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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.
And I argued the opposite (rather than changing the criteria). Then, you decided to claim that I changed the criteria and pick at details.
Zizek doesn’t believe that he “knows how to solve all our problems”.
As a follower of Lacanian psychoanalysis, he believes that the fundamental nature of subjectivity will always lead to both social conflict and internal self-conflict regardless of how we arrange social relations.
His own idiosyncratic interpretation of Hegel’s “end of history” is that “the end of history is just realizing that there is no end of history; there is no final resolution of all contradiction”. Arguable whether Hegel actually meant that or not, but that’s what Zizek believes at any rate.
He has spoken at length about how Stalin’s mistake was thinking that he could transform himself into an impersonal agent of history and rationality; there is no ahistorical viewpoint from which you can judge yourself and your own actions, the outcome of your actions is never guaranteed, they can only be judged retroactively after they have unfolded in history.
Why, given these facts about his work and thought, do you persist in saying that “he thinks he knows how to solve all our problems”?
In addition to another excellent comment from @FCfromSSC, I just spent entirely too long probing AI and the sources it cited concerning Zizek, specifically. I have to admit that I still find him to be too obscurant about many things, very given to vagueness and distraction rather than forthcoming about his plans and expectations. That said, at this point, I'm moderately confident that your characterization of his position is kind of weak. As far as I could drill down to it, he has some deep psychoanalysis position that the mere existence of language is 'violence' and the source of impossible-to-solve '(self-)contradiction' with reality. To that extent, perhaps he does, indeed, think that this is one "problem" that cannot be solved with his plans for social engineering. But, frankly, that's a pretty small fig leaf. Were I to take any other of the Enlightenment-themed philosophies for socially engineering mankind and simply graft onto it, "...sure, sure, after we've already solved all of our (real) problems, we'll still have 'violence' that is, like, inherent in language or something," I don't think we've done anything meaningfully different to it. Nor do I think his incredibly weedsy position on retroactive necessity of historical outcomes is particularly germane. That we are neither pre-ordained to eliminate mankind in a nuclear holocaust nor to adopt his emancipatory communism (thus solving pretty much all our problems except the apparent violence of language) (...nor any other particular result) does not seem to be entirely relevant to the question at hand.
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I persist in suspecting that he thinks he knows how to solve all our problems for the following reasons:
Because he appears to still be claiming allegiance to an ideology whose central feature is one of the best-possible examples of "we know how to solve all our problems".
Because your own description of him makes it pretty clear that he is not speaking plainly about his model ("Intentionally left vague" above), and "I'm totally a communist, just not the bad kind of communist, I definitely wouldn't do the bad things, I would instead mumble mumble and that's why communism will work this time" is not terribly persuasive.
Because he appears to intellectually associate with people who much-less-ambiguously employ "we know how to solve all our problems (as you say, "The sorts of ultra-left economic policies that you’ve heard of before", plus the Academy generally)."
Because I do not think he would agree with, much less ever say anything like the following:
My understanding is that he is still entirely committed to "plans and payout matrices, looking for a solution to the problem". He thinks there is a plan, that there is a solution, and I do not find his efforts to distinguish himself from his ideology's failure modes persuasive. You argue that his idea that the end-state is not static is a significant difference, but I am not confident this is true due to the aforementioned intentional vagueness and cultivated ideological associations.
From our brief discussion of Marcuse:
But my whole question is, "are these people capable of recognizing situations in which they can't make things better?" Are they capable of lifting their foot off the gas pedal? I suspect they are not, for a number of what seem to me to be entirely valid reasons, starting with their willing adherence to an ideology that has repeatedly proved itself incapable or doing so. And sure, this is a common problem across multiple ideologies, because the Enlightenment won three hundred years ago and most currently-popular ideologies are its direct descendents. My whole point is that vast swathes of ideologies suffer from this core problem, because they inherit it from the Enlightenment! I think most "standard capitalists" are in fact capable of recognizing that they don't actually have solutions to some problems, so it's not worth trying to fix them, but to the extent that some specific capitalist isn't so capable, my critique applies to them as well.
But the thing that really confuses me is that I've actually gone out of my way to describe in detail that I'm not actually certain about any of this, and recognize that I could be wrong about the disposition of specific theorists!
I think I am offering reasonable analysis hedged with appropriate uncertainty. I'm not actually clear on why you disagree.
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