[lbo-talk] Shoplifters of the world, unite

Ferenc Molnar ferenc_molnar at hotmail.com
Fri Aug 19 20:44:47 PDT 2011


It's a good polemical piece.  Zizek is at his most provocative when he compares the impotence of the UK rioters and their consumer envy with the "change the world without taking power" attitude of the comparatively educated and organized Spanish Indignados.  He's saying that neither of these groups have the ability to visualize a revolutionary role for themselves where they actually seize power.  And even though Zizek doesn't specify a vanguardist organization, "a strong body able to reach quick decisions and to implement them with all necessary harshness" comes pretty close.  

Yet the Badiou/Zizek call to revive the communist hypothesis seems to have problems visualizing a revolutionary role for itself as well.  There's a bit of a bullying game being played by Zizek as he taunts these new uprisings (and their fumbling attempts at articulating a politics for themselves) from a safe distance in the historical junk yard of history where communism will somehow be reassembled into a viable mass movement that will have the power to take on forces like the Egyptian army, the Islamists and capitalism itself.  The call to seize concrete power is seductive after one has been subjected to so many dual-power prescriptions over the past years but why communism?  Is the return to revolutionary communism the first step you take after waking up from the end of ideology?

fm



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