Another great article detailing the rise of the nefarious academic left. These people are teaching your children!
http://50.56.48.50/article/new-communism-resurrecting-utopian-delusion
A specter is haunting the academy—the specter of “new communism.” A worldview recently the source of immense suffering and misery, and responsible for more deaths than fascism and Nazism, is mounting a comeback; a new form of left-wing totalitarianism that enjoys intellectual celebrity but aspires to political power.
The Slovenian cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek and the French philosopher and ex-Maoist Alain Badiou have become the leading proponents of this new school. Others associated with the project are the authors of the influential trilogy Empire, Multitude, Commonwealth, the American Michael Hardt of Duke University and the Italian Marxist Toni Negri; the Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo (who recently declared that he has positively “reevaluated” The Protocols of the Elders of Zion); Bologna University professor and ex-Maoist Alessandro Russo; and the professor of poetry at the European Graduate School (and another ex-Maoist) Judith Balso. Other leading voices include Alberto Toscano, translator of Alain Badiou, a sociology lecturer at Goldsmiths in London, and a member of the editorial board of Historical Materialism; the literary critic and essayist Terry Eagleton; and Bruno Bosteels from Cornell University. Most spoke at “The Idea of Communism,” a three-day conference held in London in 2009 that, to the astonishment of the organizers, attracted nearly a thousand people willing to pay more than one hundred pounds each. After that event, a companion publishing industry, powered by Verso Books, has grown up to accompany the movement, making it respectable on campuses. Among new communism’s most important English-language texts, all published in the last few years, are The Idea of Communism, edited by Costas Douzinas and Zizek, Badiou’s The Communist Hypothesis, and Bosteels’s The Actuality of Communism.
Badiou’s recent volume in particular, which Verso has designed as a little red book complete with a golden communist star on its cover, gives a flavor of the movement’s thinking and aims. Co-founder of the militant French group Organisation Politique and now in his mid-seventies, Badiou reads the presence of communism in human history as the ongoing struggle for human emancipation rather than the series of disastrous detours it mostly was. From the French Republic of 1792 to the massacre of the Paris communards in 1871 and from 1917 to the collapse of Mao’s Cultural Revolution in 1976—these are but two “sequences” of the communist “idea” in modern history, the first a time for the “setting in place of the communist hypothesis,” the second an era of “preliminary attempts” at its “realization.” The gaps between these “sequences” (including the last three and a half decades) Badiou classifies as time when the communist hypothesis is “declared to be untenable” and capital all-powerful. The “thrilling task” to which Badiou calls his readers, and to which a layer of intellectuals have rallied, is to “usher in the third era” of the communist idea.
So, why this new interest in communism, of all things? After all, the leading new communists have refused to plumb the gist of the historic failures of the past and freely admit that they have almost no idea how to proceed in the future. And in the present they are politically irrelevant. The appeal rests on one fact above all: only the new communists argue that the crises of contemporary liberal capitalist societies—ecological degradation, financial turmoil, the loss of trust in the political class, exploding inequality—are systemic; interlinked, not amenable to legislative reform, and requiring “revolutionary” solutions.
Why does this idea appeal today? What can it actually mean, both theoretically and as a new form of radical politics in the twenty-first century? Do its evasions (of the communist record) and its repetitions (of the anti-democratic, authoritarian, and elitist assumptions of the old communism) define the new communism as yet another form of leftist totalitarianism?
The rehabilitation of communism has been “overdetermined,” as the late French Marxist Louis Althusser would have put it. In other words, there has been a convergence of a series of apparently disparate but, in the eyes of the new communists, systemically related factors that has created a social emergency and the need for a kind of intellectual crisis management. First, and most obviously, the international financial crisis, the failure of the capitalist utopia after 1989, and the triumph of what Badiou calls an “utterly cynical capitalism.” Second, the “return of history” after 2001 in the form of the failure of the so-called new world order and the emergence of seemingly viable authoritarian and collectivist alternatives to liberal democratic capitalism. Third, the post-1980s growth, especially in the US and UK, of what Robert Reich calls supercapitalism (intense competition, deregulation, globalization, financialization, the disappearance of job security, decline of labor unions, the erosion of the welfare state, and the attendant growth of extreme social inequalities, or what Zizek calls “new forms of apartheid, new walls, and slums”). Fourth, a growing external crisis in the form of ecological emergency. Fifth, a growing internal crisis in the form of “new enclosures”—i.e., the privatization and marketization of personal existence through the growth of biogenetics and new intellectual property norms. Sixth, a “hollowing out,” as Badiou puts it, of representative democracy until all notions of government “for the people” let alone “by the people” become a poor joke.
Badiou establishes a systemic critique in The Communist Hypothesis, arguing that “political power, as the current economic crisis with its one single slogan of ‘rescue the banks’ clearly proves, is merely an agent of capitalism.” Similarly, for Slavoj Zizek, “the link between democracy and capitalism has been broken” and this rupture is the expression of “an inner necessity . . . in the very logic of today’s capitalism.”
