[lbo-talk] Zizek: "Where to look for revolutionary potential?"

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 3/16/07, B. <docile_body at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Where to look for a revolutionary potential?
> by Slavoj Žižek
<snip>
> Palestine is
> the site of a potential event precisely because all the standard
> 'pragmatic' solutions to the Middle East crisis repeatedly fail, so
> that a utopian invention of a new space is the only 'realistic' choice.
<snip>
> what if the new
> proletarian position is that of the inhabitants of slums in the new
> megalopolises?
<snip>
> sometime very soon (or maybe, given the
> imprecision of the third world censuses, it has already happened), the
> urban population of the Earth will outnumber the rural population, and
> since slum inhabitants will compose the majority of the urban
> population
<snip>
> We are thus witnessing the fast growth of the population outside state
> control, living in conditions half outside the law, in terrible need of
> the minimal forms of self-organization.
<snip>
> they are
> incorporated into the global economy in numerous ways, many of them
> working as informal wage workers or self-employed entrepreneurs, with
> no adequate health or social security coverage.
<snip>
> No wonder that the hegemonic form of ideology in slums is Pentecostal
> Christianity, with its mixture of
> charismatic-miracles-and-spectacles-oriented fundamentalism, social
> programs like community kitchens, and taking care of children and the
> old.
<snip>
> What one finds in the "really-existing slums" is, of course, a mixture
> of improvised modes of social life, from religious fundamentalist
> groups held together by a charismatic leader to criminal gangs, up to
> germs of new 'socialist' solidarity. The slum dwellers are the
> counter-class to the other newly emerging class, the so-called
> "symbolic class" (managers, journalists and PR people, academics,
> artists, etc.) which is also uprooted and perceives itself as directly
> universal (a New York academic has more in common with a Slovene
> academic than with blacks in Harlem half a mile from his campus). Is
> this the new axis of class struggle, or is the "symbolic class"
> inherently split, so that one can make the emancipatory wager on the
> coalition between the slum-dwellers and the progressive part of the
> symbolic class? What we should be looking for are the signs of the new
> forms of social awareness that will emerge from the slum collectives:
> they will be the germs of the future.

For once, I agree with Slavoj Žižek 100%, as far as the South is
concerned.  All I need to add is that, in the Islamic world, the
hegemonic ideology in slums is and will be Islamism, rather than
Pentecostal Christianity, and that the "germs of the future," "new
'socialist' solidarity," cannot be neatly separated from criminal
gangs and charismatic religions (many slum dwellers may inhabit all
three milieux at once or go from one through another to yet another).
Will the "symbolic class" of the North and the South fight the global
slum dwellers and their ideology or will they find ways to work in
symbolic and material solidarity with them?  Hugo Chavez has found a
way to harness the energy of slum dwellers -- among whom are most of
the most loyal Chavistas -- to a coherent politico-religious project.
So has Hasan Nasrallah.  Can other Southern leaders?

Where is a revolutionary potential in the North, however?
-- 
Yoshie