Zizek is very important, any new orthodoxy must include the political application of Zizek's works. I do not hide totally being a disciple of Zizek - his critique of ideology (i.e. in contemporary society) I cannot stress enough is necessary to understand where we are today and where we are going.
I thought you had been referring to where they stand in regards to class struggle, not the if they would actually do so. And by the latter you refer to soft leftists, not just cobryn, correct? And another thing, I've often seen other users cite zizek as a primary source for you. What is your take on this and him?
Well there are many individuals, but they are not so popular here. Mike Macnair, thinkers at the CPGB (not ML), the writers at Platypus, Charnell House, and so on. There are some people who recognize our problem. Even soft Leftists like Varoufakis, Paul Mason, the Corbyn phenomena, represent a new kind of Left political discourse. There is a lot worth criticizing in the latter - but what this 'momentum' represents is a new Leftist politics/discourse to engage in the first place. It's where we ought to begin.
That is their class position. But this does not make their predicament, unwillingness to engage in class struggle an inevitability of "material conditions". The proletariat have no proletarian consciousness. Proletarian consciousness = consciousness of all social processes.
And individuals like who? Those on here, some 'real-world' figures, historical ones?
Aren't proletarians determined by their relation to production though? Which is surely material, not immaterial? We work for a wage to survive, while not owning the means of production ourselves. If we owned them and worked we'd be petty-bougeiose, if we owned them and did not work we'd be capitalists.
Social self-consciousness means being conscious of social/material processes and practically applying that knowledge. Otherwise it is a scholasticism that means nothing. Edit: But that there is no group doesn't mean there can't be one. Right now there are like minded individuals thinking in such terms.
There is no group. Finally, historical materialism is practical. Material conditions, are constituted only by human beings. The point of being conscious of material conditions is to traverse them, act upon them. We are not 'determined' by anything. The point is that the class interest of the proletriat is to abolish class, through consciousness of class. It is the class which is not a class.
As for orthodox Marxism, do you have an approach in mind for this new Orthodoxy?
Is there a particular group that actually contains at least parts of what you describe lacking in left communism? And if it is not material conditions that shape our actions and range of available actions, what does?
