Zizek challenged: 'You suffer from Stalinist Nostalgia!'

[iwouldprefernotto]

If you want to get Zizek's 'I WOULD PREFER NOT TO' t-shirt you can do so here:

[ihato]

"In my unit we didn't say good morning, we say 'I'll smoke your prick.'" - Slavoj Zizek.

[tobben]

So Tyler Cowen basically implies that you should only be allowed to be nostalgic about your youth if you live in a capitalist country ? People don't seem to understand that normal life existed behind the iron curtain, just like in the West. People went to work, they made love, they cried, they laughed, they got drunk, they argued, they went on vacation, they went to the movies, they played sports etc. Sure there were shortages, restrictions and a certain degree of opression (which varied from country to country and from period to period). But if you were not a political activist, your life wasn't that much different from that of working people in western Europe and the USA. As a Pole, I know this for a fact. I can not speak for the stalinist period, but what I'm saying is certainly true about the 1960's and onwards.

[ketikapanadze]

Unfortunately, my guess is that Tyler Cowen (and this is the first time that I see this part of the interview) has a very narrow understanding of nostalgia in a quite standard romanticized way. But nostalgia does not only mean that you 'miss something' or that you fantasize about the past but it also means that there is something unresolved from that past that creates an open question for you in the present and the answer to that question is (sometimes) what one desperately needs to make sense of the present.

[lucasjararamirez]

The next part is also fascinating: Zizek talks about 'nostalgia for the present', as exemplified by The Handmaid's Tale. I strongly recommend watching the whole interview with Cowen.

[JAMAICADOCK]

Thing is with Stalin, him being a brutal tyrant doesn't deter from the fact he was theoretically correct, that is, from a Marxist standpoint.

He did hit the right targets when it came to suppressing counterrevolution - the military, tenant farmers, soft-leftists, regional nationalists, the priests etc

Now you can argue with the brutal means of suppression, but from a Marxist point of view, you can't argue with the soundness of Stalin's Marxist logic.

Stalin being like an Oliver Cromwell, or a Robespierre - a brutal dictator but nonetheless correct in his theoretical application.

Of course if you see communism as an evil ideology, you are always going to see Stalin as an evil despot, but from a communist standpoint, Stalin did successfully defend the revolution while improving the lives of the working class.

To turn the American imperialist phrase on its head 'He might have been a sonofabitch but he was our sonofabitch' could be applied from a left-wing position,

But if you are one of those leftists that always believes the Left should have higher moral standards than capitalists and fascists, then sure Stalin will always remain a brutal tyrant.

[sammartina]

It seemed like the clip cut Zizek off just as he was getting to his point.

[MrSuvidh]

Nostalgia is not a pathology if the past memory serves as a lesson learnt .

[fastsavannah]

The guy doesn’t get that Zizek loves to analyse that bit of his past, and that while nostalgia might be there, freeing oneself from it means absolutely nothing in reality, it’s just a gesture, and so on...

[aleksandarmarkovic]

Tyler Cowan the type of guy to think Yugoslavia was Stalinist communism

[FratFerno]

Zizek took 5 minutes to say "It's ironic."

[neo-jacobin]

This Bougie Liberal( Tyler Cowen) treats nostalgia as a bad thing. My guess is that he thinks it's okay when rich western people do it. If you lived in any Marxist-Leninist state, you do have a right to feel nostalgic. because lot's of these nations collapsed into war, destruction and crippling poverty brought by the very thing( capitalism) that promised freedom and opportunity. In Ethiopia, people are nostalgic for the DERG. in Afghanistan, women use to get education under communism. In the USSR, depression( the mental health definition and the economic definition) plague the country. People do not feel nostalgic for past regimes for the sake of it. There has to be a reason.

[VolkColopatrion]

at that point. it is a complement. we should have a nostalga for questioning everything and not canceling and not surpressing. ... which well one could wonder if that is Stalinist at all but that's something else.

[Alomoes]

Good challenge. Would be interesting to challenge your own nostalgia base regardless of who you are. I feel like his adherence to stalinist image is entirely a joke sometimes, to provide an image, and alienate himself from the masses. Self isolation. That is powerful stuff to use.

[TSelNiNO]

Imagine taking zizeks unironic appraisal of Stalin's tenure as nostalgia.

Zizek has a portrait of stalin at the entrance of his apartment yet at the same time slams "Stalinism" and repeatedly insists it's even a thing.

He's joking. He's not being serious. Stop taking everything zizek says so seriously

[allypoum]

Zizek is my kind of Stalinist & sometimes nostalgia is a rational & logical response.

[kristbane]

Sometimes i suspect that Zizek use these philosophical pseudo answers about communism and being communist to avoid discussing the actual historical materialism, because he knows that would be unpopular and less entertaining.

[Varlwyll]

The more I listen to Slavoj, the more he seems like a very smart pidgeon taking a complicated shit on the proverbial chessboard whenever he's cornered. The kind of person who would take up the position that the sky isnt blue and when confronted with the blue sky over his head would say "People say that the sky is blue, and yet they also contend that the ocean is blue and so on and so on, but we can see clearly that the ocean and the sky are different colors so how do you know that it is the sky which is blue?"

[josehawking]

Marx was and remains a giant of economic thought, who understood the value for workers when they maintain mutual control over the surplus-value of their labor, separate from their individual thoughts and expressions.

Bolshevism was the furnace that forged the Soviet State. A state having a corporate structure, it's foundation cast in ideological purity. An incindiary ideology that smothered any individual thought or expression through propaganda, intimidation and/or other means.

When any elite, corporate, bureaucratic, religious, academic and so forth, thinks for us, compels our speech, we will have begun a perilous journey, inevitably descending into a neo-postmodern and/or neo-fascist inferno.

[thesensiblesocialist]

This debate was so annoying because all Cowen did the entire time was tell Zizek "Just stop calling yourself a communist." as if that's even possible. You can't change the mind of someone you don't even understand.