If the financial crisis has cast doubt on an entire economic system, it is the crisis of the left that has created a political space for the new communism. Social democratic reformism is exhausted; across Europe and the Anglosphere, national versions of “Blairism” have everywhere turned the old people’s parties into ideological rationalizers of a system that now mostly works only as a wrecking ball. These parties no longer take care of their own, argue the new communists. The only other form of leftism that has flourished after 1989 has also been revealed to be politically ineffectual: postmodern, theoreticist, and obsessed with oppression in culture, language, identity, and representation; uninterested in exploitation and political economy, in thrall to Foucauldian (often tenured) forms of “resistance,” this literary and cultural “speculative leftism,” it turns out, is no threat to capitalism. Indeed, much of the attraction to new communism comes from a yearning for a politics that is genuinely oppositional, positioned wholly outside the capitalist market and liberal democracy. Zizek sums up the pitch: “Do not be afraid, join us, come back! You’ve had your anti-communist fun, and you are pardoned for it—time to get serious once again.”
But this is no mere exercise in nostalgia. The new communists dream of working out a new mode of existence of the communist “hypothesis” in the twenty-first century. They hope a new communist movement can grow out of the system’s antagonisms. Zizek identifies four: “the looming threat of ecological catastrophe, the inappropriateness of the notion of private property for so-called ‘intellectual property,’ the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics), and, last but not least, new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums.” The new communism is distinguished by refusing to treat these antagonisms in isolation, as technical problems amenable to parliamentary reform. For example, it rejects the idea that the ecological emergency is solvable by sustainable (capitalist) development, or that the hollowing out of representative democracy can be fixed by campaign finance reform. According to Zizek, it is because these antagonisms are expressions of the very structure of contemporary capitalism that they lend to the communist idea “a practical urgency.”
Zizek argues that while the first three antagonisms are a “triple threat to our entire being,” it is the fourth, the antagonism between the “excluded” and the “included,” that is (quoting Marx) “the real movement that abolishes the present state of things.” As the commons—of culture, of external nature, of internal nature—are privatized and enclosed, a process of near-limitless proletarianization sets in: the vast majority of people become “excluded from their own substance.” Zizek thinks the new revolutionary agent will be grounded in the “revolutionary antagonism of the commons.” The new communists did not coin the slogan “we are the ninety-nine percent,” but when the Occupy activists are ready to listen, they’ll find a theory that can generalize their practice.
Zizek told the protesters at Zuccotti Park in New York City that “the only way we are communist is that we care about the commons.” The new communists seek to rehabilitate communism by treating it not as a historical movement with a record of labor camps and enormity but as a beautiful Platonic “Idea.” The catastrophe of actually existing communism is acknowledged, but only as the first failed approximation to an obvious good. As Zizek puts it, “Try again, Fail again, Fail better.”
As a capitalized “Idea” or an eternal “hypothesis,” the new communism turns out to be a simple repetition of the old. The goal is the old dream of a leap into the kingdom of freedom—a society wholly beyond the market and representative democracy; a perfectly equal stateless society. For Badiou, class divisions, along with “capitalo-parliamentarism” will be “overcome,” the division of labor “eliminated,” the private appropriation of great wealth and its transmittance by inheritance will “disappear,” and a coercive state, separate from civil society, will “wither away.” New communism, then, is a kind of grand negation of all that is—for Bruno Bosteels, it is “an egalitarian discipline of anti-property, anti-hierarchy and anti-authority principles,” while Badiou’s desire is “a world that has been freed from the law of profit and private interest.” And so on.
The communist idea or “hypothesis” is then placed beyond empirical refutation. “The eternal idea of the Cultural revolution survives its defeat in socio-historical reality,” insists Zizek, while for Badiou, “failure is nothing more than the history of the proof of the hypothesis.” Under scrutiny, it becomes clear that we are not dealing with a communist “hypothesis” at all—that would involve testing and the possibility of falsification—but rather a communist dogma, and the relation of the new communists to that dogma is fundamentally religious, marked by piety and faith, and not at all critical.
The duty of the new communist is to “help a new modality of existence of the hypothesis to come into being,” says Badiou. Likewise, uninterested in the purely theoretical, Alberto Toscano’s desire is to “connect the prospects of communism to a partisan knowledge of the real and its tendencies.” But they do not deliver. In fact they rarely rise above the merely gestural. For example, Jacques Rancière defines communism as “the autonomous growth of the space of the common created by the free association of men and women implementing the egalitarian principle.”
