From Žižek and Daly, Conversations with Žižek (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2004), pp. 147:
"I think that there is a central idea developed by Georg Lukács and the Frankfurt School which, in spite of all my criticism of the Western Marxist tradition, is today more actual than ever. The idea is that the economy is not simply one among the social spheres. The basic insight of the Marxist critique of political economy--of commodity fetishism and so on--is that the economy has a certain proto-transcendental social status. Economy provides a generative matrix for phenomena which in the first approach has nothing to do with economy as such. For example, we can speak about reification, the commodification of culture and of politics and so on. At the level of form, the capitalist economy has a universal scope. So what interests me is the global structuring dimension of what goes on at the level of capitalist economy. It is not just one domain among others."
[...] "The problem for me is , what is working class today? I think that we should certainly abandon any fetish about the centrality of the working class. But at the same time we should abandon the opposite (postmodern) fetish: that the working class is disappearing; that it is meaningless to speak about the working class. Both are wrong."
From Žižek and Daly, Conversations with Žižek (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2004), pp. 149:
"My position is almost classical Marxist in the sense that I would insist that anti-capitalist struggle is not simply one among other political struggles for greater equality, cultural recognition, anti-sexism and so on. I believe in the central structuring role of the anti-capitalist struggle."
Tuesday, February 17, 2009
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