> So the U.S. working class consists of the poor and incarcerated? The
> motor of social revolution will be less than 15% of the population?
> The most detached elements of society with the least social power?
According to Zizek, you have to add to them the residents of the rest of the world's slums, both these and the U.S poor and incarcerated having accepted the leadership of "'progressives' of the symbolic class" like Zizek, who approves apparently of what he calls Lenin's policy of "red terror", i.e. of executing anyone who by speech undermines the morale of these credulous masses at times of defeat when it's necessary to "begin from the beginning".
Evidently, whatever the other qualities these revolutionary masses will possess, one they will lack will be the degree of "integral development" Marx claimed was necessary for the required kind of "revolutionary practice", a degree that would make them immune to having their morale undermined by speech.
Ted
http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=2779
> It is, however, only the fourth antagonism ['new forms of social
> apartheid—new walls and slums'{, the reference to the excluded, that
> justifies the term communism. There is nothing more private than a
> state community which perceives the excluded as a threat and worries
> how to keep them at a proper distance. In other words, in the series
> of the four antagonisms, the one between the included and the
> excluded is the crucial one: without it, all the others lose their
> subversive edge. Ecology turns into a problem of sustainable
> development, intellectual property into a complex legal challenge,
> biogenetics into an ethical issue. One can sincerely fight for the
> environment, defend a broader notion of intellectual property,
> oppose the copyrighting of genes, without confronting the antagonism
> between the included and the excluded. Even more, one can formulate
> some of these struggles in terms of the included threatened by the
> polluting excluded. In this way, we get no true universality, only
> ‘private’ concerns in the Kantian sense. Corporations such as Whole
> Foods and Starbucks continue to enjoy favour among liberals even
> though they both engage in anti-union activities; the trick is that
> they sell products with a progressive spin: coffee made with beans
> bought at ‘fair-trade’ prices, expensive hybrid vehicles, etc. In
> short, without the antagonism between the included and the excluded,
> we may find ourselves in a world in which Bill Gates is the greatest
> humanitarian, fighting poverty and disease, and Rupert Murdoch the
> greatest environmentalist, mobilizing hundreds of millions through
> his media empire.
>
> What one should add here, moving beyond Kant, is that there are
> social groups which, on account of their lack of a determinate place
> in the ‘private’ order of social hierarchy, stand directly for
> universality: they are what Jacques Rancière calls the ‘part of no
> part’ of the social body. All truly emancipatory politics is
> generated by the short-circuit between the universality of the
> public use of reason and the universality of the ‘part of no part’.
> This was already the communist dream of the young Marx—to bring
> together the universality of philosophy with the universality of the
> proletariat. From Ancient Greece, we have a name for the intrusion
> of the excluded into the socio-political space: democracy.
>
> The predominant liberal notion of democracy also deals with those
> excluded, but in a radically different mode: it focuses on their
> inclusion, as minority voices. All positions should be heard, all
> interests taken into account, the human rights of everyone
> guaranteed, all ways of life, cultures and practices respected, and
> so on. The obsession of this democracy is the protection of all
> kinds of minorities: cultural, religious, sexual, etc. The formula
> of democracy here consists of patient negotiation and compromise.
> What gets lost in this is the position of universality embodied in
> the excluded. The new emancipatory politics will no longer be the
> act of a particular social agent, but an explosive combination of
> different agents. What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic
> image of proletarians who have ‘nothing to lose but their chains’,
> we are in danger of losing everything. The threat is that we will be
> reduced to an abstract, empty Cartesian subject dispossessed of all
> our symbolic content, with our genetic base manipulated, vegetating
> in an unliveable environment. This triple threat makes us all
> proletarians, reduced to ‘substanceless subjectivity’, as Marx put
> it in the Grundrisse. The figure of the ‘part of no part’ confronts
> us with the truth of our own position; and the ethico-political
> challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure. In a way, we are
> all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance.
> Today, we are all potentially homo sacer, and the only way to avoid
> actually becoming so is to act preventively.
>
> Georg Lukács ended his pre-Marxist masterwork Theory of the Novel
> with the famous sentence: ‘The voyage is over, the travel begins.’
> This is what happens at the moment of defeat: the voyage of a
> particular revolutionary experience is over, but the true travel,
> the work of beginning again, is just starting. This willingness to
> retreat, however, in no way implies a non-dogmatic opening towards
> others, an admission to political competitors, ‘We were wrong, you
> were right in your warnings, so let us now join forces’. On the
> contrary, Lenin insists that such moments are the times when utmost
> discipline is needed. Addressing the Bolsheviks’ Eleventh Party
> Congress a few months later, in April 1922, he argued:
>
> When a whole army (I speak in the figurative sense) is in retreat,
> it cannot have the same morale as when it is advancing. At every
> step you find a certain mood of depression . . . That is where the
> serious danger lies; it is terribly difficult to retreat after a
> great victorious advance, for the relations are entirely different.
> During a victorious advance, even if discipline is relaxed,
> everybody presses forward on his own accord. During a retreat,
> however, discipline must be more conscious and is a hundred times
> more necessary, because, when the entire army is in retreat, it does
> not know or see where it should halt. It sees only retreat; under
> such circumstances a few panic-stricken voices are, at times, enough
> to cause a stampede. The danger here is enormous. When a real army
> is in retreat, machine-guns are kept ready, and when an orderly
> retreat degenerates into a disorderly one, the command to fire is
> given, and quite rightly, too.
>
> The consequences of this stance were very clear for Lenin. In answer
> to ‘the sermons’ on the nep preached by Mensheviks and Socialist-
> Revolutionaries—‘The revolution has gone too far. What you are
> saying now we have been saying all the time, permit us to say it
> again’—he told the Eleventh Party Congress:
>
> We say in reply: ‘Permit us to put you before a firing squad for
> saying that. Either you refrain from expressing your views, or, if
> you insist on expressing your political views publicly in the
> present circumstances, when our position is far more difficult than
> it was when the white guards were directly attacking us, then you
> will have only yourselves to blame if we treat you as the worst and
> most pernicious white-guard elements.’ [3]
>
Ted