Slavoj Zizek reflecting on this era and our tasks ahead

[Q]

Slavoj Zizek (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavoj_%C5%BDi%C5%BEek) was on Dutch television last night (http://player.omroep.nl/?aflID=10591946&silverlight=true) in the critical journalistic programme Tegenlicht. They asked him to give his take on 2010 on several topics. I think his answers are very interesting.

Note: you'll need Silverlight (or, if you're running Linux, Moonlight) to watch the video.

[Delenda Carthago]

cant you upload it on youtube please?

[Q]

cant you upload it on youtube please?
Well, I don't have the video itself. So no, I can't. There is a link to it using the Windows media player though (http://player.omroep.nl/?aflID=10591946) if you really can't get it to work (but in my experience is more problematic). While this was the first video I watched using the silverlight framework, I only had to manually install Moonlight and the video codecs were downloaded for me by Ubuntu, so a pretty automated process.

[cb9's_unity]

Before I download this or go about getting silverlight, is this in English or does it have English subtitles?

I can't help but feel ignorant asking the question but if I won't understand it then it won't be worth my time.

[Q]

Before I download this or go about getting silverlight, is this in English or does it have English subtitles?

I can't help but feel ignorant asking the question but if I won't understand it then it won't be worth my time.
If it wasn't, I wouldn't have posted it in the English part of the forum.

Yes, besides the first minute it is exclusively in English and has Dutch subtitles.

[Rusty Shackleford]

so far its pretty good. Slavoj speaks english well so its understandable for anyone who is worried about understanding it


OK so, i just finished it.

Slavoj Zizek makes the point that 20th century communism is in the past and is of no use to try to bring it back. he calls for a new communism which he cannot quite define but is a wake up call for the left.

He also points out 2 developments. one in capitalism, and one in the state.
in the state, politics are shifting to the right because of liberalism which was a left value. the right steals the rhetoric of the left and moves further towards nationalism and possibly racism on the words and values of the left, the new "popular" politics is now on the right. Example: Tea party movement, it is becoming nationalistic, and popular. its values are that of smaller govermnent(traditionally an anarchistic value) and with the libertarians, social freedoms like gay marriage and so on which were liberal and left values.

in capitalism, the call for democracy or even its usefulness for democracy in capitalism is fading with the example of China which he says China is now making capitalism more efficient by means of authoritarianism. Since China is a one party state, Zizek argues that implementations of ideas are much faster. Capitalism is now in a controlled statist environment which means its changes are now also possibly much quicker.

Afghanistan is also something he spoke about. He criticizes the majority of the left for making a "simple moralistic" choice on what should happen in afghanistan, which is leave immediately. he has a point with this in that the troubles caused by the US in afghanistan, if ran away from, will lead to an even more fundamentalist state than what was in the 90s.


i will have to admit that Zizek has a very strong argument for the Afghanistan situation. Say the left managed to take control in the US democratically. would it not be a priority to make sure that what the old regime had done in afghanistan was corrected? to simply pull out leaves a disaster area. the new hypothetical US government i would hope to see do is work solely to improve infrastructure and agriculture and give the Afghans the resources to decide themselves what to build next, be it a place of worship or education. I also want to make a contradiction to what i just said. If the US were to leave say next week, it would accelerate the process of national self determination of the afghan people. sure the theocrats would come back, but it might be solely up to the afghan people to decide what the do. they will ultimately be oppressed and lose many rights but through time it might bring about a revolution in afghanistan itself whereas if the US stays there, it may only prolong the issue and sew the seeds for capitalism and international economic exploitation of the people of Afghanistan itself.

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My biggest question is: What will new communism look like if the 20th century implementation is rejected? the only alternative i see is Anarcho-Communism, or if it exists, anti-statist marxist analysis and implementation of libertarian communism.

[Q]

My biggest question is: What will new communism look like if the 20th century implementation is rejected? the only alternative i see is Anarcho-Communism, or if it exists, anti-statist marxist analysis and implementation of libertarian communism.
The most important point we have to remember is that we're in it to free humanity, to end capitalism and that only the working class can accomplish this task, this by self-organisation and direct democracy.

What I think Zizek is at, is that the far left fetishes too much on past figures and events. Communism is a universal idea, but to keep it universal it has to be reinvented or rediscovered by people that live, now.

What I like about Zizek is that he does exactly that: he tries to go back to scratch and ask himself the question "why are we doing all of this?" without falling back to Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Hoxha, Mao or whoever as the sacred source. We need more out of the box thinkers like him.

[human strike]

I watched it a couple of days ago on youtube.

youtube.com/watch?v=w9ECbDpF-1g