Badiou at least tries to explain this failure. He believes that communists, like everyone else on the left, remain the contemporaries of a fundamental strategic impasse revealed in May of 1968, when “the classical figure of the politics of emancipation was ineffective.” And despite all the experimentation since with organizational forms, agents, and strategies, it is no clearer “what new forms of political organisation are needed to handle political antagonisms.” In response to this strategic impasse, some new communists seek to “begin again at the beginning” by playing the role of underlaborer to the new practices of the new proletarians struggling against the new antagonisms: “As soon as mass action opposes state coercion in the name of egalitarian justice, rudiments or fragments of the hypothesis start to appear,” writes Badiou, who also talks of “organising new types of political processes among the poor and working masses.” Others do not even reach the level of vagueness. Instead they resolve the strategic impasse by mere rhetoric. Gianni Vattimo sees a communist future in “an undisciplined social practice which shares with anarchism the refusal to formulate a system, a constitution, a positive ‘realistic’ model according to traditional political methods.” Instead, Vattimo thinks that “communism must have the courage to be a ‘ghost’” . . . whatever that means. And what sense can we make of these effusions of Jean-Luc Nancy?: “The common means space, spacing, distance and proximity, separation and encounter. But this ‘meaning’ is not a meaning. It opens precisely beyond any meaning. To that extent, it is allowed to say that ‘communism’ has no meaning, goes beyond meaning: here, where we are.”
Finally, the refusal to face up to the criminal record of actually existing communism as a social system, let alone stare into that abyss until one’s politics and theory are utterly reshaped by it, tells us that the new communism remains within the orbit of leftist totalitarianism. These evasions take several forms.
First, for all the talk of new beginnings, new communists often deploy what Louis Althusser mockingly called “quotes from famous people” as a substitute for serious social science. For example, Zizek argues that “one should shamelessly repeat the lesson of Lenin’s State and Revolution” (as if the book holds the lessons, not the history). And Toscano makes the case for “communist equality” by simply repeating phrases from Marx’s 1875 Critique of the Gotha Programme. Second, a bleaching language is employed to redescribe mass murder. Thus, there were “many restrictions on freedom” under Stalin, mumbles Gianni Vattimo. Third, a hollow rhetoric of resurrection is deployed to market the idea of leftist revival: “communism is rising from its grave once again,” celebrates Zizek. Fourth, the new communists like to change the subject—from the crimes of communist regimes to the “long history of struggles, dreams, and aspirations that are tied to .” So, Jacques Rancière is able to write that “communism is thinkable for us as the tradition created around a number of moments . . . when simple workers and ordinary men and women . . . struggle.” For its millions of victims, of course, it is thinkable as something else. Fifth, there is a brazen promotion of evasion as a virtue. The “culture of memory” is right-wing, according to Bruno Bosteels, so it must be combated by “active forgetfulness”; Badiou declares that “the period of guilt is over”—as if it ever started. About criticism of Stalin and other communist leaders, he warns that it is “vital not to give any ground in the context of criminalization and hair-raising anecdotes in which the forces of reaction have tried to wall them up and invalidate them.” Sixth, definitional fiat is used to ward off criticism. Thus Zizek: “There can be a socialist anti-Semitism, there cannot be a communist one. (If it appears otherwise, as in Stalin’s last years it is only as an indicator of a lack of fidelity to the revolutionary event.)”
As for the extraordinarily rich tradition of liberal and left-wing antitotalitarian thought, it is simply evaded in toto. From Claude Lefort, Pierre Rosanvallon, and François Furet to Norberto Bobbio, Max Shachtman, and Irving Howe, it is never seriously engaged. Zizek mockingly titled one of his books Did Someone Say Totalitarianism? Typically, Badiou abused Jon Halliday and Jung Chang’s magnificent biography of his hero Mao in the language of the thug-commissar: “a piece of propaganda, completely mendacious, perfidious and devoid of all interest.”
Indeed, new communism seems to repeat every theoretical disaster of old communism. It is profoundly elitist, rehabilitating the Jacobin notion of the educational dictatorship. Zizek argues that the mistake of the left was to accept “the basic coordinates of liberal democracy (‘democracy’ versus ‘totalitarianism’)” and suggests that we “fearlessly . . . violate these liberal taboos,” adding, “So what if one is accused of being ‘anti-democratic,’ ‘totalitarian’ . . . ?”
When it tries to make the turn from ethereal philosophy to practical politics, the new communism is mostly a cult of force committed to magical thinking about the transformational power of revolutionary violence and expropriation. The late Italian socialist Sebastiano Timpanaro once called this the “brutal ethics of force.” Thus Badiou: “Oh, we ought to be able to say once more what Aragon, with the encouragement of Stalin, once said: ‘Open fire on the dancing bears of Social Democracy!’” Thus Zizek: “Revolutionary politics is not a matter of opinions but of the truth on behalf of which one often is compelled to disregard the ‘opinion of the majority’ and to impose the revolutionary will against it.”
