the voting power of even the largest shareholders should be capped at 10%; an individualized carbon tax calculated by a person-alised card that would track each person’s contribution to global heating… But what if the rich don’t want to pay these confiscatory tax rates and decide to emigrate? Piketty proposes an exit tax and a global justice system that makes it impossible to hide from expropriation anywhere. To that end, he imagines a supranational parliament comprised of members drawn from national legisla-tures.

The two extremes of the deadlock of today’s radical Left are best ex-emplified by a long substantial dialogue between Piketty and Alain Badiou.  Badiou’s vision is that of nomadic proletarians which will emerge as a new global revolutionary force beyond our nation-states and parliamentary democra-cy, abolishing capitalism – we should step beyond democracy as we know it, in-to a new revolutionary internationalism. Piketty’s proposal is no less utopi-an, although it presents itself as pragmatic, looking for a solution within the frame of capitalism and democratic procedures.

There is a third dream, that of rejuvenated local democracy, which is, I think, if anything even worse. No wonder that today’s practices of “direct democracy,” from favelas to the “postindustrial” digital culture have to rely on a state apparatus - their survival relies on a thick texture of »alienated« institutional mechanisms: where do electricity and water come from? Who guarantees the rule of law? To whom do we turn for healthcare? Etc.etc. The more community is self-ruling, the more this network has to function smoothly and invisibly. Maybe, we should change the goal of emancipatory struggles from overcoming alienation to enforcing the right kind of alienation: how to achieve a smooth functioning of »alienated« (invisible) social mechanisms which sustain the space of »non-alienated« communities? This is what makes welfare state so attractive to me: I don’t have to help the poor myself, the state does it for me, so that I don’t have to confront the excluded and under-privileged face to face, the anonymous state apparatuses do it. This is what is so dangerous about the process that began with Margaret Thatcher – recall her famous claim that society doesn’t exist, there are only individuals who struggle and work, fully responsible for their fate. This introduces a kind of fake dis-alienation, a false re-personalization of social relations: the poor are ultimately responsible for their fate, and the aim of help should be to enable them to regain this responsibility. It is no longer the abstract State, it is me and other hard-working people who are covering the costs, and those who receive help are also personalized, they acquire faces, often of lazy and evil, abusing our generosity… Is, in some sense, this not true? No, because the anonymous alienated system that regulates our lives is not just an illu-sion but the actuality of our lives. In such a universe, every direct person-alization (like the one proposed by Thatcher) is an ideological lie.

So, again, why do I still cling to the cursed name of Communism, when I know that the XXth century Communist project failed, giving birth to new form of murderous terror? Let me begin by the fact that we live in an age per-meated by apocalyptic prospects – there is a multiplicity of apocalyptic fears, a true antinomy of apocalypses. A proviso - when I talk about apocalyp-tic threats, I am fully aware of how ambiguous and tricky this domain is – on-ly a thin line separates our correct perception of real dangers from the fan-tasy-scenarios about a global catastrophe that awaits us. There is a specific enjoyment of living in the end time, of awaiting a catastrophe, and the para-dox is that such a fixation on the forthcoming catastrophe is precisely one of the ways to avoid really confronting it. And I take Communism not as a solu-tion to our woes, but as still the best name that enables us to locate the problems we are facing today.

We are at an interesting moment of reversal that would have rejoiced Hegel: in the last decade or two, the Fukuyamaist “end of history” (we already have the best possible social formation) turned around into its apocalyptic version – we are not yet at the end of history, we are approaching the end in the guise of an apocalyptic catastrophe… There is a formal feature which re-mains the same in this shift: the sense of infinite dragging-on. Fukuyama’s world is the one in which nothing great and new happens, life just goes on with local ameliorations, it is the world described decades ago by Kojeve as the world of snobbery; apocalypse is also all the time almost-here, we are dragging on in a kind of limbo, the end of time is experienced as the impossi-bility of end(ing)… We are used to such a situation in art (which is dying for over a century) and philosophy (which is from Hegel onwards renouncing itself, overcoming itself) – in both cases, death lead to extraordinary productivity, proliferation of new forms, as if the truth of death is a weird immortality…

