Comments on: … has Rethinking Marxism published recently?

by: Nate

Sat, 01 Dec 2007 14:33:27 +0000

I’ve not read much of the Ziz but what I have read I have generally disliked and disagreed with. I’ve also found it very confusing, and I haven’t made the effort to sort that confusion out cuz of the dislike and disagreement.

by: Adam W.

Sat, 01 Dec 2007 07:05:45 +0000

I’m reading this peice by him ‘Class struggle or post-modernism? Yes, please!’ interesting take on how post-modernism has created a narrative and how this under analyzed/considered/weighted capitalism and placed its effect under other catagories of oppression…. very rambly, but sometimes funny. … If you understand his obsession with Lacan or his ‘the Big Other’ concept (which sound exactly like Gramsci’s concept of common sense) let me know.

by: Mike Beggs

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 23:58:36 +0000

I read that Zizek piece… it’s a ludicrous ramble!

Check out the conclusion:

“What one finds in the ‘‘really existing slums’’ is, of course, a mixture of improvised modes of social life, from religious ‘‘fundamentalist’’ groups held together by a charismatic leader and criminal gangs up to germs of a new, ‘‘socialist’’ solidarity. Slumdwellers are the counterclass to the other newly emerging class, the so-called symbolic class (managers, journalists, and public relations people, academics, artists, etc.), which is also uprooted and perceives itself as directly universal (a New York academic has more in common with a Slovene academic than with blacks in Harlem half a mile from his campus). Is this the new axis of class struggle, or is the ‘‘symbolic
class’’ inherently split so that one can make the emancipatory wager of coalition between slumdwellers and the ‘‘progressive’’ part of the symbolic class? What we
should be looking for are signs of the new forms of social awareness that will emerge from the slum collectives: they will be the germs of the future.”