The democratic socialist Eduard Bernstein issued a warning at the turn of the nineteenth century to his fellow Marxists. The danger of a “truly miraculous belief in the creative power of force,” he prophesied, is that you begin by doing violence to reality in theory, and end by doing violence to people in practice. What distinguishes the new communism is that its leading partisans are fully aware of that potential . . . and embrace it as a strategy. As Zizek puts it:
The only “realistic” prospect is to ground a new political universality by opting for the impossible, fully assuming the place of the exception, with no taboos, no a priori norms (“human rights,” “democracy”), respect for which would prevent us from “resignifying” terror, the ruthless exercise of power, the spirit of sacrifice . . . if this radical choice is decried by some bleeding-heart liberals as Linksfaschismus , so be it!
This flirtation with the notion of left-fascism helps explain why the new communism needs to be taken seriously. Communism itself, of course, is dead. But when Zizek recommends the “insight” of the 1970s Baader-Meinhof gang that “in an epoch in which the masses are totally immersed in capitalist ideological torpor . . . only a resort to the raw Real of direct violence . . . can awaken them,” we should be concerned. Recent history tells us that authoritarian philosophical and political ideas can still find their way to the streets in advanced capitalist societies. The new communist ideas might yet connect with the young, the angry, and the idealistic who are confronted by a profound economic crisis in the context of an exhausted social democracy and a self-loathing intellectual culture. Tempting as it is, we can’t afford to just shake our heads at the new communism and pass on by.
For another insightful article by Alan Johnson detailing the perverse and degenerate state of this new communist comeback, check out this article he wrote for the Jacobin Magazine (edited by our very own rhizzone poster Myfanwy):
http://jacobinmag.com/summer-2011/the-power-of-nonsense/
Of course the biggest problem of this “New Communism” is that it has absolutely no connection to workers or the masses it claims to represent. Don’t’ get me wrong, I think Zizek is great too, but it’s all rhetorical fun and games and campus identity politics rather than an actual movement like Occupy or whatever.
getfiscal posted:zizek says that the big question today is whether we want to humanize capitalism or abolish it, and strongly implies that life is a waste of time if you don't want to abolish capitalism. all this says to me is that he should spend more time with his son, and i don't mean watching strippers in dubai. all progressive change is a humanizing change, there ain't nothing new under the sky.
what does this mean
Crow posted:what does this mean
it means maybe it's cool to live for a while even if you don't lock your brain into a spirit quest for communism
getfiscal posted:Crow posted:what does this mean
it means maybe it's cool to live for a while even if you don't lock your brain into a spirit quest for communism
ah well let me tell you: it's not as cool as you think
life happens, whatever quest you maybe on. but it doesn't happen if you aint questin. Check out a band called a Tribe called quest for mroe info, fucker
getfiscal posted:i was editor of vogue romania from 1994 until 1996. i was fired because i produced an issue called 'the new decadence' that had kate moss eating real parts of the corpse of a prominent dissident.
the rule of the social democrats produced a bleak character of national discourse but a flowering dissident scene until you ate every single one of them
Crow posted:Wow. i dont understand anything you guys are saying. Dumb it down for the rest of us?
Man is this animal whose definitive property is to participate in numerous worlds and appear in innumerable places. This sort of objectal ubiquity, which makes it pass nearly constantly from one world to another against the background of the infinity of these worlds and their transcendental organization, is by itself, without having to recur to any sort of miracle, a grace: the purely logical grace of innumerable appearance. Every human animal can claim that it is excluded, that everywhere and always it encounters only atonality, inefficiency of the body or defect of capable organs to treat the points. Incessantly, in some accessible world, something arises. To every human animal is accorded, several times in its brief existence, the chance to be incorporated into the subjective present of a truth. To all, and for several types of procedures, the grace to live for an Idea is distributed and thus the grace to live tout court.
(i mean like in the first instance, in the final analysis everything zizek does is for fascism but intent matters actually)
Later, Walter Benjamin, in his Critique of Violence (1920) would also establish a difference between "violence that founds the law", "violence that conserves the law", and an additional last type, "divine violence" which breaks the "magic circle" between both types of "state violence". The "violence that conserves the law" was roughly equivalent to the state's monopoly of legitimate violence, while the "violence that founds the law" was the original violence necessary to the creation of a state. The last type of violence, Benjamin also called it "revolutionary violence", and it was totally separated from the juridical sphere. Giorgio Agamben showed that the theoretical link between the law and violence permitted Nazi thinker Carl Schmitt to justify the "state of exception" as the characteristic of sovereignty. Thus, indefinite suspension of the law, which is the way to include-exclude violence in the juridical sphere (this simultaneous inclusion and exclusion is characteristic of the structure of "ex-ception"), may only be blocked by breaking this link between violence and right. This explains why Agamben refers to Benjamin, whose theorization of a "divine violence" broke the theoretical structure of the state of exception, which is at the basis of the state's sovereignty.
what use then violence?
just as the victory of one player in a sporting match is not something like an originary state of the game that must be restored, but only the stake of the game (which does not preexist it, but rather results from it), so pure violence (which is the name Benjamin gives to human action that neither makes nor preserves law) is not an originary figure of human action that at a certain point is captured and inscribed within the juridical order (just as there is not, for speaking man, a prelinguistic reality that at a certain point falls into language). It is, rather, only the stake in the conflict over the state of exception, what results from it and, in this way only, is supposed prior to the law
our inherited errors... the sins of the father...
