“Although the “ruling class” disagrees with the populists’ moral agenda, it tolerates the “moral war” as a means of keeping the lower classes in check, that is, it enables the latter to articulate their fury without disturbing the economic status quo. What this means is that the culture war is a class war in displaced mode -pace those who claim that we live in a post-class society…” -from Žižek’s First as Tragedy, Then as Farce
This is the one consolation progressives can take from the despicable authoritarian/antidemocratic tactics of the right: the very fact that the alliance of the evangelical right and libertarian/freemarketfundamantalist (think Ayn Rand (is a very precarious one. In fact, the only thing that holds them together is their hatred of progressives. And while there is the shared Calvinistic tradition between them (this notion that one’s standing in God’s eyes can be known through prosperity: the invisible hand of the market), one can only imagine the conflict that would arise between them were the progressives taken out of the picture. In other words, while the libertarian right might not share the evangelical right’s religious and moral convictions, they share a religious approach to capitalism, one that would easily fall apart once there were no longer progressives around to hate.
Žižek later goes on to explain the very real affects of this religious approach to Capitalism:
“Here one has to ask a naive question: did Madoff not know that, in the long term, his scheme was bound to collapse? What force denied him this obvious insight? Not Madoff’s own personal vice or irrationality, but rather a pressure, an inner drive to go on, to expand the sphere of circulation in order to keep the machinery running, inscribed into the very system of capitalist relations. In other words, the temptation to “morph” legitimate business into a pyramid scheme is part of the very nature of capitalist relations. There is no exact point at which the Rubicon was crossed and the legitimate business morphed into an illegal scheme; the very dynamic blurs the frontier between “legitimate” investment and “wild” speculation, because capitalistic investment, at its very core, a risky wager that a scheme will turn out to be profitable, an act of borrowing from the future.” -ibid
Madoff, basically, was a true believer. He was saturated with the religion of the “Invisible Hand”, and thought that it would justify and save him. And it’s not hard to understand why he would. Corporations are, by law, required to look out for the interests of their investors first. And it wouldn’t work if they did otherwise. If you’re an investor, the last thing you would want is some CEO going hippy and choosing to do the right thing at the expense of profits. Because of that, it’s not the role of corporations to act as moral agents. That is the role of government.
(And as Brian Musumi pointed out to me in his bounce off of D&G’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia: the best model for Capitalism is the inner-city drug dealer who acts as a kind exchange point in the flows of money as compared to someone who simply accumulates wealth.)
At the same time, I agree with Žižek’s absolution of Madoff in that Madoff was basically a man caught up in the system (the simulacrum (of Capitalism. To me, it’s no wonder he submitted to his fate like he did in the end: he saw exactly what I’m seeing now and repented.