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What I have reiterated over and over in these discussions for a year at this point is that believing in a "master plan" is not a necessary criteria of any of the political ideologies under discussion. You can be a Marxist and still believe that there is no plan, we are not in control of the world, etc. This is basically Zizek's whole schtick, if you listen to his lectures. It basically goes: "Yeah, Marxist revolutionaries at one point did believe that they were impersonal agents of history, simply carrying out what was rationally required, etc. We know now that was a mistake, a failure mode. That's how you get Stalinism. So that's been discredited. But we're still communists, we still believe in the communist project."
But does that make Zizek and his fellow travelers into allies of traditionalists? I don't think the traditionalists would agree. Which means that your belief in a master plan is not what fundamentally determines your political orientation.
It is always frustrating when people are trying to retreat to a social theory motte. Unlike physical mottes, which took many years to physically build, usually in a specific physical location that is focused on a particular geographical feature, right there for all to see with their own eyes, social theory mottes are often built around hiding the ball, burying the underlying premises under overt expressions of having rid themselves of all sorts of things. I have only very casually engaged with Zizek, so I would probably just have to ask you what you think the "Zizekian communist project" still is. What's the there there? What does it actually keep? What's it built on? My initial intuition is that it may take a few rounds of interrogation, but if/when we do discover what remains of it, we can begin to answer your questions, and I have a feeling about how it'll go.
Intentionally left somewhat vague, but my impression from listening to him and his close collaborators is that it’s something like: nationalization of industries, central economic planning, aggressive state action on issues like global warming, workplace democracy and employee co-ops, etc. The sorts of ultra-left economic policies that you’ve heard of before.
There’s still the hope that with enough fumbling about we’ll someday “transcend the social relations of capital”, although everyone has failed at specifying what this means concretely just as much as Marx himself did.
And yes, it could involve the use of revolution too. Although as I’ve already argued, revolution is a tactic that can be utilized or rejected by any ideology.
Yup. Rereading @FCfromSSC's dump of links/quotes, it's kinda hard to see how it doesn't count.
Can you please elaborate?
FC has repeated multiple times that the principle criteria is “we know how to solve all our problems”. Zizek denies that we know how to solve all our problems. But you are claiming that his project still “counts”. Why?
I mean, no? He seems to have a very particular (materialist etc.) social theory for precisely how to engineer our social relations, remaining plenty ignorant about how a contested environment could pose any challenges to the implementation of such a social theory. As FC put it, this certainly reads like "subjugating people wholesale" as "a form of manipulation by social institutions". That he has replaced "revolution" with "???" in his master social plan to solve all our problems is more like retreating from the outlying harassment defense posts to the main wall than even retreating all the way to the motte.
What challenges is he not aware of? He's aware of the external challenges (plenty of historical examples of communist rebellions being put down before they took over the whole country). He's aware of the internal challenges (degenerating into a Stalinistic reign of terror). I mean dear God, his entire career has been dedicated to thinking about the many, many challenges that communism faces.
But this is so general that it describes virtually every ideology and political system ever. Civilization, as opposed to the anarchy of nature, is the imposition of social order. Civilization requires that people conform to a certain social order. Politics is the attempt to enforce a certain vision of that social order. That's just what politics is.
The Taliban have announced that Afghanistan will be remade in the image of sharia law. They have banned women and girls "from education, many jobs and most public spaces". They have a very particular social theory for precisely how to engineer social relations. They are subjugating people wholesale using social institutions. Are they thereby following an "Enlightenment" ideology? Is sharia law "the same as" communism?
Consider European feudalism. They too subjugated large swaths of people for the sake of engineering a certain vision of social relations, through the institution of serfdom. The social mobility of serfs was extremely restricted: they could not voluntarily leave their contract without their master's permission, and their children inherited the status of serfdom as well. In some ways feudalism was a consummate example of a "rationally planned" society; the clergy, nobility, and serfs were all viewed as having their own particular and necessary social role. So is feudalism an "Enlightenment" ideology? Is it the same as what the Taliban have going on with sharia, or is it different?
Obviously contemporary western democracies do not escape the basic fact that all civilizations must impose some kind of order. We too are bound by laws and social expectations.
This is not to say that all ideologies and systems are equally totalitarian of course. Some are clearly more totalitarian than others. But if the fundamental distinction that you and FC are concerned with here is "freedom vs totalitarianism" then you should just say so, instead of saying "yeah those guys have like, a list of goals they want to achieve, and they think they can make people do things". Well, duh. That's just politics.
It is not just the subjecting; it is the underlying philosophical tradition that has persisted. FC has clearly pointed out many of those features, so you know your proposed comparison is not valid.
No, I don't. I don't know why it's "not valid" because the criteria keeps changing.
"They think they know how to solve all our problems." -> I respond with "no they don't".
So the criteria changes to "they think they can engineer social relations using social institutions" -> I respond with "literally every ideology ever thinks they can do that".
So then the criteria changes to "they all share an underlying philosophical tradition" -> ok, what specifically about that tradition? What is the shared underlying philosophical principle? It can't just be "temporally, they were developed after 1800". That's not a good criteria for grouping ideologies together. I already suggested to FC that it might be a question of theism vs atheism, and he rejected that. I'm still waiting on an answer about whether it might be about materialism vs non-materialism, or something else.
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