[T]he central task of the ruling ideology in the present crisis is to impose a narrative which will place the blame for the meltdown not on the global capitalist system as such, but on secondary and contingent deviations (overly lax legal regulations, the corruption of big financial institutions, and so on). Like­wise, in the era of Really Existing Socialism, pro-socialist ideologists tried to save the idea of socialism by claiming that the failure of the “people’s democracies” was the failure of a non-authentic version of socialism, not of the idea as such, so that existing socialist regimes required radical reforms rather than overthrow and abolition. It is not without irony to note how ideologists who once mocked this critical defense of socialism as illusory, and insisted that one should lay the blame on the very idea itself, now widely resort to the same line of defense: for it is not capitalism as such which is bankrupt, only its distorted realization…

Against this tendency, one should insist on the key question: what is the “flaw” in the system as such that opens up the possibility for such crises and collapses? The first thing to bear in mind here is that the origin of the crisis is a “benevolent” one: as we have noted, after the dotcom bubble burst, the decision, taken in a bipartisan fashion, was to facilitate real estate investment in order to keep the economy going and prevent recession — today’s meltdown is thus simply the price being paid for the measures taken in the US to avoid recession a few years ago. The danger is thus that the predominant narrative of the meltdown will be the one which, instead of awakening us from a dream, will enable us to continue dreaming. And it is here that we should start to worry — not only about the economic consequences of the meltdown, but about the obvious temptation to reinvigorate the “war on terror” and US interventionism in order to keep the motor of the economy running, or at least to use the crisis to impose further tough measures of “structural adjustment.”

An exemplary case of the way the economic collapse is already being used in the ideologico-political struggle concerns the conflict over what to do with General Motors — should the state allow its bankruptcy or not? Since GM is one of those institutions which embodies the American dream, its bankruptcy was long considered unthinkable. An increasing number of voices, however, now refer to the meltdown as providing that additional nudge which should make us accept the unthinkable. A New York Times column entitled “Imagining a G.M. Bankruptcy” begins ominously with: ''As General Motors struggles to avoid running out of cash next year, the once-unthinkable prospect of a G.M. bankruptcy filing is looking a lot more, well, thinkable." After a series of predictable arguments (the bankruptcy would not mean automatic job losses, just a restructuring which would make the company leaner and meaner, better adapted to the harsh conditions of today’s economy, and so on and so forth) the column dots the 'i’s towards the end, when it focuses on the standoff “between G.M. and its unionized workers and retirees”: “Bank­ruptcy would allow G.M. to unilaterally reject its collective bargaining agreements, as long as a judge approved.” In other words, bankruptcy should be used to break the backbone of one of the last strong unions in the United States, leaving thousands with lower wages and thousands of others with lower retirement incomes. Note again the contrast with the urgent need to save the big banks: in the case of GM, where the survival of tens of thousands of active and retired workers is at stake, there is, of course, no emergency, but, on the contrary, an opportunity to allow the free market to operate with brutal force. As if the unions, rather than failures of managerial strategy, were to be blamed for GM’s troubles! This is how the impossible becomes possible: what was hitherto considered unthinkable within the horizon of the established standards of decent working conditions now becomes acceptable.

In his Poverty of Philosophy, Marx wrote that bourgeois ideology loves to historicize: every social, religious, and cultural form is histor­ical, contingent, relative-every form except its own. There was history once, but now there is no longer any history:

Economists have a singular method of procedure. There are only two kinds of institutions for them, artificial and natural . The institutions of feudalism are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this, they resemble the theologians, who likewise establish two kinds of religion. Every religion which is not theirs is an invention of men, while their own is an emanation from God. When the economists say that present-day relations — the relations of bourgeois production —­ are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus, there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been history, since there were the institutions of feudalism, and in these institutions of feudalism we find quite different relations of production from those of bourgeois society, which the economists try to pass off as natural and, as such, eternal.

Replace “feudalism” with “socialism” and exactly the same holds true of today’s apologists for liberal-democratic capitalism.

• Slavoj Zizek: First as Tragedy, Then as Farce