Random question here, but it seems relevant: Does anyone think that Zizek will have some positive role in the development of the worker's movement and Marxism?
Well, he is attracting a lot of people from the mainstream. He is so to say a good new advertisement to join the communist cause and shows that it's not just all the same old dry theory. I think Zizek has great resonance with people today, even bourgeois newspapers interview him and honor him etc., not too bad. As to his contribution to theory: No, i don't think he really helps with his ideas of having to "do it all from the ground up again" all from "new". I don't know what people want, everything Lenin and Marx wrote is relevant, we just have to simply update them to our current material conditions. But i really don't see any great space for theory for a "new" socialism.
I don't think Zizek has ever argued for a new socialism.
I'm skeptical of Zizek myself. He's too much into philosophy, and doesn't have much in the way of political solutions on offer.
I agree entirely. I only have one of his books, Living in the End Times(economism!), and he enjoys playing with dialectics and other useless overly philosophical forms of obscurantism entirely too much. It will have to be someone other than Zizek to repopularize Marxism and make it accessible in the 21st Century.
If Marxism does establish itself as a respectable political force in the 21st century, it won't be thanks to a single bourgeois academic.
I wouldn't dismiss him completely. It seems he has attracted quite a number of my generation to Marxism, although it seems a noticeable pattern that they lose their intrest in him after getting into Lenin and so forth.
