> But the needs which are the foundation and fuel of the
> psychopathology -- the legitimate desires of the
> population which constitute true resistance to
> capitalism -- these can be so articulated.
>
> I believe this is Zizek's focus.
Maybe that's his focus (I'll take your word for it; I have a lot of trouble identifying the focus in anything he writes, but I don't think it's correct.
He sets up an opposition between the "false tolerance of liberal multiculturalism" and "religious fundamentalism," and then tries to establish a third position between both of them. First, he claims that this position, with respect to Islam, recognizes that "there is a deep strain of violence and intolerance in Islam - that, to put it bluntly, something in Islam resists the liberal-capitalist world order." This "tension," he claims could be "transposed into the core of Islam," which would then produce something that "could be articulated into a Socialist project."
Well, wasn't this precisely what the Baathists and other Islamic Socialists were trying to do? Where is Islamic Socialism today? The strain of violence and intolerance in Islam that Zizek points to, it seems to me, is just as hostile to a Western idea of socialism as it is to Western liberal capitalism. If I understand it (and I confess I am no Islamic scholar -- but then neither is Zizek), it is a demand that the whole Islamic world base its political, social, and economic institutions precisely on the Koran -- which is no more a socialist document than it is a capitalist one. If Zizek thinks that anyone at this point can come up with an authentic "Islamic socialism," I would like to see him do it in some detail, not just as a vague notion of "a Socialist project."
Similarly with his comments on European fascism, which, unlike "Islamic socialism," we can see laid out in detail in the historical record. My interpretation of it differs somewhat from Zizek's, in that I don't see it as a "misdirected act of resistance against the deadlocks of capitalist modernization." Nazi propaganda, for example, *claimed* that the Nazis were trying to resist capitalism in their own way, but that was obviously a propaganda ploy to attract the support of socialist-minded Germans. Both before they got into power and afterward, there was not the slightest evidence that they really intended to do anything to eliminate capitalism. To the contrary, they were supported by a large segment of German big business, and tried to cartelize German capitalism to make it more "efficient" (mainly to rearm as rapidly as possible).
I'm not clear what you mean by "the legitimate desires of the population which constitute true resistance to capitalism," exactly; perhaps you could spell that concept out a little more. If we are speaking specifically of the desires of the part of the German population that supported the Nazis in the late '20s/early '30s, I would say that those were desires for a more stable economic system without hyperinflation, lower unemployment, a militarily strong Germany which would be free of the "shame" of the defeat in the First World War, and a few others of this sort, including -- among some but not all Nazi supporters -- a desire to rid the country of "poisonous Jewish influence." If we could get clear about which of these desires constituted "true resistance to capitalism," perhaps the argument could be advanced somewhat.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, 'You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk-dancing.' -- Sir Arnold Bax