But the other position (that of the democratico-revolutionary tradition), which wants to maintain constituting power in its sovereign transcendence with respect to every constituted order, threatens to remain just as imprisoned within the paradox that we have tried to describe until now. For if constituting power is, as the violence that posits law, certainly more noble than the violence that preserves it, constituting power still possesses no title that might legitimate something other than law-preserving violence and even maintains an ambiguous and ineradicable relation with constituted power.
From this perspective, Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyes's famous statement, "The constitution first of all presupposes a constituting power," is not, as has been claimed, a simple truism: it must rather be understood in the sense that the constitution presupposes itself as constituting power and, in this form, expresses the paradox of sovereignty in the most telling way. Just as sovereign power presupposes itself as the state of nature, which is thus maintained in a relation of ban with the state of law, so the sovereign power divides itself into constituting power and constituted power and maintains itself in relation to both, positioning itself at their point of indistinction.
a history... of violence...
Hannah Arendt, who cites this line in On Revolution, describes how sovereignty was demanded in the course of the French Revolution in the form of an absolute principle capable of founding the legislative act of constituting power. And she shows well how this demand (which is also present in Robespierre's idea of a Supreme Being) ultimately winds up in a vicious circle: What he needed was by no means just a "Supreme Being"-a term which was not his-he needed rather what he himself called an "Immortal Legislator" and what, in a different context, he also named a "continuous appeal to justice." In terms of the French Revolution, he needed an ever-present transcendent source of authority that could not be identified with the general will of either the nation or the Revolution itself, so that an absolute Sovereignty-Blackstone's "despotic power"-might bestow sovereignty upon the nation, that an absolute Immortality might guarantee, if not immortality, then at least some permanence and stability to the republic. (Arendt, On Revolution, p. 185) Here the basic problem is not so much how to conceive a constituting power that does not exhaust itself in a constituted power (which is not easy, but still theoretically resolvable), as how clearly to differentiate constituting from constituted power, which is surely a more difficult problem. Attempts to think the preservation of constituting power are certainly not lacking in our age, and they have become familiar to us through the Trotskyite notion of a "permanent revolution" and the Maoist concept of "uninterrupted revolution." Even the power of councils (which there is no reason not to think of as stable, even if de facto constituted revolutionary powers have done everything in their power to eliminate them) can, from this perspective, be considered as a survival of constituting power within constituted power. But the two great destroyers of spontaneous councils in our time-the Leninist party and the Nazi party-also present themselves, in a certain sense, as the preservers of a constituting moment alongside constituted power. It is in this light that we ought to consider the characteristic "dual" structure of the great totalitarian states of our century (the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany), which has made things so difficult for historians of public law. The structure by which the State party tends to appear as a duplicate of the State structure can then be considered as a paradoxical and interesting technico-juridical solution to the problem of how to maintain constituting power. Yet it is just as certain that in both of these cases, constituting power either appears as the expression of a sovereign power or does not let itself easily be separated from sovereign power. The analogy between the Soviet Union and the Nazi Reich is even more compelling insofar as in both cases, the question "Where?" is the essential one once neither the constituting power nor the sovereign can be situated wholly inside or altogether outside the constituted order.
and so the problem reveals itself...
constituting power, when conceived in all its radicality, ceases to be a strictly political concept and necessarily presents itself as a category of ontology. The problem of constituting power then becomes the problem of the "constitution of potentiality" (II potere costituente, p. 383), and the unresolved dialectic between constituting power and constituted power opens the way for a new articulation of the relation between potentiality and actuality, which requires nothing less than a rethinking of the ontological categories of modality in their totality. The problem is therefore moved from political philosophy to first philosophy (or, if one likes, politics is returned to its ontological position). Only an entirely new conjunction of possibility and reality, contingency and necessity, and the other pathe tou ontos, will make it possible to cut the knot that binds sovereignty to constituting power. And only if it is possible to think the relation between potentiality and actuality differently-and even to think beyond this relation-will it be possible to think a constituting power wholly released from the sovereign ban. Until a new and coherent ontology of potentiality (beyond the steps that have been made in this direction by Spinoza, Schelling, Nietzsche, and Heidegger) has replaced the ontology founded on the primacy of actuality and its relation to potentiality, a political theory freed from the aporias of sovereignty remains unthinkable.
Edited by babyfinland ()
imo, zizek should stop pandering to the masses during his public speaking engagements with the watered down unenthusiastic/nihilistic speeches tactfully side-stepping overt calls for violent revolt, containing suggestive social-democratic approaches to reforming capitalism into socialism. it's confusing the hell out of donald.