The only consequent thing to do here is to turn the entire perspective around: the end already happened, we just didn’t notice it, like in the old cartoon-joke about a cat who walks above the precipice and falls down only when it notices there is no ground under its feet. That should be our starting point: in some sense, the apocalypse already happened (we already live in a society of exploding digital control, changes in our environment are already in process, millions are already on the move), so we should leave behind the metaphoric of “it’s five minutes to noon, our last chance moment to act and prevent the catastrophe” – it is already five minutes PAST noon, the question is only what to do in in a totally new global constellation. This, of course, doesn’t mean we should not fight to prevent the catastrophes to come – to re-turn to the cartoon joke, we are in a situation between the two ends, the first end which occurs when we begin to walk without the ground under our feet, and the second end which occurs when we actually fall down. Now we are already walking above the precipice, we lost the ground beneath our feet, but – in contrast to the scene from cartoons – the only way not to fall down is to look down into the precipice and act accordingly.

As Alenka Zupančič perspicuously noted, the ultimate proof that the ecological apocalypse already happened is that it already got re-normalized: we are more and more “rationally” reflecting on how to accommodate ourselves to it and even profit from it (“large parts of Siberia will be open to agri-culture; they can already grow vegetables on Greenland; the melting of ice on the northern pole will make transport of goods from China to the US much shorter…”). An exemplary case of normalization is the predominant (not public, but half-private) reaction to the Wikileaks disclosures epitomized by the tri-ad of names Assange-Manning-Snowden - not denial (“Wikileaks are spreading lies!”) but something like: “We all knew things like these are happen all the time  in political power games, there is no surprise here!” The shock at what went on is thus neutralized by the reference to wisdom of those who are strong enough to sustain a sober look at the realities of life… Against such “real-ism,” we should precisely allow ourselves to be fully and naively struck by the obscenity and horror of the crimes disclosed by Wikileaks. Sometimes, na-ivety is the greatest virtue. The main voice of renormalization are the so-called “rational optimists” like Matt Ridley who are bombarding us with good news: 2010s were the best decade in human history, poverty rate is falling in Asia and Africa, pollution of our environment is decreasing, etc.  – so where does the growing atmosphere of apocalypse come from? Is it not an outgrowth of the self-generated pathological need of unhappiness?  Rational optimists are telling us that we are too scared about minor problems, and our answer should be that, on the contrary, we are not scared enough – to quote Alenka Zupančič: “Apocalypse already began, but it seems that we still prefer to die than to allow the apocalyptic threat to scare us to death.” Moments of doom and re-signed expectation of the end are interchanged with pseudo-courageous endur-ance (“we’ll somehow get through it, just don’t lose nerves and fall into pan-ic”).

  Let’s take the Leftist-humanitarian version of the fear of immigrants which runs in the opposite direction with regard to the Rightist one: for the Right, immigrants pose a threat to our way of life, while for the Left, build-ing new walls is a threat to our global civilization. While this is basically true, things get complex here - let’s take the touchy case of receiving immi-grants. Pia Klemp, captain of the ship Iuventa which was saving refugees in the Mediterranean, concluded her explanation why she decided to refuse the Grand Vermeil medal awarded to her by the city of Paris with the slogan: “Doc-uments and housing for all! Freedom of movement and residence!”  If this means that – to cut a long story short – every individual has the right to move to a country of his/her choice, and that this country has the duty to provide him/her with residence, then we are dealing here with an abstract vision in the strict Hegelian sense: a vision which ignores the complex context of so-cial totality. The problem cannot be solved at this level: the only true solu-tion is to change the global economic system which produces immigrants. The task is thus to make a step back from direct criticism to the analysis of the immanent antagonism of the criticized phenomenon, with the focus on how our critical position itself participates in the phenomenon it criticizes.

