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I appreciated this article on Zizek from the latest issue of Jacobin magazine. The issue also has an article by Zizek himself. This makes it one of the more interesting magazines on the left, since it appears to be cultivating a space for debate. http://jacobinmag.com/summer-2011/the-power-of-nonsense/ Excerpt: Žižek is busy utterly recasting Marxism as a kind of linksfaschismus – an anti-capitalist radicalism that has been unmoored from self-emancipation, democracy, and reason and re-attached to Terror, Dictatorship and an eternal, absolute and universal “Truth” capable of being known only by an elite, and understood, he tells us, following Badiou, never as Istina (truth as adequacy to the facts) but always as Pravda – “the absolute Truth also designating the ethically committed ideal Order of the Good.” Getting Marx Wrong In “The Jacobin Spirit” Žižek “Marxified” his argument for terror and dictatorship by radically misconstruing what “Marx’s key insight” was. He claimed Marx understood political democracy to be a mere “democratic illusion” because without economic equality political democracy can only be a tool of the ruling class, a part of the state apparatus and therefore our “main enemy.” This gets Marx totally wrong. And getting Marx right is not merely an academic exercise. Looking back, what is at stake are those 100 million Communist corpses memorialized by Vasily Grossman in Forever Flowing, with their “crazed eyes; smashed kidneys; skull[s] pierced by a bullet; rotting infected, gangrenous toes; and scurvy racked corpses in log-cabin, dugout morgues.” Looking forward, what is at stake is the possibility of the Left creating more corpses. Marx’s key insight did indeed concern the relation between the social question and political democracy, but rather than counterpoise the two as Žižek does, Marx’s revolution in thought was, precisely, to integrate them on the social ground of popular self-emancipation. Žižek denies the very possibility of self-emancipation, so can see only a clash between the social question and political democracy. He seeks to resolve that clash by using terror and dictatorship to impose “Communism.” That is what he means by “The Jacobin Spirit.” ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@greenhouse.economics.utah.edu Set your options at: http://greenhouse.economics.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
