Men are slowly turning into perpetual adolescents, with no clear passage of initiation into maturity (aquiring a profession, even education no longer play this role) …To supplant this lack…youth gangs proliferate…providing…social identity. #thugpride #londonriots

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1056536503764033539 https://ift.tt/2FQo8n0

a new and global anti-nuclear movement…should focus…on those superpowers who assume the right to monopolize nuclear weapons. Public mention of the use of nuclear weapons should be treated as a criminal offense

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1056534497968246785 https://ift.tt/2E2dR5z

when plolitics proper is..replaced by expert social administration, the only remaining [allowed] source of conflict is cultural tensions (ethnic, religious) tensions.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1056532595285090304 https://ift.tt/2zu4gAe

People want the appearance of choice, not real choice-making. This is how our democracies function - with our consent: we act as if we are freely deciding… A ‘crisis of democracy’ does not occur when people stop believing in their own power but…stop trusting the elites

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1055825901919920128 https://ift.tt/2FUg4Bs

When the fight against anti-Semitism and the struggle for Palestinian rights are not conceived as parts of the same endeavour, we find ourselves in a new state of barbarism. https://t.co/GefLI9IJTS

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1055827534242349057 https://ift.tt/2RhKRte

Assange..wrote,…the US Democratic..establishment..embraced the ‘We didn’t lose - Russia won’ narrative..because if they didn’t,..the insurgency created by Bernie Sanders…would dominate the party. …And the US Democratic establishment diabolizes Trump to get rid of Sanders.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1055825254281547776 https://ift.tt/2PRfdGq

The task is not to build a coalition between the radical Left and the fascist Right, but to cut off the working-class oxygen supply to the alt-right by addressing their voters. …Exactly what Sanders and Corbyn were doing and which was the root of their relative success

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1055823204906864642 https://ift.tt/2TF3aKx

There is a program behind Trump’s provocations. …Trump’s (and others’) vulgar obscenities are part of their populist strategy to sell…lower taxes for the rich, less healthcare…People are ready to swallow many things of they are presented to them with laughter

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1055822728400461824 https://ift.tt/2PROppu

What if the very duality of Trump’s personality…is what makes him attractive to Christian conservatives, what if they secretly identify with this very duality…-his high moral stance, accompanied by…lewdness & vulgarity"?

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1055821845889474561 https://ift.tt/2zot2Sy

By the end of the 1960s, the US economy was no longer able to continue the recycling of its surpluses to Europe and Asia: its surpluses had turned into deficits. …Instead of tackling…deficits, it decided to…boost deficits. And who would pay for them? The rest of the world!

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1055818988175978496 https://ift.tt/2DDBwIx

Class struggle is back as the main determining factor of our political life…even if the stakes appear to be totally different, from humanitarian crises to ecological threats, class struggle lurks in the background and casts its ominous shadow

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1055818024278605824 https://ift.tt/2ziXDkm

Trump’s wrong vision is nonetheless based on the correct insight that the existing world system no longer works. An economic cycle is coming to an end

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1055817323695742978 https://ift.tt/2Dx4SYP

the twists of Stalinism: In 1943, when Italy capitulated, Jurančič led a rebellion of Yugoslav prisoners. …Under his leadership, 2,000 starved prisoners single-handedly disarmed 2,200 Italian soldiers. After the war, he was arrested and put in a prison on the nearby small Goli Otok (“naked island”), a notorious Communist concentration camp. While there, he was mobilized in 1953, together with other prisoners, to build a monument to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the 1943 rebellion on Rab - in short, as a prisoner of Communists, Jurančič was building a monument to himself

https://ift.tt/2Fsp54w

Will Self reproached me for still counting on some big ‘revolutionary’ act that will turn…prevent our slide towards catastrophe. …So what can we do…? Self’s answer: nothing big, just…enjoy our isolated life, jerking off … Such a cynical…stance suits…those in power

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1055814398479122432 https://ift.tt/2DsUtgW

Insofar as human rights were first proclaimed during the French Revolution, one should note the irony of the fact that Calais is a French city.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1055812980888211462 https://ift.tt/2Kc28Sa

The web is now our most important commons, and the struggle for its control is the struggle today. The enemy is the combination of privatized and state-controlled commons

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1055808042841858049 https://ift.tt/2z8JyGb

Our side will be accused of playing into the enemy’s hands (like the campaign against Assange), but we should get used to it and learn to strike back with interest, ruthlessly playing one side against another… Were Lenin & Trotsky also not accused of being paid by the Germans?