Impper posted:Idiots
whereever there are models for bad aesthetics: there is babyfinland
AmericanNazbro posted:while i agree with this guy on the general areas which he criticized zizek, i do so for the inverse reason: that zizek doesn't advocate authoritarian communism enough
imo, zizek should stop pandering to the masses during his public speaking engagements with the watered down unenthusiastic/nihilistic speeches tactfully side-stepping overt calls for violent revolt, containing suggestive social-democratic approaches to reforming capitalism into socialism. it's confusing the hell out of donald.
Sorry but if you think that Zizek is "pandering to the masses" I don't know what to say. The Olympics is pandering to the masses, the Avengers is pandering to the masses, a small collection of disgruntled college students do not constitute a "mass" in any reasonable sense.
Ironicwarcriminal posted:AmericanNazbro posted:while i agree with this guy on the general areas which he criticized zizek, i do so for the inverse reason: that zizek doesn't advocate authoritarian communism enough
imo, zizek should stop pandering to the masses during his public speaking engagements with the watered down unenthusiastic/nihilistic speeches tactfully side-stepping overt calls for violent revolt, containing suggestive social-democratic approaches to reforming capitalism into socialism. it's confusing the hell out of donald.Sorry but if you think that Zizek is "pandering to the masses" I don't know what to say. The Olympics is pandering to the masses, the Avengers is pandering to the masses, a small collection of disgruntled college students do not constitute a "mass" in any reasonable sense.
im a distrungled college student ozbong, would u consider me a mass?
This is kinda awkward.
'Cuz...Uh, some of you motherfuckers don't know me...
Some of you do...
But, Uh...
We're going to fuck shit up.
-Stalin
My paintbrush: the kalashnikov forty-seven.
AmericanNazbro posted:there is a decent sized rift in the general subtext between his speeches that he does at universities and on TV, and his writing, when it comes to ideological support for violence. that's all i'm saying, i don't know or care what you are sperging on about
thats no rift. thats an asshole
"workers, elect your manager!"
"okay we elect the woman that will let us not work at all while still paying us a lot more."
"uhh, no, you can't do that!"
"what can we vote on then."
"you can pick your uniform colour and whether you come in at 8:30am or 9:00 am"
*workers shed tears of joy at worker's liberation*
Ironicwarcriminal posted:Sorry but when it comes to action and popular support in the pursuit of anti-imperialism, “the new communists” look pretty silly in comparison to Occupy or Al-Qaeda
Hrrm yes , The real problem we are facing, is, how we can we possibly realize the same anti-imperialist strength as "zionist c.i.a. front" or "zionist c.i.a. front"
http://kasamaproject.org/2012/06/10/slavoj-zizeks-speech-to-greeces-coalition-of-the-radical-left-syriza/
The following speech is from June 6. It first appeared on Left.gr.
by Slavoj Žižek
I am honoured to be here, but ashamed that I don’t speak your language. So, let me begin: Late in his life, Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, asked the famous question; “What does a woman want?” Admitting the perplexity, when faced with the enigma of feminine sexuality. And a similar perplexity arises today; “What does Europe want?”
This is the question you, the Greek people, are addressing Europe. Because you know what you want, you want this guy to be your next Prime Minister. (Gestures to Alexis Tsipras sitting next to him.)
Europe doesn’t know what it wants. The way European States and media relates to what is going on now in Greece, is, I think, the best indicator of what kind of Europe they want. Is it the neo-liberal Europe, is it the Europe of isolationist states or maybe something different?
Critics accuse SYRIZA of being a threat to the Euro, but SYRIZA is, on the contrary, the only chance for Europe. Far from being a threat. You are giving a chance to Europe to break out of its inertia to find a new way.
In his notes towards a definition of culture, the great conservative poet, T.S. Eliot, remarked the moments when the only choice is between heresy and non-belief. That is to say moments when the only way to keep a belief, to keep religion alive, is to perform a sectarian split from the main course.
This is what happens today with Europe; only a new heresy represented at this moment by SYRIZA, can save what is worth saving in the European legacy; Democracy, trusting people, egalitarian solidarity. The Europe that will win, if SYRIZA is out-maneuvered is a Europe with Asian values – and of course these Asian values have nothing to do with Asia, but with the clear and present tendency of contemporary capitalism to suspend democracy.
SYRIZA is said to lack the proper experience to govern. Yes, I agree, they lack the experience of how to bankrupt a country by cheating and stealing. You don’t have this experience. This brings us to the absurdity of the politics of the European establishment; they bring the preach of paying taxes, opposing Greek clientelism and they put all their hopes on the coalition of the two parties which brought to Greece this clientelism.
Christine Lagarde, recently said that she has more sympathy for the poor inhabitants of the Niger, than for Greeks, and she even advised the Greeks to help themselves by paying their taxes, which, as I found a few days ago, she doesn’t have to pay. Like all liberal humanitarians, she likes the impotent poor who behave like victims, evoke our sympathy and bring us to give charity.
