Žižek: ‘We are all basically evil, egotistical, disgusting’

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/dec/10/slavoj-zizek-we-are-all-basically-evil-egotistical-disgusting

We are all basically evil, egotistical, disgusting. Take torture, for instance. I am a realist. If I had a daughter and someone kidnapped her, and I found a friend of the kidnapper, I cannot say I wouldn’t torture that guy.

I have become more aggressive over time. Some say I am more right wing, which I am absolutely not. On the refugee crisis, we should drop the patronising “They are warm people.” No, there are murderers among them in the same way there are among us. The liberal left prohibit writing anything bad about refugees, which results in the anti-immigrant right monopolising.

I’m not a good father. There is something ridiculous in asserting my dignity which I resist automatically. My teenage son identifies with this undermining of my own authority. When he was 14, I was mad at him and used a vulgar expression in Slovenian: “Let the dog fuck your mother.” He replied: “That already happened 15 years ago. That’s how I was born.”

My friends call me Fidel. Not because of politics, but because I talk too much. I visited Cuba once and on TV, Fidel Castro was shown entering a meeting saying: “Comrades, five minutes to make some remarks.” I went to sleep, woke up five hours later, and he was still talking.

I hate politically correct arrogance. With black friends, in contrast to politically correct white guys, I establish real contact. How? Through dirty stories, dirty jokes. When you visit a foreign country, you play PC games about your interesting food or music, but how do you become really friendly? You exchange a small obscenity.

I’m unable to have one-night stands. In my city, Ljubljana, you can tell exactly which women I’ve slept with, because I married them.

It would be horror to say I love Isis. But look at its organisation with its postmodern fluid identity. There is an emancipatory underground tendency in Islam; a wonderful Muslim historian of philosophy developed a claim that Aquinas misread Aristotle under the influence of Islamic poets like Avicenna, which opened up the way for modernity, gay rights and so on.

My parents weren’t strict, but they were patronising. I didn’t like them. They both died in hospital during the night, and when I found out over the phone the next morning I was already behind my computer working. I said: “Is everything taken care of? OK, thanks,” and carried on. I felt totally cold – something didn’t work there. I am not celebrating myself for that.

Hollywood knows everything. It’s obsessed with dystopias, like in Elysium or TheHunger Games. I really think this is one of our quite possible futures. Young people today should prepare for a big catastrophe, but engage in well thought out, local everyday struggles, and not escape into moralism.

Writing saved my life. Years ago, because of some private love troubles, I was in a suicidal mood for a couple of weeks. I told myself: “I could kill myself, but I have a text to finish. First I will finish it, then I will kill myself.” Then there was another text, and so on and so on, and here I still am.

Disparities by Slavoj Žižek is published by Bloomsbury (£19.99 frombookshop.theguardian.com)

The Shocking Way Private Prisons Make Money

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gX2R0b_mqrQ&index=6&list=PLuKg-WhduhkksJoqkj9aJEnN7v0mx8yxC

Bernie Sanders Shows What A Real Leader Is?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ye_CYwm0_WA

Democrats Behind New De Facto Party Leader: Bernie Sanders?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6QH5UQ1qQd4

21st-Century Marxisms

http://arcade.stanford.edu/colloquies/21st-century-marxisms

From the pages of The New York Times and The Nation to those of the American Spectator, social commentators  advanced, debunked, and fretted over the claim that 2014 marked a comeback year for Marxist thought. Big Finance had emerged triumphant from the 2008 crisis, Occupy-style anarchism had foundered, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century became a bestseller, and young Leftists of the so-called millennial generation, the punditry went, were effecting a turn away from airy, poststructuralist, "cultural" Marxism back to the more nitty-gritty, all-too-solid volumes of Capital and more materialist concerns of Marxist theory.

Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education in November 2013, Andrew Seal had already anticipated and rejected such claims. "The continuities between today’s focus on political economy and the aging Theory Era," he wrote, "are often obscured by an exaggerated narrative of willful rediscovery of Marx, as if our inspirations are only our own intelligent resentment of the economy and the powers behind it." Seal offered a provocative counterpoint: the conversation was refocused by the vast capture, not only of a generation’s future wealth in the form of student and consumer debt, but of its "best minds." Decades of high-achievers were scooped up by Wall Street scouts who cruised the campuses of colleges too preoccupied with rankings and endowment figures to concern themselves with fusty old mission statements about social responsibility and the liberating power of knowledge. Friends morphed into investment bankers and hedge-fund managers, ascending to the boardrooms of the 1% as soon as the diploma ink had dried.

Indeed, Louis Althusser’s characterization of the university as an ideological state apparatus must be revised. Forget the state—the university has become the tool and stooge of the transnational finance economy, which itself has shown only contempt for the state. Steeped in pure free-market ideology and restructured along the lines of corporate managerialism, elite colleges not only became the nurseries of nascent Wall Street execs, but collaborated in generating huge new markets for consumer debt.

But not without generating a backlash. The new thrusts of Marxist theory, as Seal suggests, are a generation’s first efforts to delineate the terrain and bleak scenery of today’s class struggle: a rapidly vanishing commons; a desiccated public sector; the neoliberal, corporatized university; and the despotic regency of finance over not only democratic institutions and what used to be called civil society, but the political imagination of that very generation.

Recent efforts in Marxist theory attempt to understand the origins of today’s debt- and finance-based economy, without neglecting its social and cultural aspects. Arcade has convened a Colloquy on 21st-Century Marxisms to collect some of these thoughts. In the interest of dialectical critique, the present colloquy also hopes to create a space for considering the role of the academy and of public intellectuals at this juncture in Marxist theory.

We’ve collected recent and forthcoming materials from our partner journals and presses that take up these new directions in Marxist thought, and invited commentary from some of the leading voices in contemporary Marxist theory. To open the colloquy, we’re featuring an article on debt by David Palumbo-Liu and the first of a multi-part reflection by McKenzie Wark on 21st-Century Marxisms. We also include the introduction to The Specter of Capital by Joseph Vogl, who offers an analysis of the irrational and spectral nature of immaterial finance capital through a reading of Don DeLillo’s novel Cosmopolis. Nancy Fraser returns to "Marx's Hidden Abode" in a lecture given at Dartmouth, and Edgar Illas attempts to "name the system" that Marxist theory now tries to describe and analyze.

Watch for additional interventions from Jacobin editor Alyssa Battistoni, professor and immigration activist Justin Akers Chacón, novelist and professor Lee Konstantinou, and New Inquiry blogger and author Evan Calder Williams.

Latin America in 2016: The Resurgence of the Right Continues

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WpXPhkT1InQ

The U.S. Government Has Essentially Created A Ministry of Truth

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXhGhCmpDKA