Simple courtesies cannot be mandated, least of all in Internet chats, but discussion surely would be facilitated if Angela would trifle to comprehend this thread before pouring invective into it, especially if she wishes to pursue her allegation that I have an obsession with Zizek but fail to comprehend Z's wise advice.
In fact, as I have written before, I have no interest at all in Zizek, and my rather sparse postings here have been limited to commenting upon the excerpts from Zizek's writings that Doug has posted, presumably because he sought through them to stimulate discussion.
Those excepts have had essentially two characteristics. First, depending on the degree of a reader's charity, they are either ignorant or defamatory of most leftwing activists worldwide (who, in any event, owe Zizek no justification for our contributions to political life, but legitimately ask Zizek what he has done to merit anyone's respect). Second, they are duplicitous, misleading, and gratuitously obscure.
Whether other writing by Zizek has merit is neither here nor there as far as the LBO-talk discussion is concerned, although one could be forgiven for thinking that Doug has placed before us what he regards as characteristic and worthwhile morsels.
So Angela's attempt to divert the discussion into an attack on me for allegedly having failed to comprehend Zizek is offensive, particularly in light of her failure to respond when I pointed out the specific frauds and lies in the posted excerpts from her hero.
Next:
> Clear and unambiguous slogan -- there is no such thing. This discussion
is
> already evidence of that. Psychoanalysis is one way in which ambiguities
> are explored. You don't like that, fine. But, politics, well, politics
> would not even exist were it not for ambiguity, contradictions, and so on.
> The same has already been said about the the preconditions of science by
> earlier marxists, or maybe it was the fat guy himself.
This is plainly a disagreement between us, or between Angela and any variant of Marxism and/or Leninism. We shall see if Doug eventually posts an excerpt from Zizek's forthcoming work on Lenin that agrees with Angela on this point. It will be of academic interest, if not of political value, to see how Zizek's Lenin compares to Lukacs's Lenin, for example, because the latter dialectician was as clear as a bell on the need for political clarity, even in swallowing his pride and withdrawing the Blum Theses, his premature call for a united front against fascism.
Parsing Angela's paragraph on etymology, we can conclude that she rejects not only Lenin's agitation in Russia, but also all of Karl Marx's agitation. Which leads me to this thought regarding Angela's and Ken Mackendrick's common political faith:
Suppose that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels had failed to embrace the Paris Commune, but instead had sought an alternative mass movement to support, basing this abstention on, as they recorded, the inevitable failure of the Paris proletariat; the inevitable victory of Thiers, with bourgeois power enhanced by the Commune's defeat; and the political abomination of the Commune's Blanquist/Proudhonist leadership. Who today would regard Marx and Engels as worthy of study had they pursued that course? Yet that is the approached urged on us today by Ken M, Angela, Doug, and above all, by their mutual mentor.
It is not my purpose or expectation to persuade them they are mistaken. Either mass struggles will do that eventually, or nothing will. But the value of this discussion, if there is one, goes beyond the convictions of the participants.
For myself, I'm fascinated that those who disagree with me take flight from the fundamental strategy of dual power, basic Hegelian/Marxist dialectics (also Gramscian, Leninist, etc.) applied to political struggle, without discussing it or putting forth an alternative strategy. This is the concept that one must create contexts of struggle in which the oppressed and exploited masses begin to perceive themselves as potential rulers of society, by exercising class power in direct opposition to and substitution for official authority.
Finally, Angela persists in the Zizek trick of super-left posturing by attempting to elide the distinction between mass protests and small-group militancy. I have no objection to the latter -- I have frequently engaged in such exemplary politics, which can be an excellent thing to do -- but it cannot legitimately be counterposed to the former by any honest adherent of Marxism.
The Italian actions reported by Angela are commendable, but her use of them to denigrate the Austrian mass struggles is not.
Ken Lawrence