The debate (video at the end of this post) was actually an opportunity for Peterson and Žižek to make their marketing pitches of the moment. How much academic value this particular debate has is hard for me to judge, since (among other things) I'm not an academic. But I do know that Žižek is widely recognized as an important philosopher identified with the field of "Western Marxism." I assume it was a boost to Peterson's academic respectability to be presented on an equal basis with Žižek in this match-up.
Michael Brooks' discussion focuses mostly on Peterson, who receives critical attention from the American left because he has so many fanboys - and I believe they are mostly male - among American conservatives. Brooks and his guests focus on on the superficiality of Peterson's business-booster-club defense of capitalism.
Loosely defined debate terms
The topic of the debate, “Happiness: Capitalism v. Marxism”, is about as broad as the Atlantic Ocean. In an hour and a half, it's not surprising that both participants focused on their marketing pitches. I would say for the debate to have more philosophical substance, it would have required setting some kind of more restricted parameters. Maybe not as conventional as giving them a proposition to defend and oppose, but something less incredibly wide in scope
For instance, under this broad title, the debaters could have been asked to focus specifically on the context of happines in the sense of personal satisfaction or economic prosperity. Or to focus on the ethical principles of capitalism and Marxism, or on capitalism and Marxism since 1989.
As it happened, Peterson in his main presentation claimed to address Marxism as it appears in the Communist Manifesto of 1848, co-authored with Fredrich Engels. Last year was the 200th anniversary of Marx' birth. And with it came a substantial amount of new publications on Marx. And partly since it was an round anniversary year of 1848, those publications included various treatments of the Manifesto. So it's not as though Peterson didn't have recent scholarship available on it and the revolutionary year in Europe in which it appeared.
You don't need to be an academic to realize that Peterson's presentation was hackwork. Michael, Ana, and Ben Burgis explain why it was painfully superficial when it came to the Manifesto's content and context. That famous documents does contain a good basic statement of the view of historical process and role of the capitalist system in driving political developments which he largely maintained for the remainer of his life. But it also was a statement addressing a political moment which turned out to be one of the most decisive years for the development of democracy in Europe, although that history isn't particularly well known in the US. But it was actually pretty spectacular: a revolutionary uprising in France, the establishment of a rebel democratic parliament in Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Emperor and his court forced to flee Vienna.
Focusing the topic specifically on the Communist Manifesto of 1848 and its continuing historical relevance, or lack thereof, would have been a useful way of narrowing the scope from Atlantic Ocean dimensions to something closer to the Mediterranean Sea. But Peterson does say at the beginning that he is focusing his comments on that political-polemical work and the broader ideas behind it. If he's going to do that, it's reasonable to expect that a well-known and (at least popularly) influential philosopher to at least apply minimal scholarly scruples to the topic.
Michael and his guests focus on Peterson's expressed surprise to find see in the Manifesto that Marx and Engels articulated the enormous productive power of capitalism. That also struck me as disingenous on Peterson's part. If he really wasn't acquainted with that aspect of Marx's thought, he probably should have demurred on taking part in a high-visibility debate on the topic. Because it's a fundamental aspect of Marx's view that capitalism represented a huge historical increase in productivity and the production of wealth. Which was an empirical fact. But Marx - and pretty much everyone else at the time who was at all familiar with capitalist economies - also recognized that huge dislocations and new social problems accompanied capitalist development, including urban poverty and squalor and new factors generating social conflict.
It's hard for me not to see that part of Peterson's presentation as a performative example for how earnest conservatives can present their Chamber of Commerce talking points as a fresh discovery by an inquisitive mind: Hey, did you know that even Karl Marx was extremely impressed with capitalist productivity?
Marx and the dark side of capitalism
If Žižek wanted to stick with the subject matter as laid out by Peterson, he might have responded along those lines. He could also have situated Marx's economics in the context that James Oakes does when he writes:
Marx was, after all, the last of the great classical economists, those who concerned themselves with how wealth was produced and therefore, how labor was organized. We do not think that way anymore, especially not after the revival of market ideology in the 1980s. Hence our retrospective bemusement at the intellectual struggles of the nineteenth century. ("The Peculiar Fate of the Bourgeois Critique of Slavery", Slavery and the American South [2003]; Winthrop Jordan, ed.)Marx based a great deal of his analysis on the work of thinkers from David Hume to Adam Smith to David Ricardo. And despite his appropriation by booster-club propagandists, Adam Smith took a critical view of the negative effects of capitalism, based on his moral philosophy. Although the extremes of poverty that developed in the decades after The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776 were not nearly so evident to Smith in the 1770s. Karl Polanyi, whose work has enjoyed new recognition and appreciation since the 2008 economic crisis, spends a large part of his most influential work The Great Transformation (1944) describing the political economy of Britain in the late 18th and early 19th century, when reformers and legislators struggled to find ways to mitigate the negative effects of the market on British society.