But the problem with you Greeks is that you suffer, yes, but you are not passive victims, you resist, you fight, you do not want sympathy and charity, you want active solidarity. You want and you demand a mobilization, a support for your fight.
SYRIZA is accused of promoting leftist fictions, but it is the austerity plan, imposed by Brussels, which clearly is a work of fiction. Everybody knows that this plan is fictitious, that the Greek state, cannot ever repay the debt, in this way. In a strange gesture of collective make-belief, everyone ignores the obvious nonsense of the financial projection on which the European plans are based.
So why does Brussels impose these measures on you? The true aim of these measures is not to save Greece, but of course to save the European banks.
These measures are not presented as decisions grounded in political choices, but as necessities imposed by neutral economic logic. Like, if we want to stabilize our economy, we simply have to swallow the bitter pill. Or, by tautological proverbial sayings, like you cannot spend more than you produce. Well, the American banks and United States as such, are a big proof, for decades, that you can spend more than you produce.
To illustrate the mistake of austerity measures, Paul Krugman, often compares them to the medieval practice of blood letting. A nice metaphor, which I think should be radicalized, further. The European financial doctors, themselves not sure about how this medicine works, are using you as test-rabbits, they are letting your blood, not the blood of their own countries. There is no blood letting for the German and French banks. On the contrary, they are getting big transfusions.
So is SYRIZA, really, a group of dangerous extremists? No, SYRIZA is here to bring pragmatic common sense. To clear the mess created by others. It is those who impose austerity measures who are dangerous dreamers. The true dreamers are those who think that things can go on, indefinitely, the way they are just with some cosmetic changes. You are not dreamers; you are awakening from a dream, which is turning into a nightmare.
You are not destroying anything; you are reacting to how the system is gradually destroying itself. We all know the classic scene from cartoons, Tom and Jerry and so on: The cat reaches the precipice, but goes on walking, ignoring the fact that there is no ground under its feet, then it only starts to fall down, when it looks down and notices that there is nothing. This is all you are doing. You are telling those in power, “hey, look down!” and they are falling down.
The political map of Greece is clear and exemplary; In the centre, I hope you noticed it, there is, that, one big party, one party, with two wings, left and right, PASOK and New Democracy. It’s like, you know, Cola, which is Coca and Pepsi, an indifferent choice. The true name of this party, if you bring PASOK and ND together, should be something, I think, like NHMAD, New Hellenic Movement Against Democracy.
Of course, this big party claims that is for democracy, but I claim they are for decaffeinated democracy. Like, you know, coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice cream without sugar. They want democracy, but democracy where instead of making a choice, people just confirm what wise experts tell them to do. They want democratic dialogue? Yes, but, you know, like in the late Plato’s dialogues, where one guy talks all the time, and the other only says, every ten minutes, “by Zeus, so it is!”
And then, there is the exception. You, SYRIZA, the true miracle, radical left movement, which stepped out of the comfortable position of marginal resistance and courageously signaled your readiness to take power. This is why you have to be punished.
That is why Bill Freyja, recently wrote in the Forbes magazine, in an article with the title “ Give Greece what it deserves: Communism.” Here is a short quote:
“What the world needs, let’s not forget, is a contemporary example of communism in action. What better candidate than Greece? Just toss them out of the European Union, cut off the flow of free Euros and hand them back their old drachmas. Then, stand back for a generation and watch”. In other words, Greece should be exemplary punished so that once and for all, the temptation for a radical, leftist solution of the crisis will be blocked.”
I know that the task of SYRIZA is almost impossible. SYRIZA is not the extreme left madness, it is the voice of pragmatic reason, counteracting the market ideology madness. SYRIZA will need the formidable combination of principle politics and rootless pragmatism of democratic commitment and readiness to act fast and brutally when needed. If you, SYRIZA are to be given a chance, a minimal chance to succeed, you will also need pan-European solidarity.
This is why I think, you, here in Greece, should avoid cheap nationalism, all the talk about how Germany wants to re-occupy you, destroy you and so on. Your first task is to change things here. SYRIZA will have to do the job, which the other guys should have done. The job of building a better, modern – an effective state. The job of clearing the state apparatus from clientelism. It’s a hard job, there is nothing enthusiastic in it, it’s slow, hard, boring job.
Your pseudo-radical critics are telling you that the situation is not yet right for the true social change. That if you take power now, you will just help the system, making it more efficient. This is, if I understand it correctly, what KKE, which is basically the party of the people who are still alive because they forgot to die, are telling you.
It is true, that your political elite demonstrated its inability to rule, but there will never be a moment when the situation will be fully right for the change. If you wait for the right moment, the right moment will never come. When you intervene, it is always immature. So, you have a choice: Either comfortable wait and look how your society is disintegrating, as some other parties of the Left suggest, or heroically intervene, fully aware of how difficult the situation is. And SYRIZA made the right choice.
