DarthSickleus [they/them]
This kind of stuff is like starring into the abyss.
The good news is we can all make
choices to help reduce our environmental footprintsthe choice to forcefully decommission industrial resource extraction equipment and help protect other species – predator or otherwise.
He is talking both about liberals and leftists. I think his shit flinging at leftists is the dumb part.
Western political correctness (“wokeness”) has displaced class struggle, producing a liberal elite that claims to protect threatened racial and sexual minorities in order to divert attention from its members’ own economic and political power.
This Iine is a pretty clear condemnation of liberals, saying they’ve coopted the rhetoric of the ‘woke’ left. Something I would largely agree with.
As Marx and Engels wrote more than 150 years ago in the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto:
“The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. … All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”
This observation is studiously ignored by leftist cultural theorists who still focus their critique on patriarchal ideology and practice. Yet surely the critique of patriarchy has reached its apotheosis at precisely the historical moment when patriarchy has lost its hegemonic role – that is, when market individualism has swept it away. After all, what becomes of patriarchal family values when a child can sue her parents for neglect and abuse (implying that parenthood is just another temporary and dissolvable contract between utility-maximizing individuals)?
Of course, such “leftists” are sheep in wolves’ clothing, telling themselves that they are radical revolutionaries as they defend the reigning establishment. Today, the melting away of pre-modern social relations and forms has already gone much further than Marx could have imagined. All facets of human identity are now becoming a matter of choice; nature is becoming more and more an object of technological manipulation.
This is the critique of the ‘woke’ leftists invoked in the title, something I do not agree with. Insert Parenti quote about western leftists not being able help themselves from bashing left.
The problem with ‘woke’ libs isn’t that they believe in gender liberation, its that they use it as a smokescreen. Seems like Zizek has an issue with liberals weaponizing feminism, but also feminism in of itself? Article is kind of all over the place tbh, but Zizek’s opinion pieces tend to be.