by
Slavoj Žižek
View all notes
[...] colonialism is not overcome when the intrusion of the English language as a medium is abolished, but when the colonizers are, as it were, beaten at their own game--when the new Indian identity is effortlessly formulated in English, i.e., when English language is 'denaturalized', when it loses its privileged link to 'native' Anglo-Saxon English-speakers. [...]
[...] fidelity to pre-modern ('Asian') values is paradoxically the very feature which allows countries like China, Singapore and India to follow the path of capitalist dynamics even more radically than Western liberal countries. Reference to traditional values enables individuals to justify their ruthless engagement in market competition in ethical terms ('I am really doing it to help my parents, to earn enough money so that my children and cousins will be able to study,' and so on).
this isn't even just a pre-modern value (I can think of lots of Western people who fit this mold)
[...] John Jay Chapman (1862-1933), today a half-forgotten American political activist and essayist who wrote about political radicals:
The radicals are really always saying the same thing. They do not change; everybody else changes. They are accused of the most incompatible crimes, of egoism and a mania for power, indifference to the fate of their own cause, fanaticism, triviality, want of humour, buffoonery and irreverence. But they sound a certain note. Hence the great practical power of consistent radicals. To all appearance nobody follows them, yet everyone believes them. They hold a tuning-fork and sound A, and everybody knows it really is A, though the time-honoured pitch is G flat. The community cannot get that A out of its head. Nothing can prevent an upward tendency in the popular tone so long as the real A is kept sounding.
somewhat relevant to drift though almost in the opposite direction
So what remains of Thatcher's legacy today? Neoliberal hegemony is clearly falling apart. The only solution is to repeat Thatcher's gesture in the opposite direction. [...]
the big question is if it's even possible to go in the opposite direction, or if you're just swimming against the tide
[...] what was inherently wrong with the twentieth-century Communist project, and which immanent weakness of this project forced the Communists (and not only the Communists) in power to resort to unrestrained violence? In other words, it is not enough to say that Communists 'neglected the problem of violence': it was a deeper socio-political failure that pushed them to violence. (The same goes for the notion that Communists 'neglected democracy': their overall project of social transformation enforced on them this 'neglect'.)
Communism is today not the name of a solution, but the name of a problem, the problema of commons in all its dimensions--the commons of nature as the substance of our life, the problema of our biogenetic commons, the problema of our cultural commons ('intellectual property'), and, last but not least, commons as the universal space of humanity from which no one should be excluded. Whatever the solution, it will have to deal with these problems. This is why, as Alvaro Garcia Linera once put it, our horizon has to remain Communist--a horizon not as an inaccessible ideal, but as a space of ideas within which we move.
idk why he says problema
[...] The true novelty of the Syriza government is that it is a governmental event--the first time that a Western radical Left (not the old-style Communist one) has taken state power. The entire rhetoric, so beloved of the New Left, of acting at a distance from the state, has to be abandoned: one has to heroically assume full responsibility for the welfare of the entire people and leave behind the basic Leftist 'critical' attitude of finding a perverse satisfaction in providing sophisticated explanations of why things had to take a wrong turn.
[...] The point is that this dilemma is wrong: the dilemma cannot be solved at this level since the very gap between private interest (safety of my son) and global justice bears witness to a situation which has to be overcome.
great illustration of the problem with individualist thinking vs looking at the bigger picture (someone's white son is having a tough time at a majority-black school--what's the solution?)
[...] when we are deprived of universal healthcare, we are told that we are given a new freedom of choice (to choose our healthcare provider); when we can no longer rely on long-term employment and are compelled to search for a new precarious job every couple of years or maybe even every couple of weeks, we are told that we are given the opportunity to re-invent ourselves and discover our unexpected creative potential; when we have to pay for the education of our children, we are told that we become 'entrepreneurs-of-the-self', acting like a capitalist who has to choose freely how he will invest the resources he possesses (or has borrowed)--in education, health, travel. Constantly bombarded by such imposed 'free choices', forced to make decisions for which we are not even properly qualified (or do not possess enough information about), we increasingly experience our freedom as a burden that causes unbearable anxiety. Unable to break out of this vicious cycle alone, as isolated individuals, since the more we act freely, the more we get enslaved by the system, we need to be awakened from this dogmatic slumber of fake freedom by the push of a Master figure.
damn
"Socialism" is no more an evil word than "Christianity." Socialism no more prescribed Joseph Stalin and his secret police and shuttered churches than Christianity prescribed the Spanish Inquisition. Christianity and socialism alike, in fact, prescribe a society dedicated to the proposition that all men, women, and children are created equal and shall not starve.
can't believe i read this a decade ago without really paying attention to the socialism part. i could have been converted A DECADE AGO
though tbh I don't really agree with his pro-Christianity points but the argument isn't bad for people who are pro-Christian