https://twitter.com/VaushV/status/1502591584067481604
Catching up on Zizek articles
radlib who can’t read Marx but loves the guy who criticizes art and culture…folks this is why we need to get the Game Theory youtuber to read Das Kapital
and saw earlier this month he wrote those who blame Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on NATO and the West are “not really leftists” and compared them to Hitler apologists lmao
And now some who call themselves leftists (I wouldn’t) are blaming the West for the fact that US President Joe Biden was right about Putin’s intentions. The argument is well-known: NATO was slowly encircling Russia, fomenting color revolutions in its near-abroad, and ignoring the reasonable fears of a country that had been attacked from the West in the last century.
There is, of course, an element of truth here. But saying only this is equivalent to justifying Hitler by blaming the unjust Treaty of Versailles. Worse, it concedes that big powers have the right to spheres of influence, to which all others must submit for the sake of global stability. Putin’s assumption that international relations is a contest of great powers is reflected in his repeated claim that he had no choice but to intervene militarily in Ukraine.
Is that true? Is the problem really Ukrainian fascism? The question is better directed at Putin’s Russia. Putin’s intellectual lodestar is…
Lol fuck off no one cares about philosophy, idealist. Russia is clearly not the party doing finance imperialism to privatize farmland and keep people jobless and poor. That’s the entire purpose of the IMF/World Bank (radlibs talk about geopolitics like NATO because idealists are only concerned with superstructure, not the material base)
Zizek attempts to be speaking dialectically but he’s just a lazy careerist contrarian, this is why we need a commitment to historical materialism, you end up being on the level of Vaush.
coincidentally he wrote for this neoliberal website with a nerdy FIght Club name: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Syndicate
Project Syndicate, which Ezra Klein described as “the world’s smartest op-ed page,”
the least amount of soul
received grants from the Open Society Foundations, The Politiken Foundation in Denmark, Die Zeit, ZEIT-Stiftung, and The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation
Zizek drew attention away from finance imperialists on a website funded by the exact people who want to turn Ukraine in a nation who doesn’t own their own farmland? PMC synthetic leftist hackfraud lol
this is actually a good point, but not for what he’s trying to make
stop licking Putin’s boots, please. the contrarian, non-materialistic praise of him and his choices ignores the complete meaninglessness of this conflict. just because liberals are too stupid to understand nuance doesn’t mean we should forget about revolutionary defeatism as a concept and defend Putin, even ironically. yes, there is historical context, but the interests of one massive oligarch who helped with the collapse of the USSR are not better interests than those of the other oligarchs who helped with the collapse of the USSR. i do not understand how bringing up his historical reasoning for attacking Ukraine is even relevant. I guarantee there will be exactly the same number of nazis staffed as there were beforehand, even if they just become masked.
Putin is not our friend.
do you think any of us have any actual power here? we’re just elevating an oligarch in our eyes for no reason except contrarianism. we have no power over whether or not capitalists throw us into meaningless conflict. America has next to no class consciousness.
I don’t fucking care if America’s enemies are perfect. None of them (except like fucking North Korea) are perfect.
Some of them are better than others. Some of them I only tenuously support.
As long as they oppose America, I support them nevertheless. As long as they oppose the conditions that smother socialism, I support them nevertheless.
All I care about is that America is defeated, because socialism cannot happen under global American hegemony.
“I, as an American, want Russia to lose because of revolutionary defeatism.”
The point of revolutionary defeatism is that your own country loses.
no, the point of revolutionary defeatism is that you don’t care who wins lol
like we’re entering “critical support to hitler for killing hitler” territory here
the point i’m making is that Putin and American capitalists are effectively the same, so them fighting is analogous to hitler killing himself, not that they’re actually similar to hitler
