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Sunday, December 11, 2011

Zizek is Fox New's Best Friend

I just want to start by saying I enjoy Slavoj Zizek, his eccentricity his mixing of philosophical and psychoanalytic analysis and especially his critique of modern cynicism as a cover for a more nefarious ideology. 

But my problem with him, which I suppose is more of a problem with all self-proclaimed Marxists, is that despite all his unconventional criticisms (at one point ironically saying there is "too much anti-capitalism" in criticizing agents in the capitalist system like corporations) attacks on the ineffectual "left" in the United States, calling The King's Speech "a reactionary film" and so on. 

Despite all these criticisms he takes on the fundamental conventional frames that are reiterated by  the mainstream, more so in the right-wing in fact. 

Take for example something very basic, the words "capitalism" and "socialism." Zizek plays on the squeamishness of the mainstream thinkers by asserting that just as the United States is capitalist you can't deny that China and the Eastern Congo are capitalist as well. Likewise, the Soviet Union, Cuba etc. are examples of socialist countries.  

Well unfortunately Zizek is not only playing to the right-wing but to decades of propaganda. As people like Chomsky have pointed out in "The Soviet Union Versus Socialism" by the basic measure of worker's control of production, state-socialist countries not only had no worker's control but were less socialist than the US. Likewise, unsubsidized, unregulated capitalism has more or less never existed or existed for a brief time before collapsing and turning to protectionism.

But lets give Zizek the benefit of the doubt and say he's only using the terms as they're defined in Marxist theory. How else could someone with a title as subversive and unconventional as the "Elvis of cultural theory" actually hold very doctrinal beliefs?  

Take for example the 2009 healthcare debate in which Zizek says that if a public option or single-payer system comes out of it, 
"If Obama wins his battle over healthcare, if some kind of blow can be struck against the ideology of freedom of choice, it will have been a victory worth fighting for." 
Well call me crazy but this seems like a rather narrow definition of "freedom of choice" since policy options like single payer or a public option are themselves a political choice. And single-payer and the public option were both overwhelmingly supported by polls of Americans so it would seem like a good "choice" to make. 

Being against the "freedom of choice," however contextually it was used, not only sounds incredibly authoritarian but sounds like the kind of caricature that comes out of Fox News, which is why if Zizek ever came to be interviewed in the US media he would bolster the right-wing.