[Fwd: [Marxism] Callinicos on Zizek]

Wed Mar 11 16:31:30 CET 2009

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

-------- Original Message --------
Subject:     [Marxism] Callinicos on Zizek
Date:     Wed, 11 Mar 2009 07:23:48 -0700 (PDT)
From:     Max Clark <poeticaleconomy at yahoo.com>
Reply-To:     Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition
<marxism at lists.econ.utah.edu>
To:     aorta <aorta at home.nl>

Posted: 6.32pm Tuesday 10 March 2009
Alex Callinicos
Slavoj Zizek’s Ideas need to link with reality
Nearly a thousand people will be attending a conference this weekend on
“The Idea of Communism” in central London.

In itself, this isn’t a big deal. Left wing conferences take place
regularly in central London. The Socialist Workers Party’s annual
Marxism event attracts several thousand participants every summer.

There are two things that are different about this particular
conference. The first is that it isn’t being organised by a political
organisation or journal, but by Birkbeck College’s Institute for the
Humanities.

Secondly, the conference is attracting an unusual amount of media
attention. The Financial Times devoted a full page of its weekend
edition to an interview with the director of the Institute for the
Humanities, Slavoj Zizek, headlined “The modest Marxist”.

It is presumably Zizek, one of the most dazzling figures on the
intellectual left, who has succeeded in attracting as speakers at the
conference some of the best known continental philosophers – notably
Alain Badiou, Toni Negri and Giorgio Agamben, along with, among others,
Terry Eagleton and Peter Hallward. The emphasis indeed seems to be on
philosophy. “From Plato onwards, Communism is the only political Idea
worthy of a philosopher,” the conference publicity declares.

Fortunately, Zizek is incapable of being anything but concrete. His
writing and speeches irresistibly mingle high philosophy with political
commentary, film criticism – and jokes of varying degree of dirtiness.

Spot on

Sometimes Zizek can be politically absolutely spot on. He wrote a superb
piece, “Use Your Illusions”, after Barack Obama’s election victory. In
it he insisted both that the celebrating crowds were absolutely right to
see this as a real historical break and that “the true battle begins
now, after the victory – the battle for what this victory will
effectively mean”.

In much of his interview with the Financial Times, Zizek makes plenty
more good points. Thus he argues that “the financial crisis has killed
off the liberal utopianism that flourished after the collapse of the
Soviet Union in 1991” but also stresses the importance of “the
ideological battle over how to interpret the financial crisis”.

Alas, where Zizek gets shifty is over the question of Stalinism. Pressed
about the relationship between the idea of communism and what is
sometimes called “historical Communism”, he ducks and dives.
Fortunately, he doesn’t repeat some of the really silly things he has
said on this subject in the past.

For example, he wrote in The Parallax View (2006): “If we really want to
name an act which was truly daring, for which one truly had to ‘have the
balls’ to try the impossible, but which was simultaneously a horrible
act, it was Stalin’s forced collectivisation in the Soviet Union at the
end of the 1920s.”

Zizek isn’t a Stalinist. He was a dissident in his native Slovenia under
the old Communist Party dictatorship. But he seems to think that the
only way to prove that he isn’t a liberal is by refusing to renounce the
crimes that defenders of capitalism try to tie round the necks of Marxists.

This isn’t just a really badly mistaken approach. It reflects a
disengagement from political practice. Zizek’s conference is about the
“Idea of Communism”. But if he is as concerned as he says he is with
challenging right wing interpretations of the crisis, he will have to
step out of the realm of the Idea and start thinking about how the
Marxist left can connect with real social forces.

The indifference of the Birkbeck conference organisers to political
practice is reflected in the outrageous entrance price of £100 they are
charging. This helps right wingers like John Lloyd to dismiss the
conference as a bunch of ageing professors peddling “an academic illusion”.

This is a pity. Those participating in the conference as both speakers
and audience are serious people who have been brought together by a
shared concern to challenge capitalism. But those who want to do this
can’t escape the problem Marx posed all those years ago – how to unite
theory and practice.

________________________________

http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=17333

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