[...] 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.

A series of situations that characterize today's society perfectly exemplify this type of superego-individualization: ecology, political correctness and poverty [...] The ideological stakes of such individualization are easily discernible: I get lost in my own self-examination instead of raising much more pertinent global questions about our entire industrial civilization.

[...] the 'working class' is ultimately an empirical category designating a part of society (wage workers), while the proletariat is more a formal category designing the 'part of no-part' of the social body, the point of its symptomal torsion or, as Marx put it, the un-reason within reason--the rational structure of asociety. [...]

The difference between liberalism and the radical Left is that, although they refer to the same three elements (the liberal centre, the populist Right, and the radical Left), they locate them in a different topology: for the liberal centre, the radical Left and Right are two forms of the same 'totalitarian' excess, while for the Left, the only true alternative is the one between itself and the liberal mainstream, with the populist 'radical' Right as nothing but the symptom of liberalism's inability to deal with the Leftist threat. When we hear today's politicians or ideologists offering us a choice between liberal freedom and fundamentalist oppression, and triumphantly asking a (purely rhetorical) question 'Do you want women to be excluded from public life and deprived of their elementary rights? Do you want everyone who mocks religion to be punished by death?', what should make us suspicious is the very self-evidence of the answer--who would ever want that? The problem is that such a simplistic liberal universalism lost its innocence long ago. This is why, for a true Leftist, the conflict between liberal permissiveness and fundamentalism is ultimately a false conflict--a vicious cycle of two poles generating and presupposing each other. One should take a Hegelian step back and question the very measure from which fundamentalism appears in all its horror. [...]

This is why every revolution has to be repeated. It is only after the first enthusiastic unity disintegrates that true universality can be formulated, a universality no longer sustained by imaginary illusions. It is only after the initial unity of the people falls apart that the real work begins, the hard work of assuming all the implications of the struggle for an egalitarian and just society. It is not enough simply to get rid of the tyrant; the society which gave birth to the tyrant has to be thoroughly transformed. [...]

The paradox is that, precisely because it lacks democratic legitimacy, an authoritarian regime can sometimes be more responsible towards its subjects than one that was democratically elected: since it lacks democratic legitimacy, it has to legitimize itself by providing services to the citizens, with the underlying reasoning, 'True, we are not democratically elected, but as such, since we do not have to play the game of striving for cheap popularity, we can focus on citizens' real needs.' A democratically elected government, on the contrary, can fully exert its power for the narrow private interests of its members; they already have the legitimacy provided by elections, so they don't need any further legitimization and can feel safe doing what they want--they can say to those who complain, 'You elected us, now it's too late.'

[...] the great lesson of state socialism is that the direct abolition of private property and market-regulated exchange without concrete forms of social regulation of the process of production necessarily resuscitates relations of servitude and domination. If we merely abolish the market (inclusive of market exploitation) without replacing it with a proper form of Communist organization of production and exchange, domination returns with a vengeance, and with it direct exploitation.

[...] Perhaps the Left should learn fully to assume the basic 'alienation' of the historical process: we cannot control the consequences of our acts--not because we are just puppets in the hand of some secret Master or Fate which pulls the strings, but for precisely the opposite reason: there is no big Other, no agent of total accountability that can take into account the consequences of our own acts. This acceptance of 'alienation' in no way entails a cynical distance; it implies a fully engaged position aware of the risks involved--there is no higher historical Necessity whose instruments we are and which guarantees the final outcome of our interventions. From this standpoint, our despair at the present deadlock appears in a new light: we have to renounce the very eschatological scheme which underlies our despair. There will never be a Left that magically transforms confused revolts and protests into one big consistent Project of Salvation; all we have is our activity, open to all the risks of contingent history. [...]

In short, what Marx overlooked is, to put it in standard Derridean terms, that this inherent obstacle/antagonism as the 'condition of impossibility' of the full deployment of the productive forces is simultaneously its 'condition of possibility': if we abolish the obstacle, the inherent contradiction of capitalism, we do not get the fully unleashed drive to productivity finally delivered of its impediment, we lose precisely this productivity that seemed to be generated and simultaneously thwarted by capitalism. [...] Marxian Communism, this notion of a society of pure unleashed productivity outside the frame of Capital, was a fantasy inherent to capitalism itself, the capitalist inherent transgression at its purest, a strictly ideological fantasy of maintaining the thrust to productivity generated by capitalism, while getting rid of the 'obstacles' and antagonisms that were--as the sad experience of 'really existing capitalism' demonstrates--the only possible framework for the effective material existence of a society of permanently self-enhancing productivity. [...]

[...] The Christian church faced a common problem from the fourth century onwards, when it became the state religion: how does one reconcile feudal class society, in which rich lords ruled over impoverished peasants, with the egalitarian poverty of the collective of believers as described in the Gospels? The solution of Thomas Aquinas is that, while, in principle, shared property is better, this holds only for perfect humans; for the majority of us, who dwell in sin, private property and difference in wealth are natural, and it is even sinful to demand the abolition of private property or to promote egalitarianism in our fallen societies, i.e., to demand for imperfect people what befits only the perfect. [...]