Regarding Doug's posting of Zizek's latest, I have to say I very much like his attacking those who'd reduce the desire for social transformation to nostalgia for "the final deliverance of the faithful." On the other hand, when he writes:
> And - back to Marx - what if his mistake was also to
> assume that the object of desire (unconstrained
> expanding productivity) would remain even when it
was
> deprived of the cause that propels it
> (surplus-value)?
If, as the man says, we need a return to the critique
of political economy, is he being fair or even
accurate when he characterizes Marx as proposing that
surplus-value be eliminated in favor of unconstrained
expanding productivity? I thought that when the
condition where "From each according to his abilities,
to each according to his needs" obtains, accumulation
and surplus value would still exist -- BUT that there
would be no owners of capital distinct from the
society as a whole. In other words, M->C->M' where M'
> M would still hold, but the surplus (M' - M) would
be distributed...well, however the hell people felt
like. And people could, for example, decide that M' =
M or even M' < M for a while.
Now, I may have gotten both Marx and Zizek wrong, but what the hell. Correct me. I'm just trying to figure out things here.
But in the spirit of adding to Zizek's criticism of the religious slur against social transformation, here's something from Guy Debord's _Society of the Spectacle_, which turns that slur on its head: --------- Modern revolutionary expectations are not irrational continuations of the religious passion of millenarianism, as Norman Cohn thought he had demonstrated in _The Pursuit of the Millennium_. On the contrary, it is in millenarianism that revolutionary class struggle is speaking the language of religion for the last time, which is already a modern revolutionary tendency that as yet lacks the consciousness that it is only historical. The millenarians had to lose because they could not recognize the revolution as their own operation. The fact that they waited to act on the basis of an external sign of God's decision is the translation into thought of the practice of insurgent peasants following chiefs taken from outside their ranks. The peasant class could not attain an adequate consciousness of the functioning of society or of the way to lead its own struggle: because it lacked these conditions of unity in its action and consciousness, it expressed its project and led its wars with the imagery of an earthly paradise. -----------------
Now, I realize that might be more left-Hegelian than Marxian for some, especially with its emphasis on the consciousness of the insurrectionary class, but there it is. As with Zizek and Marx, take what you can use and run with it -- leave the rest behind. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress demands it.
-- Curtiss
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