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1055807229981536257 https://ift.tt/2K8f2jM

We also need a narrow striking force of dedicated ‘engineers’ (hackers, whistle-blowers …)… Its task will be to 'take over’ the digital grid, to rip it out of the hands of corporations and state agencies that now de facto control it… Let a hundred WikiLeaks blossom! -S.Z.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1055806488470536194 https://ift.tt/2PtfOOw

The big question remains:…Can we even imagine today an authentic Communist power? What we get is disaster (Venezuela), capitulation (Greece), or a full return to capitalism (China)

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051965398587985922 https://ift.tt/2OK4R5Q

It is possible to tolerate limited elements of capitalism without allowing the logic of capital to become the overdetermining principle

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051964977047842816 https://ift.tt/2B3aqJ8

not..hackers…nudged the people towards Trump -…they probably did try…- but our own data-processing [Cambridge Analytica], who allied their forces with political ones. …The big bad wolf who distorts our democracy is right here…& this…Assange was claiming all the time.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051961400992690178 https://ift.tt/2Fto4cP

Although capitalism can..turn ecology into a new field of..investment…, [climate change] fundamentally precludes a market solution. ..Capitalism only works in precise social conditions: it implies trust in the…market’s ‘invisible hand’

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051944123001950208 https://ift.tt/2OEEVZk

instead of focusing on individual greed and approach the problem of growing inequality in moralist terms, the task is to change the system so that it will no longer allow or even solicit “greedy” acting.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051897451655979009 https://ift.tt/2PocMuZ

it is because of their focus on concrete enemies that Left populists…endorse…nationalism, presenting their struggle as a defense against international financial capital. …One should nonetheless insist that…resistance against global capital has to be itself global.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051894030152417284 https://ift.tt/2Pgk2sC

the rise of Trump is..the effect of the failure of liberal-democratic consensus https://t.co/s47ukyR17T #populismstudies

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051892191344435202 https://ift.tt/2RHZG8m

This urge to construct the Enemy is another fatal limitation of populism. Today, the ultimate “enemy” is not a concrete social agent but in some sense the system itself, a certain functioning of the system https://t.co/s47ukyR17T #zizek #populismstudies #antisemitismstudies

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051888014182535169 https://ift.tt/2PicGoF

Here we encounter the truth of populism: its failure to confront the real of the capital. The supreme populist moment (referendum victory) immediately reverted into capitulation, into confession of impotence with regard to the capitalist order. #populism https://t.co/s47ukyR17T

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051886974133563394 https://ift.tt/2RFlAcx

Leftist politics today does not need (just) confrontational passion;…it needs…cold rationality. Cold analysis and passionate struggle… need each other. The formula…of a passionate confrontation directed against lifeless universalism is..all too formal

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051886681782145028 https://ift.tt/2DmN1oi

the ideology of neoliberalism… is anything but “rational.” …It is.. confrontational,…it brutally excludes those who do not accept it under the pretext that they are dangerous anti-democratic utopians. Its expert knowledge is ideology at its purest

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051871497927761920 https://ift.tt/2F24291

“the idea of world-wide elections..is self-defeating…: "People feel bound by..elections only when they share a basic bond… If the experience of other voters is alien to me,…then…I have..no reason to accept the verdict”“ says Zizek citing Yuval Harari on liberal bias.

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051857588055408641 https://ift.tt/2JArqsG

those who advocate a radical opening of the borders to refugees: are they aware that, since our democracies are nation-state democracies, their demand equals the suspension of democracy, since they encourage a gigantic change,…without democratic consultation of its population?

http://twitter.com/extimacy/status/1051853397111001088 https://ift.tt/2qnJUnq