[lbo-talk] Zizek's view on the embrace of ignorance

[Mike Ballard]

Mike Ballard wrote:
> 
>
> 
> 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.
>

Carroll responded:

"The Left" THE LEFT Where do I find this creature?
***************
To which Mike B) replies:

The Left is a spectre haunting all the people who
agree that more of the social product of our
collective labour should be returned to us in some way
or another.  We constantly debate and factionalize
over how this should be done.  The
Right--factionalized as it is, even down to the
individual--has other ideas about who should own and
control the wealth (and therefore the power) which
wage-labour creates.  

***********
Carroll said:

Amnesia is a condition characterizing the brain of an
organism. A 
single
brain.

*************

It seems odd to me that Marx could have addressed a
group of lefties at a meeting of the First
International in 1865 

http://csf.colorado.edu/psn/marx/Archive/1864-IWMA/1865-VPP/

using conceptual language concerning the abolition of
wage-labour without him knowing that most would
understand what he was talking about.  Today's Left
seems to have forgotten about wage-labour as being THE
issue.  I'd say that the collective amensia, I'm
referring to, has a lot to do with time and the
'positive' use that wage-labour has been put to by
both of the major socialist tendencies of the 20th
Century--the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks.

Is this a willfull embrace of ignorance on the part of
the Left?

Zizek makes the point that workers in general seem to
be able to embrace ignorance vis a vis their rulers
misdeeds, at least partly because they don't see
themselves as having the knowledge to carry out the
dirty deeds of 'their' democratic State.  They do
think that the dirty deeds need doing though.  They
just don't want to know about them.  That's why, he
thinks, that workers sort of coddle up to the Shrub. 
They identify with this simpleton, while acknowledging
the sinister wisdom of Cheney and the neo-cons in the
background.  

Regards,
Mike B)  

=====
"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy."

Benjamin Franklin

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/philosophicalcreativity/

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