Slavoj Žižek has unveiled a radical re-evaluation of the concept of social justice for the London Review of Books, although you wouldn’t know it from the title of his essay.
The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie!
Snore! Lots of middle-class kiddies showed up for the Arab Spring! What else is new? No job for Abdul except slinging falafel, even with his Ph.D!
That’s Arabia, baby!
And it’s only after five or six paragraphs of snooze-inducing neo-Marxist analysis (Hardt and Negri) that the world-class intellectual terrorist Žižek finally throws his bomb, and as usual he bought it from somebody else’s bomb-shop.
The evaluative procedure used to decide which workers receive a surplus wage is an arbitrary mechanism of power and ideology, with no serious link to actual competence; the surplus wage exists not for economic but for political reasons: to maintain a ‘middle class’ for the purpose of social stability. The arbitrariness of social hierarchy is not a mistake, but the whole point, with the arbitrariness of evaluation playing an analogous role to the arbitrariness of market success. Violence threatens to explode not when there is too much contingency in the social space, but when one tries to eliminate contingency.
In La Marque du sacré, Jean-Pierre Dupuy conceives hierarchy as one of four procedures (‘dispositifs symboliques’) whose function is to make the relationship of superiority non-humiliating: hierarchy itself (an externally imposed order that allows me to experience my lower social status as independent of my inherent value); demystification (the ideological procedure which demonstrates that society is not a meritocracy but the product of objective social struggles, enabling me to avoid the painful conclusion that someone else’s superiority is the result of his merit and achievements); contingency (a similar mechanism, by which we come to understand that our position on the social scale depends on a natural and social lottery; the lucky ones are those born with the right genes in rich families); and complexity (uncontrollable forces have unpredictable consequences; for instance, the invisible hand of the market may lead to my failure and my neighbour’s success, even if I work much harder and am much more intelligent).
Contrary to appearances, these mechanisms don’t contest or threaten hierarchy, but make it palatable, since ‘what triggers the turmoil of envy is the idea that the other deserves his good luck and not the opposite idea – which is the only one that can be openly expressed.’ Dupuy draws from this premise the conclusion that it is a great mistake to think that a reasonably just society which also perceives itself as just will be free of resentment: on the contrary, it is in such societies that those who occupy inferior positions will find an outlet for their hurt pride in violent outbursts of resentment.
Since I don’t pretend to write a better summary of Dupuy than Žižek, I’ll leave the reader to weave his or her way through that forest of ideas without me, and instead tease out a few reasonable assumptions underlying Žižek’s presentation.
What all those wannabe salaried kiddies in Cairo will not get is what some neo-Marxists call “surplus wages,” meaning wages above and beyond what a hard-working blue-collar worker would earn, and Americans accordingly interpret the Arab Spring as a revolt for social justice, meaning their particular paradigm of “meritocratic” payoffs for the university bourgeoisie.
Of course you deserve to make four times as much as a truck driver, Buckwheat! You went to college!
But for Žižek our self-proclaimed Jeffersonian meritocracy is just another “arbitrary social hierarchy,” now falling apart almost everywhere, from Chicago to Cairo, where the previous generation left falafel behind and began slinging paper instead, on the basis of college credentials that don’t guarantee you a high-paying job today.
“Our inherited right to sling paper for big bucks has been infringed! Down with Mubarak!”
But instead of Mohamed El Baradei and his gang of bourgeois technocrats, the Arab street has elected the Muslim Brotherhood, and now it’s back to the Middle Ages for the erstwhile Egyptian middle class.
So the question of “social justice” wasn’t really in play, except in what remains of the Western press, where the last few reporters and editors still believe in their own divine right to “surplus wages,” and project that delusional paradigm onto every social conflict anywhere.
Meanwhile the same abyss also opens beneath the American bourgeoisie, almost all of them (outside the elite 1%) ineluctably teetering over the brink. Bargain software can do the same job as an MBA! Law-clerks in Mumbai write wills for $2! Expert software outputs a more accurate diagnosis than the average doctor!
Yesterday you looked away when steel-workers were suddenly transformed into “structurally unemployable” nobodies. You don’t need no stinking unions! Welfare is for losers! Cut it down to nothing!
Now it’s your turn to fall, and if there’s any such thing as social justice, you’re about to feel it.