Your critics hate you, because, I think, secretly, they know you have the courage to be free and to act as free people. When you are in the eyes of the public, those who observe you understand, at least for the flash of an instant, that you are offering them freedom. You dare do what they also dream about. For that instant, they are free. They are one with you. But it is only for a moment. Fear returns and they hate you again, because they are afraid of their own freedom.
So, what is the choice that you, the Greek people, are facing on June 17? You should bear in mind the paradox that sustains the free vote in democratic societies: You are free to chose on condition that you are making the right choice. Which is why, when the choice is the wrong one, for example when Ireland voted against the European constitution, the wrong choice is treated as a mistake and you know, they want to repeat the voting, in order to enlighten the people to make the right choice. And this is why the European establishment is in a panic. They see that maybe, you don’t deserve your freedom, because there is a danger that you will make the wrong choice.
There is a wonderful joke in Earns Lubifish, classical comedy, Ninoxka: The hero, listens carefully, visits a cafeteria and orders a coffee without cream. The waiter replies “Sorry, but we have run out of cream, we only have milk, so can I bring you coffee without milk?” So, in both cases, you get coffee alone, but I think the joke is a correct one. You know negation also matters. The coffee without cream is not the same as the coffee without milk. You are in the same predicament today; the situation is difficult. You will get some kind of austerity, but will you get the coffee of austerity without cream, or without milk? It is here that the European establishment is cheating. The European establishment is acting as if you will got the coffee of austerity without cream. That is to say that the fruits of your hardship will not profit only European banks, but they are effectively offering you coffee without milk, it is you who will not profit from your own sacrifice and hardship.
In the very South of Peloponnese, round Mani, I was there, I know it, the so-called weepers; women that you hire to cry at funerals. They can do the spectacle for the relatives of the diseased. Now, there is nothing primitive about this. We, in our developed societies, are doing exactly the same. Think about this wonderful invention, I think maybe the greatest contribution of America to the world culture, the so-called can-laughter. You know, the laughter, which is part of their sound track on TV. Like, you know, you can go home tired, you put on TV some stupid show like Cheers or Friends and you just sit and the TV, even laughs for you. And, unfortunately, it works.
That’s how those in power, the European establishment, wants to see, not only Greek people, but all of us: Just staring at the screen and observe how the others are doing the dreaming, crying and laughing. There is an apocryphal but wonderful anecdote about the exchange of telegrams between German and Austrian army headquarters in the middle of the First World War: The Germans sent a message to the Austrians; “Here, on our part of the front, the situation is serious, but not catastrophic.” The Austrians replied; “Here, the situation is catastrophic but not serious.”
This is the difference between SYRIZA and others: For the others, the situation is catastrophic, but not serious, things can go on as usual, while for SYRIZA, the situation is serious, but not catastrophic, since courage and hope should replace fear. So, what is ahead of you is to quote the title of an old song of the Beatles, “a long and winding road.” When decades ago, the cold war threatened to explode into a hot one, John Lennon wrote a song, you remember it, if you are old enough, “all we are saying is give peace a chance.” Today, I want to hear a new song all around Europe, “all we are saying is give Greece a chance.”
Allow me just to conclude with a reference to one of your greatest maybe, the greatest classical tragedies, Antigone: Don’t fight battles, which are not your battles. In my idea of Antigone, we have Antigone and Creon. These are just to sects of the ruling class. This is, a little bit, like PASOK and New Democracy. In my version of Antigone, while the two members of the royal families are fighting each other, threatening to ruin the state, I would like to see the chorus, the voices of the people, stepping out of this stupid role of just wise comment, take over, constitute a public committee of people’s power, arrest both of them, Creon and Antigone and establish the people’s power.
Just allow me now to finish with a personal note. I hate the traditional, intellectual left, which likes revolution but the revolution, which takes place somewhere far away. This is why when I was young, the further away it is, the better; Vietnam, Cuba, even today, Venezuela. But you are here, and that’s what I admire. You are not afraid to engage in a desperate situation, knowing how the odds are against you. And this is what I admire. You know, there is also a principled opportunism, opportunism of principles. When you say the situation is lost, we cannot do anything, because we would betray our principles, this appears to be a principled position, but it’s really the extreme form of opportunism. SYRIZA is a unique event of how precisely that left -in contradiction to what the usual extra-parliamentary left does, that cares more if some criminals’ human rights are violated, than if thousands are dying- gathered the courage to do something. So I conclude now with a great honor to give the word to your future prime minister.
cute little potshot at the KKE, who are actually rooted in the masses and the communist struggle of greece going back to the civil war. when Greece's february revolution begins this sunday and then fails, the KKE and the genuine marxist movements of the world will be ready and clowns like Zizek will jump on the next bandwagon. also his dumb shit about "capitalism with asian values" is pure nonsense, as is his weird fascination with sci-fi genetics. btw I say all of this as a comrade, he deserves criticism and not purging