by
Slavoj Žižek
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[...] It is not enough to remain faithful to the Communist Idea: one has to locate in historical reality the antagonisms that make this Idea a practical urgency. The only true question today is this: do we endorse the predominant acceptance of capitalism as a fact of (human) nature, or does today's global capitalism contain strong enough antagonisms to prevent its indefinite reproduction? There are in fact four such antagonisms: the looming threat of ecological catastrophe; the more and more palpable failure of private property to integrate into its functioning so-called 'intellectual property'; the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics); and, last but not least, as has been mentioned above, new forms of apartheid, new walls and slums. [...]
[...] Waiting for another to do the job for us is a way of rationalizing our inactivity. However, the trap to be avoided here is the one of perverse self-instrumentalization: 'We are the ones we are waiting for' does not mean that we have to discover how we are the agent predestined by fate (historical necessity) to do the task. It means, on the contrary, that there is no big Other to rely on. In contrast to classical Marxism, in which 'history is on our side' (the proletariat fulfils a predestined task of universal emancipation), in today's constellation, the big Other is against us: left to itself, the inner thrust of our historical development leads to catastrophe, to apocalypse. Here, the only thing that can prevent catastrophe is pure voluntarism, i.e. our free decision to act against historical necessity. [...]
kinda similar to note 1553 but different enough to warrant a new note I guess
[...] today's society must appear post-ideological: the prevailing ideology is that of cynicism; people no longer believe in ideological truth; they do not take ideological propositions seriously. [...] the structural power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.
Fisher goes on to explain that we absolve ourselves of the responsibility to change our behaviour by "believing" that capitalism is bad, thereby distancing ourselves
[...] The Berlin Wall [...] signified that capitalism was not the only option, that an alternative to it, although a failed one, existed. By contrast, the walls that we see rising today [...] don't stand for the division between capitalism and communism but for a division that is strictly immanent to the global capitalist order. [...]
in the next sentence he describes it as "a nice Hegelian move" which is the most Zizek thing ever
[...] Why then should the left leave this field of nationalist passions to the radical right [...] Could the radical left not mobilize these same nationalist passions as a mighty weapons against the dominant force in today's global society, the increasingly unfettered reign of rootless financial capital? [...]
[...] Cynical conformism tells us that emancipatory ideals of more equality, democracy and solidarity are boring and even dangerous, leading to a grey, overregulated society, and that our true and only paradise is the existing 'corrupted' capitalist universe. Radical emancipatory engagement starts from the premise that it is the capitalist dynamics which are boring, offering more of the same in the guise of constant change, and that the struggle for emancipation is still the most daring of all ventures. Our goal is to argue for this second option.
[...] one of the main dangers of capitalism: although it is global and encompasses the whole world, it sustains a stricto sensu worldless ideological constellation, depriving the large majority of people of any meaningful cognitive mapping. Capitalism is the first socio-economic order which de-totalizes meaning: it is not global at the level of meaning. There is, after all, no global 'capitalist world view', no 'capitalist civilization' proper: the fundamental lesson of globalization is precisely that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilizations, from Christian to Hindu or Buddhist, from West to East. Capitalism's global dimension can only be formulated at the level of truth-without-meaning, as the Real of the global market mechanism.
only after I typed all this out did I realise that this motherfucker had almost the exact same paragraph in note 1088 T_T
[...] From Marx on, the truly radical Left was never simply 'progressist'. It was always obsessed with the question: what is the price of progress? Marx was fascinated by capitalism, by the unheard-of productivity it unleashed; it was just that he insisted that this very success engenders antagonisms. And we should do the same with the progress of global capitalism today: keep in view its dark underside, which is fomenting revolts.
What all this implies is that today's conservatives are not really conservative. While fully endorsing capitalism's continuous self-revolutionizing, they just want to make it more efficient by supplementing it with some traditional institutions (religion, for instance) to constrain its destructive consequences for social life and to maintain social cohesion. Today, a true conservative is the one who fully admits the antagonisms and deadlocks of global capitalism, the one who rejects simple progressives, and who is attentive to the dark obverse of progess. In this sense, only a radical Leftist can be today a true conservative.
I wouldn't really call it a dark underside ... it's a feature, not a bug (that's how it re-invents itself, and maybe eventually, as tech continues to develop, that's how we move to a post-capitalist world?)
[...] the crisis is not just the result of inadequate financial regulations, it expresses 'the intrinsic difficulty to make immaterial capital function like capital and cognitive capitalism to function like capitalism'. As such, this crisis signals the end of the 1990s project of the New Economy, the idea that capitalism can be revitalized in its digital form, with programmers and other intellectual workers turning into 'creative' capitalists [...] stronger and stronger state intervention is needed to keep the system viable. We should not miss the double irony here: there is some truth in the claim that state-socialism disintegrated in 1990 because it was not able to adapt itself to the digitalization of economic and social life; however, the same traditional Marxist notion of the contradiction between productive forces and relations of production is now undermining capitalism itself.
shit, this is good
Communism remains the horizon, the only horizon, from which one can not only judge but even adequately analyse what goes on today--a kind of immanent measure of what went wrong. That's why one should abandon the 'neo-Ricardian compromise between wage labour and productive capital against the power of finance', which tries to resuscitate the Social-Democratic welfare-state model: every demonization of financial capital is a manoeuvre to obfuscate the basic antagonism of capitalist production by transposing it onto 'parasitic' financial capital. [...]
this is so good that I've forgiven him for the note 1538 fiasco