> All you Leninists out there may be glad to hear (or maybe you won't,
> since it might confound your paradigm) that at a reading last night
> in NYC, Slavoj Zizek said that it was time to go back to Lenin.
> "Everyone" now is talking about Marx, but that's too easy; we all
> know about alienation and the "fetishism of merchandise." What we
> need now, he said, is someone who'll cut off some heads.
This reminds me of the celebrity "Marxist" Eugene Genovese in the 1960s. Whenever his attacks on real Marxists became too transparent, he would insert a phrase in praise of Comrade Stalin's ruthlessness to confound his critics. But just like Zizek, Gene became a celebrity precisely because he was a mountebank.
Genovese burst upon the scene with a book titled The Political Economy of Slavery, which used Marxist categories to argue in support of the discredited pro-slavery school of historians led by Ulrich Phillips, in specific opposition W.E.B. Du Bois and Herbert Aptheker. In particular, Gene denied that any significant slave rebellions had occurred in the antebellum U.S. Because his non-Marxist readers never had read Marx, who had written that cotton slavery was the cruelest of all because it was capitalist, Gene was able to fob off his view of the feudal South as Marxist. (Later, after many scholars had refuted that interpretation, he retreated a half-step and called the system "seigneurial.")
Later, while teaching at Sir George Williams College in Canada, Gene was the "Marxist" who supported the expulsion of militant Black students after they had led protests against racism and in solidarity with the Black Power uprisings in Jamaica and Guyana. Many of those students went on to greater glory as members and leaders of the New Jewel Movement, the Dominica Liberation Movement, and other insurgencies in the Caribbean. Undeterred, Gene dedicated his book In Red and Black to faculty members who had stood firm in disciplining the militants.
Later still, Gene supported the disgraceful racist tome, Time on the Cross by Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman, giving Marxist cover to yet another neoConfederate view of slavery, the history profession's equivalent of The Bell Curve. At all times in his career, Genovese's enemies were authentic Marxists and activists. For that he was rewarded with his profession's highest honors, including lucrative appointments and chair of the Organization of American Historians. The most reactionary white-supremacist professor in Mississippi won praise from Gene, and returned the compliment.
Today Genovese is openly neoconservative, with no pretensions to socialist beliefs.
And now we have Zizek, following a similar path, mystifying Marxism and Leninism, purporting to fly their banners but striving to discredit their true adherents, posturing as a tough guy but proving only that he's a brute, being celebrated and rewarded by the bourgeoisie for his services.
After Yoshie revealed reports of Zizek's support of the U.S.-NATO war against Yugoslavia, Doug solicited Zizek's denial. As far as I'm concerned, Zizek's weasel words do not require parsing; the certainty is that he was not out organizing and proclaiming opposition to the imperialist war, which was the elementary duty of every Marxist. If he had been, no ambiguity would have materialized, and he would not have remained a darling of chattering intellectuals.
More recently, when masses of antifascist militants took to the streets of Vienna in opposition to the rising threat to immigrants and workers, Zizek attempted to deflect their struggle by trivializing opposition to Haider's Freedom Party as simply liberal hot air exemplified by Clinton and Blair. This trick of undermining the left with a super-left pretext for inaction was perfected by Genovese long ago.
Doug wrote,
> By the way, to a questioner who implied he was guilty of
> Eurocentrism, Slavoj said "Yes, I'm a Eurocentrist." He pointed to
> the ANC, which in all its decades of struggle against apartheid,
> never wavered from a dedication to "universal" Englightenment values.
A racist declaration if ever there was one! Instead of saying, as any Marxist would, that human advances and their codifications are universal achievements embraced by all people of good will regardless of their particular geographic origins, he attributes a moral superiority to his continent because it was the birthplace of one progressive advance long ago.
[I did enjoy Doug's unintended but revealing misspelling "Englightenment."]
Ken Lawrence