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Slavoj Žižek: Democracy and Capitalism Are Destined to Split Up | Big Think

Big Think | November 9, 2025



Slavoj Žižek: Democracy and Capitalism Are Destined to Split Up
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Philosopher Slavoj Žižek argues that our current brand of global capitalism is quickly outgrowing democracy and that a divorce between the two is inevitable. This leads to an array of social and geopolitical concerns regarding the public commons. These problems include but are not limited to ecology, biogenetics, finance, neo-apartheid, crisis management, intellectual property rights, and personal freedom. Žižek touches on all these topics and more in this epic delivery of political and social theory.
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SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK:

Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His books include Living in the End Times, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, In Defense of Lost Causes, four volumes of the Essential Žižek, and Pandemic!: COVID-19 Shakes the World.
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TRANSCRIPT:

Slavoj Zizek: Well people often ask me how can you be so stupid and still proclaim yourself a communist. What do you mean by this? Well, I have always to emphasize that first I am well aware that let’s call it like this – the twentieth century’s over. Which means all not only communists solution but all the big leftist projects of the twentieth century failed. Not only did Stalinist communism although there its failure is much more paradoxical. Most of the countries where communists are still in power like China, Vietnam – their communists in power appear to be the most efficient managers of a very wildly productive capitalism. So okay, that one failed. I think that also and here I in a very respectful way disagree with your – by your I mean American neo-Keynesian leftists, Krugman, Stiglitz and so on. I also think that this Keynesian welfare state model is passé. In the conditions of today’s global economy it no longer works. For the welfare state to work you need a strong nation state which can impose a certain fiscal politics and so on and so on. When you have global market it doesn’t work. And the third point which is most problematic for my friends, the third leftist vision which is deep in the heart of all leftists that I know – this idea of critically rejecting alienated representative democracy and arguing for local grass root democracy where it’s not that you just delegate to the others. Your representatives to act for you, but people immediately engage in locally managing their affairs and so on.

I think this is a nice idea as far as it goes but it’s not the solution. It’s a very limited one. And if I may be really evil here I frankly I wouldn’t like to live in a stupid society where I would have to be all the time engaged in local communitarian politics and so on and so on. My idea is to live in a society where some invisible alienated machinery takes care of things so that I can do whatever I want – watch movies, read and write philosophical books and so on. But so I’m well aware that in all its versions radical left projects of the twentieth century came to an end and for one decade maybe we were all Fukuyamaists for the nineties. By Fukuyamaism I mean the idea that basically we found if not the best formula at least the least bad formula. Liberal democratic capitalism with elements of rebel state and so on and so on. And even the left played this game. You know we were fighting for less racism, women’s right, gay rights, whatever tolerance. But basically we accepted the system. I think and even Fukuyama himself is no longer a Fukuyamaist as I know that if there is a lesson of September 11 if other event is that no we don’t have the answer. That not only is liberal democratic capitalism not the universal model and is just a time of slow historical progress for it to be accepted everywhere. But again try now in Singapore and other examples of very successful economies today demonstrate that this, let’s call it ironically eternal marriage between democracy and capitalism it’s coming to an end.

What we are more and more getting today is a capitalism which is brutally efficient but it no longer needs democracy for its functioning. That’s my first point. My second point is that the problems that we are confronting today we can list them in different ways but my point is they are all problems of commons. For example…

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Comments

This post currently has 47 comments.

  3. @unmysteriousstranger

    November 9, 2025 at 12:49 am

    This is actually retarded. I don't care about his nationality or achievements, so much as what he's putting forward. Communism was always a stateless classless society without money, capital, privilege, inheritance or even (in some versions) hierarchy itself. Anything else is revisionism and backwardness.

  5. @pauuwu9090

    November 9, 2025 at 12:49 am

    4 years ago, I was watching Zizek and squinting hard enough to understand him. But now, truth be told, no more googling, no more cc, just the sublime intellectual juice.

  12. @sktgm-b6w

    November 9, 2025 at 12:49 am

    The rich and powerful men don't become like a poet or philosopher. They become like a monk, a monk of unlimited shopping rights. That's what fails everything.

  16. @eastafrika728

    November 9, 2025 at 12:49 am

    Democracy and capitalism have failed badly in Afrika, they only serve to raise criminals out of society. Politics is just attention seeking by lazy individuals who want votes so they can live off society. Politics and democracy is the most stupid concept to come out of western Europe.

  17. @robertaglarsen

    November 9, 2025 at 12:49 am

    I love the point about individuals being made responsible for the "welfare" of the world, especially with respect to the issue with energy consumption, CO2 emissions etc, when large-scale forces should handle the issue by building a nuclear energy infrastructure and using actual viable technology. Instead, huge governing- and financial bodies like the EU and the WEF are mass-manipulating the population of the (western) world into this pseudo-communist deep-capitalist pro-elite consumerism by selling false virtues through making people voluntarily give up perfectly healthy and prosperous privileges like cars, warm homes, private property and individual freedom in the name of "the climate".

  20. @Curtis006

    November 9, 2025 at 12:49 am

    Chairman Yang has entered the chat.
    Okay but seriously I know the problem of freedom is serious, but that’s why when we all become biogenetic cyborgs you gotta know your shit and pirate your parts, not get them from the government or corporate gene therapy clinic

  23. @Snafuski

    November 9, 2025 at 12:49 am

    I was not a Fukuyamaist in the 90s… When the wall came down, within a few months I was working on the idea that the French Revolution had just been defeated and in fact — not being a Hegelian at that point — we were returning to feudalism… And so it was… the greed unleashed by Reagan's policies, by trickle down economics, was creating a class of superrich people whose connection to human life was tenuous at best., and we were returning to a feudal society…Those lords are named Gates, Bezos, Arnault, Cook, Zuckerberg, Crow, Singer, etc…

  28. @alancantu2557

    November 9, 2025 at 12:49 am

    As smart as Zizek is, I think one of the main points I disagree with him on is China. Chinese politics and economics are far too complicated to understand and explain in short videos, especially for Westerners/Europeans not living there. It’s a different philosophy and a different goal that China is aiming for altogether, and analyzing China with Western standards is not a materialist way of going about it. There is simply no way of understanding China and its leadership fully without acknowledging this.

