#dissident left

[the-funtime-autocrat]

We live in an extraordinary era in which there is no tradition on which we can base our identity, no frame of meaningful universe which might enable us to lead a life beyond hedonist reproduction. Today's nihilism, the reign of cynical opportunism accompanied by permanent anxiety, legitimizes itself as the liberation from the old constraints: we are free to constantly reinvent our sexual identities, to change not only our job or our professional trajectory, but even our innermost subjective features like our sexual orientation. However, the scope of these freedoms is strictly prescribed by the coordinates of the existing system, and also by the way consumerist freedom effectively functions: the possibility to choose and consume imperceptibly turns into a superego obligation to choose. The nihilist dimension of this space of freedoms can only function in a permanently accelerated way, the moment it slows down, we become aware of the meaningless of the entire movement.

Slavoj Žižek, “Like a Thief in Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism” (2018).

[the-funtime-autocrat]

The smartest people I know are not in governing institutions, board rooms, academia, or media. They're working banal 9-5 office jobs or doing their own thing with a pastiche of gig work. They're posting anonymously. Decadent capitalist institutions filter "out"the clever people.

Aimee Terese, Host of the podcast, “What Left?”

[the-funtime-autocrat]

Since, in our society, free choice is elevated into a supreme value, social control and domination can no longer appear to infringe on the subject's freedom, it has to appear as (and be sustained by) the very experience of individuals as being free. There are a multitude of ways in which thus un-freedom appears in the guise of it's opposite: When we are deprived of universal healthcare, we are told that we are given a new freedom of choice (to choose our healthcare provider); when we can no longer rely on long-term employment and are compelled to search for a new, precarious position every couple of years, we are told that we are given the opportunity to reinvent ourselves and discover novel, unexpected creative potentials that lurk in our personality; when we have to pay for the education of our children, we are told that we become 'entrepreneurs of the self,' acting like a capitalist who chooses freely how he will invest the resources he possesses (or has borrowed) in education, health, travel...Constantly bombarded by so-called 'free choices,' forced to make decisions for which we are mostly not even properly qualified (or about which we possess inadequate education), increasingly we experience our freedom as what it effectively is: a burden that deprives us of the true choice of change.

Slavoj Žižek, “Like a Thief in Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism” (2018).

[the-funtime-autocrat]

[the-funtime-autocrat]

Bourgeois society generally obliterates castes and other hierarchies, equalizing all individuals as market subjects divided only by class difference; but today's late capitalism, with its 'spontaneous' ideology, endeavors to obliterate the class division itself by way of proclaiming us all 'self-entrepreneurs,' the differences among us being merely quantitative (a big capitalist borrows hundreds of millions for his investment, a poor worker borrows a couple thousand for his supplementary education).

Slavoj Žižek, “Like a Thief in Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism” (2018).

[the-funtime-autocrat]

Warren is not, as her defenders claim, a third way between centrist Democrats and Democratic Socialists, the synthesis of what is best in race/gender identity politics and in the struggle for economic justice. No, she is just Hillary Clinton with a slightly more human face.

Slavoj Zizek.

[the-funtime-autocrat]

Furthermore when leftist liberals endlessly vary the motif of how the rise of terrorism is the result of Western colonial and military interventions in the Middle East, meaning that we are ultimately responsible for it, their analysis, although affecting respect towards others, stands out as a blatant case of patronizing racism that reduces the Other to a passive victim and deprives it of any agenda. What such a view fails to see is how Arabs are in no way just passive victims of European and American neo-colonial machinations. Their different courses of action are not just reactive, they are different forms of active engagement in their predicament: the expansive and aggressive push towards Islamization (financing mosques in foreign countries, for example), and open warfare against the West are ways of actively engaging in a situation with a well-defined goal.

Slavoj Žižek, “Like a Thief in Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism” (2018).

[the-funtime-autocrat]

What is remarkable about today’s oligarchy is not its ruthlessness but its pettiness and purposelessness. An all-consuming megalomania might at least produce some great art as a side-effect. But this collec­tion of mediocrities cannot even do that. Their political activities—whether pushing for a slightly lower tax rate or throwing money at a self-serving brand of faux progressivism—are too small-minded to be anything other than embarrassing. This class has no idea what to do with its wealth, much less the power that results from it. It can only withdraw and extract, socially and economically, while the political justifications for its existence melt away.

Julius Krein, "The New Class War" (Winter 2019).