Slavoj Žižek on GameStop, WallStreetBets, and the Future of Capitalism

Joe Weisenthal (0:10)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Unfortunately, my normal co-host Tracy Alloway isn't here today, so it'll just be me. But if she were here today, I would call back to mind several weeks ago when we were talking about GameStop, and I complained in some of those episodes about the GameStop story. And I complained that throughout the GameStop story that numerous people were offering up their uninformed takes on the subject. Everybody seemed to have something they wanted to say about it, something about class warfare or something about the structure of the market. And by and large, most of those were not particularly interesting or informed, and Tracy got mad at me for take policing, so to speak. But there was one thing I read that definitely caught my attention and sort of surprised me when I saw it, and that was a piece in the UK magazine, The Spectator, titled Corruption for Everybody. And the author of that piece is the well-known philosopher Slavoj Žižek. He's at the University of London and the University of Ljubljana. Slovenian professor, author of numerous books, filmmaker, created the documentary, widely viewed, titled The Pervert's Guide to Ideology.

And a sort of well-known leftist, Marxist, psychoanalyst philosopher talking about GameStop really intrigued me. And so I thought, why don't we get him on the show and talk about stocks and the market and the economy and the world today and anything else that's on his mind. And so he is here today. And I'm so very excited to bring in Slavoj Žižek. Thank you so much for joining us.

What made you write about this story? You don't normally like write something about a stock or the stock market. What was it about this that suddenly like captured everyone's attention? And you wrote this essay, The Corruption for Everybody.

Slavoj Žižek (2:14)

It was the memory of, as I said in the text of Croat elections a year ago. This really happened. It's not my imagination, although I love imaginary examples.

I invented that, a guy there, an actor, I learned he was a well-known actor in Croat National Theatre, made a presidential campaign where he said the problem now is that corruption is limited to those who are inside, but I promise corruption for everybody.

Everybody will be able to be corrupted and so on, will get his or her piece of the pie in the corruption. And I thought isn't something similar at work in WallStreetBets, GameStop, and so on and so on. Now, I don't want to be accused of bluffing too much. So let me just make a very brief two points of self presentation. First, I don't think I know, I try to read stuff and so on, but that I know too much about all the technical details about economy, you know. So what I'm saying is that what fascinated me in GameStop story is a certain logic that I saw in it, which is on the one hand, I know there is a very interesting vision in it, vision of a truly popular or populist capitalism. Every one of us can do it. On the other hand, what interests me more, and that's the, in my domain, ideology, even more interesting. So it's not the version of everybody can do it. If you have a permanent job in the morning, you work or you work from home, whatever. And yeah, it was in the evening, anybody can do it and so on and so on. What interested me is, again, two crucial features.

The first one is that it's the counterpoint of experts. And that's why they succeeded. What do I mean by this? You know, there was a certain tendency among others, I don't trust him, Elon Musk proposed this and didn't two guys, a lady and a man, already, you must know this better than me, already a year, a year and a half ago, didn't they propose an algorithm, a program which enables you to play the stock market and it costs a certain penny on WallStreet because the rumor was that the algorithm, which the text, the market proposes investments does on average, on average, there are always exceptions and mistakes, slightly better job than your stock market representatives, so who needs WallStreet when algorithm can do it better? What interested me here is that WallStreetBets and then GameStop is not this, but it's in some way a counterpoint because what I find so immensely attractive, I was tempted to I'm excited to play it with GameStop. Let's say you are a perfect scientist, at least if I doubt it, stock market games are science. You know all the tendencies, futures, you know the influence of weather and so on. Okay, you can play this game professionally, but isn't the big revolution of GameStop that they consciously didn't want, at least a certain trend, to know too much? Their strongest card was, we don't know it, we want to introduce chaos.