I've watched hours and hours of his talks, and found some of what he says to be useful or interesting. But what is he really saying?

  1. Most is barely intelligible, with tangents upon tangents of weird psychoanalytical jargon.
  2. The jokes function to disarm and disorient anti-communist talking points.
  3. The core message seems to usually be "idpol bad" (which is true, at least for the liberal variants), but nothing much more interesting.

???

SUBTEXT: Ex-Yugoslav lib reformer now supports COMMUNISM*! If he can, so can you!

* by which he always specifies "the big problems are not solvable by capitalism" and distances all other associations

  • JoeySteel [comrade/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Really interesting guy. I love his movies, talks and read a lot of his books and find them enjoyable

    His prediction of the "new authoritarianism" coming in the form of Silvio Berlusconi, the ridiculous clown going to bunga bunga parties everyone laughs at yet still there is an authoritarianism underlying it was very accurate

    His shitting on shitlibs obsessed with Idpol is also good

    That said his 'communism' is dogshit. He rejects any actually existing socialism as unmitigated disasters and dismisses the Leninist view of vanguard parties.

    His speech versus Jordan Peterson was a pyrric victory as he basically conceded every point on any actually existing socialist country

    The problem with this is a majority of citizens in former socialist countries say their lives were better under socialism: from ex Yugoslavia, to Russia, to DDR to Czechoslovakia, to a majority of Ex-Ussr states

    Zizek himself was a dissident in Yugoslavias Slovenia. Marx explicitly that

    Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.

    He was explicitly a materialist... Proceeding from the conditions that are now in existence and proceeding from there. What does Zizek offer in place of the Leninist theory of the party...Of the conditions of capitalist encirclement by the CringeZoners? (Which presupposes a strong state in lockstep with a Communist Party with a foreign policy of Socialism in one country basicslly unchanged since 1920s ussr? 3rd wayers have ended up where Allende did)

    What are we to make of the fact that socialism has only appeared in 3rd world countries with peasant majorities seeking to break free from imperialisms fascistic grip?

    Zizek, as much as i enjoy his social commentary and mannerisms, is basically an armchair philosopher Marx wouldve hated

    He offers nothing for anyone to ground themselves in material reality but he rejects what has appeared, even his own Yugoslavia which had more freedom for its citizens by occupying a "non aligned" position in geopolitics (as soon as Ussr fell the capitalists then invaded)