A kind of litmus test is - this always works on all my friends - "How do you stand toward Fight Club, the movie?"

[Eric Dean Rasmussen, Liberation Hurts: An Interview with Slavoj Žižek, electronic book review, 1. Juli 2004]

Es ist schon eine Weile her, aber: Herr M. hat mich getestet und ich habe bestanden!

As I repeat again and again in my books, I don't buy the simplistic, Marxist reductive decoding, "human rights, screw them, they are really just rights for white men of property." The problem is that from the very beginnings of Liberalism there was the tension between content and form. The properly political dialectic is that the form, even if it is just a fake appearance, has its own symbolic efficiency and sets in motion a certain process.

Das ist mir in meinem Fieberwahn bei der Beackerung von Aristoteles' Politik auch aufgefallen: Der Staat ist nicht der Staat aller, die mit ihm verbunden sind (Aristoteles sagt das ganz offen und gibt sich vergeblich einige Mühe, es auch zu rechtfertigen), aber irgendwas ist da doch. Die Form ist nie ganz leer.

Again, I don't have great positive answers. I just think that something is effectively happening with today's capitalism and that both standard positions - on the one hand, the standard Leftist view, it's nothing new, it's just the old financial capitalism; on the other hand, the opposite view, all the `post-` theories (information society, post-industrial society, whatever) - at some level misfire. They elevate into a self-contained entity something which can function only as a part of a larger society. The argument that we are living in this post-industrial, information society, service society, with no blue-collar workers, is a fiction. I know, because I have a small son. Go to a toy store; ninety percent of the toys are made in China, the rest are made in Guatemala, Indonesia, and so on. This is one of my standard jokes from my early books. It always fascinated me that the only place where you see the old-fashioned production process is where? Hollywood. In James Bond movies. It's a formula; two-thirds of the way into the film, Bond is captured by the big, bad guy and, then - this is the kind of structural stupidity that enables the final victory of Bond - instead of immediately shooting Bond, the villain gives Bond kind of an old Soviet Union socialist tour, showing him the plant and how it works. Of course it's some kind of criminal activity, like processing drugs, or manufacturing gold. But there you see it, and the result you know - Bond escapes and destroys it all. It's as if Bond is a kind of agent of Anthony Giddens and other sociologists who claim that there is no working class.

[...]

At this state of the revolutionary process [chuckling] I see my function as introducing more trouble, if anything, to force confrontations. As a friend put it, the standard Leftist stance is that we basically know what's going on, and we just need to find a way to mobilize people. I don't think we really know what's going on. By this, I don't mean anything mystical. I simply mean that the Left still doesn't have a representative theory. I see elements here and there.

[...]

So there are elements here and there, but I don't think we have a theory. Here, I am even more pessimistic. It's not that the Left knows what's going on and just doesn't know how to mobilize people. This view is the last, and maybe the most dangerous illusion, of the Left.

Ein sehr interessantes und lesenswertes Beispiel (über das eigentlich noch viel mehr zu sagen wäre) dafür ist [Chris Harman, Theorising neoliberalism, International Socialism Journal, 18. Dezember 2007] - Harman zeigt u.a. die diversen ideologischen Funktionen des Begriffes "Neoliberalismus" (auch innerhalb der Linken) auf und argumentiert, dass viele, die vom Neoliberalismus sprechen, dessen "Erfolge" bei Weitem überbewerten, um sich kopflos in die neuen sozialen Bewegungen zu stürzen - in diesem Sinne kritisiert er auch die Rifondazione Comunista, die ihre Regierungsbeteiligung mit den Verwüstungen begründet hat, die die zunehmende Prekarität der Arbeiterklasse zugefügt haben soll: Social movements were seen as the only way forward, and when they went into decline the only hope seemed to be entering a government which might make at least a little turn away from “neoliberalism”. Er meint daher aber auch, dass sich am Kapitalismus (und damit an den Methoden, ihm zu begegnen) eigentlich nichts geändert hat. Und da hat Žižek auf jeden Fall Recht: Irgendetwas hat sich aber verändert. Jedenfalls: Worum geht es also?

The supreme question should be why did Marxism go wrong?

[...]

In simplistic terms, the paradox is that it's a relatively easy game to assess fascism. Hitler was bad guy who wanted to do some bad things, and really did many bad things. So, ok, with all the complexity, how did it function? The situation in Nazi Germany is fairly clear. But, my god, with the October Revolution, with Lenin, it's more complicated. Sorry, but if you read the reports, how did Lenin succeed, against even the majority of the politburo? There was a tremendous low-level explosion. People down below wanted more. However the revolution was twisted, there was an emancipatory explosion. The difficulty is thinking this explosion together with what happened later and not playing any of the easy, Trotskyite games. If only Lenin were to live two years longer, were to make the pact with Trotsky, blah, blah, blah. I don't buy this [line of argument]. No, the problem is how, as a result of first the socialist revolution, you get a system that at a certain level was, in naïve terms, much more irrational.

[Bemerkenswerte Sache: Žižek eignet sich hervorragend für cut-ups; ich habe vorhin eine halbe Stunde mit einem Freund diskutiert und dabei nur Passagen aus diesem Interview aneinandergereiht -- ich sehe das schon vor mir, angelehnt an ELIZA: SLAVOJ]