  29. @tom-kz9pb

    November 9, 2025 at 12:49 am

    Democracy and capitalism are inherently incompatible, because genuine democracy is incompatible with rule by the rich, which is the real golden rule of capitalism. You can only have an illusion of democracy, a veneer of democracy, so long as the rich can use their ownership of media and the tools of propaganda in order to trick the masses into doing the bidding of the wealthy class. This is why capitalist democracies revere patriotism, religion and military, for example, or why they nuture hatred of socialism, or why they have casinos and sell MegaBuck tickets, or why they pit blacks against working-class whites.

  30. @FMEBAKERY100

    November 9, 2025 at 12:49 am

    True democracy is one sheep and two wolves… Deciding who they will eat tonight

    This guy can’t keep his fingers out of his nose… Any of you who think anything he has to say is valuable

    You are even more useless and worthless than he is

  32. @seth_sesu

    November 9, 2025 at 12:49 am

    So many lies and retellings of history have polluted the entire discussion of socialism vs capitalism. I can't believe people still pretend that autocratic, state-capitalist countries like China or the USSR are socialist or communist when in fact that is a lie. A lie told by their respective communist parties and parroted by Western elites who want to point a finger and say, “Look how bad socialism is. You don’t need labor rights or health care!”

    The reality is that the closest we examples of socialism / communism in human history are the United States in the 1940s and modern Scandinavia. Both have been successes.

  35. @gourdtube

    November 9, 2025 at 12:49 am

    Zizek's mind is so powerful that he can totally ignore the bugs he's hallucinating and keep them out of his nose while speaking eloquently about 5 subjects at once.

  38. @victorfernandes7173

    November 9, 2025 at 12:49 am

    I think it's problematic to adress the fight against climate change as an ideology. it would be an ideology five hundred years ago, when we had no apparent problem of extinction. now it's a necessity. it should be enforced by governments of all countries in the world.

    And about this pessimism, i think capitalism, as he refers (in the sense of the ideology of profit above anything – which is basically neoliberalism) just needs to be regulated. as proven, liberalist ideologies and the pseudoscience created to legitimize it, don't work. but people are free to vote and demand it. the problem is, the big companies want that, so they spread a lot of beliefs and fake news to us. it should be regulated, it's a crime. it's one of the hardest things to fight against, but we must.

    Communism, as he refers to, can also be called more democratic. what he calls it is actually some left wing politics that aren't even that far left. many are actually applied by right wing governments (if we extrapolate a bit and get the concept of "all that's free is 'communist'", we'll get in this category social services, free medical care, etc, which are actually payed by taxes, but we can have things like a street concert that are not payed by taxes).

    So to me, what he's saying is that capitalism (neoliberalism) is not democratic: it increases the gap between poor and rich, not only in terms of income, but also in freedom and control over their own lives and choices. In the other hand, the opposite of liberalism (which sometimes he calls communism ), would be able to regulate those things. Except in communist countries, the state ended up stifling even more the freedom of their citizens. So he wants something like comunism, but without the bad part.

    It already exists. In some countries, it's called "left wing". Some places, like USA, call leftists liberals, in spite the fact that some of their current politics are the complete opposite, and extreme right wing parties being the embodiment of our current notion of neoliberalism. Left is, by definition, not only for the people, but progressive. That's why in the beginning they were called liberals, because that was progressive at the time. The right wing was created to defend the will of the then nobility and clergy – that's why they are called "conservatives", they wanted to conserve their feudal status quo. Today, they defend the rich, traditions and capitalism "as it's supposed to be" – now they see liberalism as the best opportunities to make money without restraints.

    So, by definition, left wing today shouldn't be considered liberal. And that's the sole reason they have such a "bad name", the profit margin of the rich gets reduced a lot if they can actually implement human rights that ensure that the minimum wage gets people out of a situation where they can be considered modern slaves; apply restrictions and laws against social control through the internet and social media; etc.

  42. @chillywilly314

    November 9, 2025 at 12:49 am

    On his point that capitalism will not succeed in privatizing commons. We can see that with YouTube. You can learn almost anything with YouTube. Back then you needed to attend a school, go to a library. Now all the knowledge is within our pocket practically free.

  43. @PickledPixiePie

    November 9, 2025 at 12:49 am

    A lot of people in the US would agree that they wouldn't want to be engaged in politics all of the time. However, then corrupt people get into power. We must pay attention to what's going on around us. I know we've forgotten how to survive outside of society. However, it will always be a condition of survival in general. When we were surviving off of the land, we learn to keep a keen eye out for predators. One must accept that humans prey on other humans, too.

  44. @denismorgan9742

    November 9, 2025 at 12:49 am

    Democracy and capitalism are not doomed to split up, these are not the same thing. These are two separate things that can go hand in hand but doesn't mean they will. One doesn't equal the other.

  46. @brianeno1062

    November 9, 2025 at 12:49 am

    This is a pretty misguided title. Everything that's good deteriorates, because the intelligence of society declines. A good system needs conscious effort by the people participating in it. It's not designed, but perpetrated rather, by the power that be.

Comments are closed.

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