One of the most devious traps which lurk in wait for Marxists is the search for the moment of the Fall, when things took the wrong turn in the history of Marxism: was it already the late Engels with his more positivist-evolutionist understanding of historical materialism? Was it the revisionism and the orthodoxy of the Second International? Was it Lenin? Or was it Marx himself in his late work, after he abandoned his youthful humanism (as some 'humanist Marxists' claimed decades ago)? This entire topic has to be rejected: there is no opposition here, the Fall is to be inscribed into the very origins. (To put it even more pointedly. such a search for the intruder who infected the original model and set in motion its degeneration cannot but reproduce the logic of anti-Semitism.) What this means is that, even if - or, rather, especially if - one submits the Marxist past to a ruthless critique, one has to first acknowledge it as 'one's own', taking full responsibility for it, not to comfortably get rid of the 'bad' turn of things by way of attributing to a foreign intruder (the 'bad' Engles who was too stupid to understand Marx's dialectics, the 'bad' Lenin who didn't get the core of Marx's theory, the 'bad' Stalin who spoils the noble plans of the 'good' Lenin, etc.).
Is that Zizek? I used to really like him when I was a shitlib (in fact, tbh I still do)
But he's not a Marxist and fought against socialism in Yugoslavia as a Yugoslav dissident
With the fall of Socialism in Yugoslavia and US/German hegemony stealing all their markets the time of Socialism in Yugoslavia is now looked at as a golden period
You can only possibly look at the previous Socialist experiments as "failed monstrosities" if you are a Western chauvinist (as Zizek is and one of the many Slovene intellectuals that wanted to turn West to the EU to receive IMF loans at the promise of breaking away.. while Western capital balkanised Yugoslavia)
There is a newspaper clipping (though I can't for the life of me find it right now) where Marx is being interviewed and even in his day they're pulling the "billion deaths!" when asking him about the Civil war in France and his support for it
To which he cooly replies that there is a factor of 100x that death every day in capitalist society and you can't begrudge the revolutionary fervour to end that cycle of death
I'd be interested in hearing some as well. This quote is from the introduction to Mao's "On Practice and Contradiction" as published by Verso, but I've only watched Zizek give speeches, I've never read any of his actual books.
To quote our beloved trash panda:
Is that Zizek? I used to really like him when I was a shitlib (in fact, tbh I still do)
But he's not a Marxist and fought against socialism in Yugoslavia as a Yugoslav dissident
With the fall of Socialism in Yugoslavia and US/German hegemony stealing all their markets the time of Socialism in Yugoslavia is now looked at as a golden period
https://balkaninsight.com/2010/12/24/for-simon-poll-serbians-unsure-who-runs-their-country/
https://news.gallup.com/poll/210866/balkans-harm-yugoslavia-breakup.aspx
You can only possibly look at the previous Socialist experiments as "failed monstrosities" if you are a Western chauvinist (as Zizek is and one of the many Slovene intellectuals that wanted to turn West to the EU to receive IMF loans at the promise of breaking away.. while Western capital balkanised Yugoslavia)
There is a newspaper clipping (though I can't for the life of me find it right now) where Marx is being interviewed and even in his day they're pulling the "billion deaths!" when asking him about the Civil war in France and his support for it
To which he cooly replies that there is a factor of 100x that death every day in capitalist society and you can't begrudge the revolutionary fervour to end that cycle of death
Thanks for the context.
I'm curious; did you already think of him that way, or did you say that because you saw my drawing?
Looks like it's been a low-key meme since at least 2018. I honestly can't remember whether I had the idea independently, or I saw the meme somewhere.
It's been a meme for a while
Nice.
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I'd be interested in hearing some as well. This quote is from the introduction to Mao's "On Practice and Contradiction" as published by Verso, but I've only watched Zizek give speeches, I've never read any of his actual books.
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