[lbo-talk] discipline

Eric rayrena at realtime.net
Thu May 3 08:01:48 PDT 2007



>It is true, as Alain Badiou says, that the only means of defense that
>the poor have is "their capacity to act together," and one may call
>that "a popular discipline," but Slavoj Zizek is wrong to see any
>popular discipline at work in 300.

I haven't seen the movie so I can't speak to that, but the rest of what you say is a step back even from Zizek/Badiou, as you seem to think of this "acting together" as a purely defensive maneuver, one that only reacts and protects rather than as something that forces capital and the state to react to it.

The real problem with Zizek, aside from the tedious moralism at work in the quote I posted, is that for him, as for Leninism and liberalism, organization is always something transcendent, something the poor/working class must come to. Organization preexists the group's actual actions, and deviations from the organizational model get called "infantile leftism" (Lenin) or "juvenile outbursts" (Zizek on the banlieu rioters).



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