by
Slavoj Žižek
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[...] 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
[...] Think about daily life in Congo, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon ... where are the outpourings of international solidarity in the face of constant atrocities perpetrated there? We should remember now that we live in a kind of glasshouse, in which terrorist violence for the most part exists in the public imagination as a threat, which explodes intermittently, in contrast to countries where--usually with the participation or complicity of the West--daily life consists of more or less uninterrupted terror and brutality.
after the outpouring of support re: Paris terror attacks, which he characterises as a "momentary brutal disruption of normal everyday life"
With regard to the refugees, our proper aim should be to try and reconstruct global society on such a basis that desperate refugees will no be forced to wander around. Utopian as it my appear, this large-scale solution is the only realist one, and the display of altruistic virtues ultimately prevents the carrying out of this aim. The more we treat refugees as objects of humanitarian help, and allow the situation which compelled them to leave their countries to prevail, the more they come to Europe, until tensions reach boiling point, not only in the refugees' countries of origin but here as well. [...]
reminds me of note 1952
[...] The usual Left-liberal critique of the EU--it's basically OK, just with something of a 'democratic deficit'--betrays the same naivety as the critics of ex-Communist countries who basically supported them while complaining about the lack of democracy. In both cases, however, these friendly critics failed to realize that the 'democratic deficit' was a necessary, inbuilt part of the structure.