krebscycle

My opinion is that the left is not able to offer a true alternative to global capitalism. – in LRB response to critics Vol. 30 No. 2 · 24 January 2008

Above is Žižek’s response to critics of his earlier article which begins with:

One of the clearest lessons of the last few decades is that capitalism is indestructible

and ends with 

The big demonstrations in London and Washington against the US attack on Iraq a few years ago offer an exemplary case of this strange symbiotic relationship between power and resistance. Their paradoxical outcome was that both sides were satisfied. The protesters saved their beautiful souls: they made it clear that they don’t agree with the government’s policy on Iraq. Those in power calmly accepted it, even profited from it: not only did the protests in no way prevent the already-made decision to attack Iraq; they also served to legitimise it. Thus George Bush’s reaction to mass demonstrations protesting his visit to London, in effect: ‘You see, this is what we are fighting for, so that what people are doing here – protesting against their government policy – will be possible also in Iraq!’ [ In LRB in 2007]

This is the beauty of the “professional left” position: one stakes out a position of moral clarity, far from the ugly compromises entailed in the policies of liberal democracies, and then .. and then that’s it. One’s beautiful soul is safe and clean, and if one is actually in the professional left there is an article for The Nation or a grant proposal or something as well. And for the few thousand in the “mass base” of the professional left there is absolution as they go on with their jobs in IT or media or whatever form of middle management is their metier. 

So what should, say, the US Democrats do? Stop competing for state power and withdraw to the interstices of the state, leaving state power to the Republicans and start a campaign of anarchic resistance to it?

Žižek is making this argument from the position of a somewhat homeless Marxist would-be-revolutionary, but the weak quality of the responses from his indignant colleagues is quite hilarious. Hold high the banner of the revolutionary proletariat in the letters section of the LRB, comrades!

Update 2025: The protests against Joe Biden that helped Donald Trump win the election shown above.