although I’m very critical of it . . . Capitalism is more an ethical/religious category for

me. It’s not true when people attack capitalists as egotists. “They don't care.” No! An

ideal capitalist is someone who is ready, again, to stake his life, to risk everything

just so that production grows, profit grows, capital circulates. His personal or her happiness

is totally subordinated to this. This is what I think Walter Benjamin, the great Frankfurt

School companion, thinker, had in mind when he said capitalism is a form of religion.

You cannot explain, account for, a figure of a passionate capitalist, obsessed with

expanded circulation, with rise of his company, in terms of personal happiness.

I am, of course, fundamentally anti-capitalist. But let’s not have any illusions here. No.

What shocks me is that most of the critics of today’s capitalism feel even embarrassed,

that's my experience, when you confront them with a simple question, “Okay, we heard

your story . . . protest horrible, big banks depriving us of billions, hundreds, thousands

of billions of common people's money. . . . Okay, but what do you really want? What should replace

the system?” And then you get one big confusion. You get either a general moralistic answer,

like “People shouldn't serve money. Money should serve people.” Well, frankly, Hitler

would have agreed with it, especially because he would say, “When people serve money,

money’s controlled by Jews,” and so on, no? So either this or some kind of a vague

connection, social democracy, or a simple moralistic critique, and so on and so on.

So, you know, it’s easy to be just formally anti-capitalist, but what does it really mean?

It’s totally open.

This is why, as I always repeat, with all my sympathy for Occupy Wall Street movement,

it’s result was . . . I call it a Bartleby lesson. Bartleby, of course, Herman Melville’s

Bartleby, you know, who always answered his favorite “I would prefer not to” . . . The

message of Occupy Wall Street is, I would prefer not to play the existing game. There

is something fundamentally wrong with the system and the existing forms of institutionalized

democracy are not strong enough to deal with problems. Beyond this, they don't have an

answer and neither do I. For me, Occupy Wall Street is just a signal. It’s like clearing

the table. Time to start thinking.

The other thing, you know, it’s a little bit boring to listen to this mantra of “Capitalism

is in its last stage.” When this mantra started, if you read early critics of capitalism,

I’m not kidding, a couple of decades before French Revolution, in late eighteenth century.

No, the miracle of capitalism is that it’s rotting in decay, but the more it’s rotting,

the more it thrives. So, let’s confront that serious problem here.

Also, let’s not remember--and I’m saying this as some kind of a communist--that the

twentieth century alternatives to capitalism and market miserably failed. . . . Like, okay,

in Soviet Union they did try to get rid of the predominance of money market economy.

The price they paid was a return to violent direct master and servant, direct domination,

like you no longer will even formally flee. You had to obey orders, a new authoritarian

society. . . . And this is a serious problem: how to abolish market without regressing again

into relations of servitude and domination.

My advice would be--because I don't have simple answers--two things: (a) precisely to start

thinking. Don't get caught into this pseudo-activist pressure. Do something. Let’s do it, and

so on. So, no, the time is to think. I even provoked some of the leftist friends when

I told them that if the famous Marxist formula was, “Philosophers have only interpreted

the world; the time is to change it” . . . thesis 11 . . . , that maybe today we should say,

“In the twentieth century, we maybe tried to change the world too quickly. The time

is to interpret it again, to start thinking.”

Second thing, I’m not saying people are suffering, enduring horrible things, that

we should just sit and think, but we should be very careful what we do. Here, let me give

you a surprising example. I think that, okay, it’s so fashionable today to be disappointed

at President Obama, of course, but sometimes I’m a little bit shocked by this disappointment

because what did the people expect, that he will introduce socialism in United States

or what? But for example, the ongoing universal health care debate is an important one. This

is a great thing. Why? Because, on the one hand, this debate which taxes the very roots

of ordinary American ideology, you know, freedom of choice, states wants to take freedom from

us and so on. I think this freedom of choice that Republicans attacking Obama are using,

its pure ideology. But at the same time, universal health care is not some crazy, radically leftist

notion. It’s something that exists all around and functions basically relatively well--Canada,

most of Western European countries.

So the beauty is to select a topic which touches the fundamentals of our ideology, but at the

same time, we cannot be accused of promoting an impossible agenda--like abolish all private

property or what. No, it’s something that can be done and is done relatively successfully

and so on. So that would be my idea, to carefully select issues like this where we do stir up

public debate but we cannot be accused of being utopians in the bad sense of the term.