----- Original Message ----- From: "Carl Remick" <carlremick at hotmail.com>
[Uncharacteristically understandable and interesting musings from SZ ;-)]
What Is To Be Done (With Lenin)?
By Slavoj Zizek | 1.21.04
[snip] Phenomena like these make it all the more necessary today to reassert the opposition of "formal" and "actual" freedom in a new, more precise, sense. Let us take the situation in the Eastern European countries around 1990, when the Really Existing Socialism was falling apart: all of a sudden, people were thrown into a situation of "freedom of political choice"-however, were they really at any point asked the fundamental question of what kind of new order they actually wanted? People were first told that they are entering the promised land of political freedom; then, soon afterwards, they were informed that this freedom involves wild privatization, the dismantling of the social security, etc.etc. They still have the freedom to choose, so if they want, they can step out; but, no, our heroic Eastern Europeans didn't want to disappoint their Western tutors, they stoically persisted in the choice they never made, convincing themselves that they should behave as mature subjects who are aware that freedom has its price. And here one should risk to reintroduce the Leninist opposition of "formal" and "actual" freedom: the moment of truth in Lenin's acerbic retort to his Menshevik critics is that the truly free choice is a choice in which I do not merely choose between two or more options within a pre-given set of coordinates, but I choose to change this set of coordinates itself. The catch of the "transition" from the Really Existing Socialism to capitalism was that people never had the chance to choose the ad quem of this transition-all of a sudden, they were (almost literally) "thrown" into a new situation in which they were presented with a new set of given choices (pure liberalism, nationalist conservatism). ...
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Maybe Zizek's ready to read Condorcet, Hale, Arrow and Sen............
Ian