>IMO, Zizek's calling the rioters "rabble" is over the top.
That''s not exactly what he did. He said "they fit much better the Hegelian notion of the ‘rabble’, those outside organised social space, who can express their discontent only through ‘irrational’ outbursts of destructive violence – what Hegel called ‘abstract negativity’."
That's a bit different than "calling them rabble."
^^^^^^^ CB: The rational kernel that Marx and Engels refer to in Hegel is pretty big. Evidently some "progressive" writings by Hegel on "social questions" poverty etc. were discovered some long time after his death.
I suspect a "rational kernel" in Zizek , too. He seems to be putting a "husk" around it to fool the bourgeois censors.