Impper posted:
i dont think anyone here was arguing that theyre hipsters

i just wanted to use a derogatory term

leninimity posted:
well if youre not interested in activism at all it seems really masochistic to spend your time following politics

astronomers have no appreciable effect on the explosion of a star, but they will spend their lives watching one.

leninimity posted:
i think at a certain point you've got to accept that in lieu of a proper revolutionary movement (which isn't going to spring up out of nowhere in america) you have to work with what you have, and the occupy movement is what we have

except that historically that has never worked

babyfinland posted:
i donno if u guys realize it but announcing your oh so important Position regarding the revolutionaryism of these protests is Twatty as Arse

agreed. cease all discussion in this discussion forum lest ye be revealed as arse twats

aerdil posted:
Spatial_Reasoning posted:
oh shit!

I was thinking about it for a while, and I guess i can see how you could be pissed off about this, if it weren't practical enough to fix the problems you see.

That sucks. But if nothing's made better, at least there's some kids getting practice organizing. That's bound to pay dividends.

Do you have at hand any good stuff where zizek talks about shit like this?



practically every single one of his books, especially when he talks about '68 or other protest movements. maybe 'violence' is a good starting point?

i'd go with The Ticklish Subject

gyrofry posted:

germanjoey posted:
IMHO Impper totally hit the nail on the head about what makes me feel so queasy about these OWS groups: that they feel less like revolutionary or even protest groups and more like a new form of collective identity politics, something more akin to having a brand loyalty than any kind of conviction. I don't why you would think they "remind me of my own failures" or how I'm supposed to be "terrified" of these people when I actually think they're a laughing stock.

i mostly agree, but can't see any real harm in people engaging in a 'new form' of (superficially anti-capitalist) 'collective identity politics', unless one is coming from the perspective that there is an opportunity cost involved and they ought to be engaging in a more 'effectual' set of activities (if so, what?)

at worst it seems like a less aesthetically-repugnant variety of LARP

thats basically how I feel about it, and they're well focused (finance, war, wealth disparity, opposition to the mainstream political parties, practical gains for working people)

getfiscal posted:
zizek says that direct democratic socialism is the other side of the coin of stalinism and that its failure is the true failure of actually existing socialism. he says you can't run a society with a council and that if you don't know what you want to replace the state with you have no right to talk about dismantling it yet. he thinks that the intimation that disciplined organization is proto-fascist is the central problem of the left today and that we must focus more on building the changes we want/need through an interaction between organized movements and state power with the use of "divine" violence (such as mobs killing rich people). so basically everything in his theory says that OWS is wrong on every major point. so he'll probably come out and praise it as challenging the legitimacy of liberal-democratic institutions through new forms of democracy or something because he gets excitable.

he certainly does say those things, and then he turns around and criticizes people who promote "building the changes we want" and "developing new democratic institutions" for buying into the liberal-democratic framework and so on, (as in Hardt & Negri, he also talks about Badiou a lot because they're colleagues i guess, but also in his view the left as a whole).

getfiscal posted:
oh he also said that main street / wall street is a dumb idea to focus on because obviously wall street commands the entire economy and if you fuck with that power it isn't like it just diminishes quietly and the economy runs smoothly, there are processes in capitalism that make it totally legitimate (in a sense) for the powers that be to say we need to fork over a few hundred bill' to put out some fires or else things will collapse. and he's like well yeah you can't just moralize and be like heh let's give the money to the strugglin' middle class or whatever because That's Really Not How It Works. and if people are like well then if our system can't be reformed and actually existing socialism was terrible then are we condemned to capitalism. and he's like no! we need to do two things now: act, just act in ways to address the major world problems in whatever ways might help a bit for now, and also let's think about communism, which we need to completely reinvent if we are going to survive as a species.

you can't ask people to do two things. if you do the first you're not doing the second, and if you do the second you're not doing the first. that's why ideally ows are the enemies, but in reality nobody is doing the second so who cares

Lessons posted:
he certainly does say those things, and then he turns around and criticizes people who promote "building the changes we want" and "developing new democratic institutions" for buying into the liberal-democratic framework and so on, (as in Hardt & Negri, he also talks about Badiou a lot because they're colleagues i guess, but also in his view the left as a whole).

does goofy rhizomatic masturbation really count as "building" or "developing" anything, come on now