In a recent TV debate, Gregor Gysi, a key figure of the German Linke, gave a good answer to an anti-immigrant who aggressively insisted that he feels no responsibility for the poverty and horrors in the Third World coun-tries – instead of spending money to help them, our states should only be re-sponsible for the welfare of their own citizens. The gist of Gysi’s answer was: if we don’t get responsible for the Third World poor (and act according-ly), they will come here, to us… (which is precisely what the anti-immigrant is ferociously opposed to). Cynical and unethical as this reply may appear, it is much more appropriate than abstract humanitarianism: the humanitarian ap-proach appeals to our generosity and guilt (“we should open our hearts to them, also because the ultimate cause of their suffering is European racism and colonization”), and this  appeal is often combined by a strange economic reasoning (“Europe needs immigrants in order to continue to expand  economi-cally, our birth rates are falling, we are losing our vitality” – it is strange to hear Leftists evoke the typical Rightist motif of vitality…). The hidden stakes of this operation are clear: let’s open ourselves to migrants… as a desperate measure to avoid the much-needed radical change and to maintain our liberal-capitalist order. The logic that sustains the quoted Gysi state-ment is the opposite one: only a radical socio-economic change can really pro-tect our identity, our way of life.

Incidentally, the symptom of this type of “Global Leftists” is how they simultaneously reject any talk of “our way of life,” of cultural differ-ences, as a reactionary Huntington stance masking the fundamental identity (or, rather, levelling) of all of us in global capitalism, AND demand of us to respect the immigrants’ specific cultural identity, i.e., not to impose on them our standards. The obvious counter-reproach that our and their way of life are not symmetrical since our “way” is hegemonic, makes a valid point but avoids the core of the problem, the status of universality in the struggle for emancipation. It is true that, in some sense, the refugee is a “neighbor” par excellence, neighbor in the strict biblical sense, the Other reduced to its naked presence. Without possessions, without home, without a determined place in society, refugees are like a stain in the social edifice, always too close to us; since they lack a stable placed in our society, they stand for univer-sality of being-human – how we relate to them indicates how we relate to hu-manity as such. They are not just different from us – we are all different from other groups -, they are in some sense Difference as such. But, in a properly Hegelian way, universality and particularity coincide here: refugees come naked only materially, and for this reason that they all the more cling to their cultural identity. They are perceived as universal, rootless, but at the same time as stuck into their particular identity.

From this fact alone, it is clear why nomadic immigrants are not pro-letarians – in spite of attempts by Alain Badiou and others to promulgate ref-ugees into the exemplary figure of today’s proletarians, “nomadic proletari-ans.” What makes proletarians proletarians is the fact that they are exploit-ed: they are the key moment of the valorization of capital, their labor cre-ates surplus-value – in clear contrast to nomadic refugees who are not just perceived as worthless but are literally value-less, worthless “trash”/remainder of global capital. Leftists and capitalists dream the new wave of immigrants will also be integrated into the capitalist machine as it happened back in 1960s in Germany and then France since “Europe needs immi-grants” - but this time, it doesn’t work, immigrants cannot be integrated, the bulk of them remains outside. This fact makes the situation of immigrant refu-gees much more tragic – they are caught in a kind of social limbo, a deadlock from which fundamentalism offers a false exit. With regard to the circulation of global capital, refugees are put in a position of surplus-humanity, a mir-ror image of surplus-value, and no humanitarian help and openness can resolve this tension, only a restructuring of the entire international edifice will do.

The usual Left-liberal retort to this is: but is not “let’s work to change the situation in the countries from which immigrants are coming in or-der to abolish the reasons of their leaving their countries” a (not so) subtle excuse to prevent refugees coming to us? The answer to this is clear: in a strictly symmetrical way, “opening our hearts” to refugees here is a (not so) subtle way of doing nothing to change the global situation which gives birth to them… So the solution is simply: look at what they are doing - are they re-ally doing it?

Incidentally, the falsity of humanitarianism is the same as the one of the rejection of anthropocentrism advocated by deep ecology - there is a deep hypocrisy in it. What all the talk about how we, humanity, pose a threat to the life on and of the Earth really amounts to is our worry about our own fate. Earth in itself is indifferent: even if we destroy life on it, it will just be one - not even the greatest – of catastrophes that befell it. When we worry about environment, we worry about our own environment, we want our own good and safe life. The falsity of this position is the same as the falsity of white anti-Eurocentric liberals who, while ruthlessly rejecting their own cultural identity and solic-iting others to assert this identity, reserve for themselves the position of universality – the proponents of deep ecology, of the rights of animals, plants, and living habitats, continue to acts as universal beings, as representatives of all beings - animals and plants have no awareness of other’s interests, they just live and struggle for survival.

The general lesson to be learned here is that one should avoid at any price cheap humanitarian sentimentalization of those downtrodden. For this reason alone, Parasite (Korea 2019, Bong Joon-ho) isa well-worth seeing – here is the film’s succinct storyline: “Jobless, penniless, and, above all, hopeless, the unmotivated patriarch, Ki-taek, and his equally unambitious fam-ily - his supportive wife, Chung-sook; his cynical twentysomething daughter, Ki-jung, and his college-age son, Ki-woo - occupy themselves by working for peanuts in their squalid basement-level apartment. Then, by sheer luck, a lu-crative business proposition will pave the way for an insidiously subtle scheme, as Ki-woo summons up the courage to pose as an English tutor for the teenage daughter of the affluent Park family. Now, the stage seems set for an unceasing winner-take-all class war. How does one get rid of a parasite?”  What the film avoids is any moralizing idealization of the underdogs in the Frank Capra style: they are the parasites, intruding, manipulating, exploita-tive… We should oppose here content and form: at the level of content, the up-per-class Parks are without any doubt morally better, they are considerate, sympathetic, helping, while the underdogs effectively act like exploitative parasites; however, at the level of form, the Parks are the privileged ones who can afford to be caring and helpful, while the underdogs are real under-dogs, pushed by their situation into not very gracious acts. So the solution is not to play the humanitarian games but to change the situation which needs humanitarian games – or, as Oscar Wilde put it in the opening lines of his “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”:

“[People] find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease. They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor. But this is not a so-lution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim.” 

And exactly the same holds for one of the usual anti-feminist complaints: “I treat women in a kind not-patronizing way, but they are often so aggressive towards me…” – of course they are since this is often for them the only way to counteract their formal submission – as a rule, it is only those at the top who can afford kindness and sympathy… - The next step to be accomplished apro-pos of the migrants’ “invasion” of Europe is to put the fear that migrants will inundate us into its proper context: this fear

“is fueled by a largely unspoken preoccupation with demographic collapse. In the period 1989–2017, Latvia haemorrhaged 27% of its population, Lithuania 22.5%, and Bulgaria almost 21%. In Romania, 3.4 million people, a vast majori-ty of them younger than 40, left the country after it joined the EU in 2007. The combination of an ageing population, low birth rates and an unending stream of emigration is arguably the source of demographic panic in central and eastern Europe. More central and eastern Europeans left their countries for western Europe as a result of the 2008-9 financial crises than all the refugees that came there as the result of the war in Syria.” 

One thing we should absolutely avoid here is the profoundly reactionary topic of the alleged “loss of vitality” of European nations – the idea that Europe-ans need an influx of fresh foreign blood to regain their vitality. The prob-lem is the one of the geopolitical dynamics of global capitalism, not of eth-nic identities and relations. Furthermore, what anti-liberals hate more than multiculturalism is individualist cosmopolitism: multiculturalism at least maintains cultural identities, while individualist cosmopolitism threatens to dissolve them.