There are other ways that Peterson's presentation on the Manifesto would have gotten marked down in an undergraduate paper, as Michael Brooks observed on the question of Marx's evaluation of capitalist development. In his performance as a bright-eyed reader discovering the Manifesto for the first time, Peterson implies that he encountered the concept of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in the Manifesto. But he didn't. Only two known mentions of that concept are found in the voluminous surviving writing of Marx. And the first one came in 1850, two years after the Manifesto. Peterson also describes the Manifesto as though it was making an ethical case about workers being somehow being pure and capitalists evil. That's at best a shallow reading.
If Peterson wanted to make a more serious case about Marxism leading to undemocratic conditions and underdevelopment, there were ways to do that. He could have presented a post-1989 triumphalist "end of history" argument that the experience of the Soviet bloc and its collapse historically demonstrated both points. (He does allude briefly to something along those lines in the discussion.) Or he could look at the experience of China, which still identifies itself as a Communist country.
But as the group on the Michael Brooks segment point out, China's experience is uncomfortable for Peterson's brand of rah-rah-hooray-for-capitalism narrative. He does refer briefly to China as mixing a brand of capitalism with other factors. But he makes much of the radical reduction in poverty in recent times. As the Brooks video also points out, a huge part of that reduction in poverty has been because of the very fast economic development in China in recent decades. And part of that economic model has certainly included practices that are heresy to the market-fundamentalist, neoliberal version of capitalism currently ascendant in the West: extensive central planning, public ownership of enterprises, protectionist measures for domestic industry, capital controls.
That would have been an interesting discussion to have!
Žižek, a quirky presenter but an actual philosopher
In the video above, both Michael and Ana were impressed with Žižek's response, but don't elaborate much. I'm rarely particularly fond of these kinds of verbal presentations by Žižek. And this debate was no exception. He concentrates here on being provocative, and it often comes off as a scatter-shot argument. In the second half during the discussion phase, Žižek talks about wanting to go from Marx back to Hegel in his own thinking. Which is provocative. And the importance for Hegel to Marx's thought has always been a subject of discussion and dispute. In the early postwar years, Stalin decided that Hegel was an undesirable influence and the implications of that actually had a practical effect on Soviet nuclear physics, because the approved anti-Hegel position was judged to exclude the validity of Einstein's theory of relativity.
But Žižek doesn't elaborate that point very clearly. He talks about Hegel's famous reference to the Owl of Minerva and interprets it reasonably. But he leaves it there without giving much of an idea of how he understands his post-Marx Hegelian notion. Though since Peterson was dealing on the level of popular conservative polemics, it might not have added that much to the discussion.
Just after 1:45:00 in the YouTube video, Žižek actually does make a decent point when he challenges Peterson by asking him to name one person who fits his description of postmodern neo-Marxists. Peterson only comes up with Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) and Michel Foucault (1926-1984), which is a pretty weak response. The postmodern theory which focuses on verbal and literary narratives and texts is pretty far removed from the materialism and class theory of most of the Marxist tradition. Peterson responds that he views postmodernism as a kind of closet Marxism that substitutes "identity" groups for class. What Peterson is trying to do there is equate the longtime anticommunism that is a beloved theme for conservatives and radical rightists with the "political correctness" of civil rights demands. Žižek actually nails Peterson on this point and flatly tells him that his identification of those schools of thought is just wrong. And Peterson basically says that he wants to identify the two strains even though he knows that they are very different.
But in scoring the points he did in this debate, Žižek didn't jam Peterson about his embrace of the toxic conspiracy theory of "cultural Marxism," which basically blames Jewish Marxists for postmodernism and "political correctness." (See: Noah Berlatsky, The Lethal Antisemitism of “Cultural Marxism” Jewish Currents 05/03/2019) Charles Mudede makes the point about the academic inaccuracy of Peterson's argument that Žižek also touched on (Jordan Peterson's Idea of Cultural Marxism Is Totally Intellectually Empty The Stranger 03/25/2019, internal link omitted):
Marxism survived in the structuralist moment in France (1950s and 1960s) by way of Louis Althusser, but not as the post-structuralism of Deleuze, Foucault, and Derrida, none of whom can be called a Marxist without causing laughter among those in the know (Peterson, who can be described as a third-rate Bernard-Henri Lévy, is clearly not in this group). The simple reason is the point of departure for post-structuralists is a philosopher that apparently Peterson admires, Nietzsche. For classical Marxism, it is clearly Hegel. These, intellectually speaking, are two different languages or landscapes.A "third-rate Bernard-Henri Lévy": now that's harsh!
Trigger warning on the debate video: toward the end, Peterson plunges off a Jungian cliff, which is one of his brand identity features.
Slavoj Zizek vs Jordan Peterson debate 04/20/2019, on the topic “Happiness: Capitalism v. Marxism”:
(05/08/2019: Ben Burgis also commented on the debate in Marx Deserves Better Critics Quilette 04/24/2019:)
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