What has been demoralizing?
Chuck0 ************
I should have written above: "who they really are (in terms of being for replacing commoditification with production/consumption for use and need i.e. the aboition of the wages system of slavery)".
Zizek indicates that the left seems more to react to the right with liberal gestures than propose what it wants in terms of a new society. At least, that's what I got from his speculation. The left also seems unable to accept its own defeats in the past, thus it keeps bringing up the same excuses as to why it hasn't succeeded e.g. if Lenin had only lived two more years and made an alliance with Trotsky or if the revolutionaries could just prove to the proles that the social democrats are betraying their interests or if we just had an effective revolutionary leadership....
He thinks that the neo-con right has been successful to a large degree--even with the left i.e. British Labour and the embrace of Thatcherite economics--by being honest, up front and so forth. Most on the left are not as honest about what they want.
Do socialists really just want 'nice' wage-labour or do they want to critique the way wage-labour is ALWAYS exploitive and propose ways and means to strengthen classwide solidarity to the point of abolish the system of wage-labour?
Perhaps part of the problem is that the left keeps repeating its mistakes, as Zizek states, and keeps embracing 'milder' forms of the wages system a la Sweden or Cuba. Perhaps the left has a case of amnesia when it comes to its own needs, its own use-values.
Regards, Mike B)
===== "Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."
Benjamin Franklin
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