The Rotten Core of Modern Leftism

 http://www.unz.com/isteve/slavoj-zizek-on-kevin-macdonalds-culture-of-critique/

Zizek is one of the prime exhibits for the hollowness of modern leftism: a clever clown praised extravagantly by Leftist propaganda organs, hoisted up as the philosopher par excellence of his generation. But, Sailer's right: Zizek offers here a summary of The Culture of Critique probably more clearly written than anything else I've seen from his hand. If I were McDonald, I'd use it as a blurb on the book's back cover.

This book, despite its flaws, offers up some crucial historical analysis not elsewhere to be found. It competently investigates major socio-political phenomena, and it fights free of the censorship and abuse inflicted in America upon all criticisms of the Jews. Its two main flaws are the dubiousness of its guiding theory of group evolutionary strategy as the prime motivator of the Jewish assault on Western culture and its relative underweighting of the powerful groundwork for such destruction which had previously been laid by such thinkers as Machiavelli, Hume, Rousseau, Voltaire, Paine, Bentham, Nietzsche. If the evolutionary theory were subtracted and more intellectual context added, I would have little to say against the book. Its most important aspects demonstrate the high degree of Jewish involvement in many destructive trends in the West and how the Jews may have or did interpret the destruction as beneficial to themselves. Per Derbyshire's review: the book focuses on "six distinct intellectual and political phenomena: the anti-Darwinian movement in the social sciences (most particularly the no-such-thing-as-race school of anthropology associated with Franz Boas), the prominence of Jews in left-wing politics, the psychoanalytic movement, the Frankfurt School of social science (which sought to explain social problems in terms of individual psychopathology), the "New York intellectuals" centered on Partisan Review during the 1940s and 1950s, and Jewish involvement in shaping U.S. immigration policy." All of these Jew-dominated phenomena were fundamentally damaging to American and Western traditions and cultural coherence. And more examples could readily be added (Hollywood, in particular, ought to be added--the pornography industry--America's Israel-warped foreign policy).

Given their immense success in America, the Jews ought to be held to a higher standard of decency than the majority--instead, the "chosen people," who ironically are much more atavistic and racially conscious than the Gentiles, hide and lie and censor and shamelessly persist in self-serving attacks. They use their immense success to ensure that no one has the power to measure the Jews by any standards. The Jews have become the arbiters of moral standards, and grant themselves flagrant exemption from moral judgment by any exogenous, any non-Jewish force. I do not condemn them as a monolithic tribe of traitors and subversives, since they have contributed uncounted victories to science, mathematics, medicine, philosophy, economics, technology, aesthetic pursuits, and other fields. And many believe their efforts constitute universal wisdom. Nor, per Moldbug, do their efforts easily disentangle from America's homegrown Super-Protestantism/Ultra-Calvinism/Univeralism tradition. Also, in either an American or a global accounting, these Jewish assaults arose almost exclusively from the Ashkenazi Jews, not the Sephardi or Mizrahi contingents. Indeed, the latter groups were drawn into the Zionist project mainly by Ashkenazis, and found themselves expelled from Muslim nations in its wake. Yet, a list of nations in which Jews once resided, now absent Jews, might instructively be compared to a list of nations in which they currently reside. The former list is much longer than the latter--and for good reason. A good reason which also explains why these lands of Europe and North Africa and the Middle East, despite the known talents of the Jews, are not to be seen competing with each other for Jewish immigrants. But, America, a nation never in serious geopolitical jeopardy, a nation whose survival instincts are much dulled through a long and easy sojourn in safety, in short, a comparatively innocent land, America is the richest opportunity the Jews have ever met with, nor have they hesitated to attack her on all fronts and to cut out the largest pieces of pie they could manage. But, even America, someday, will lose her innocence and take measures against this predation, just as other former hosts of the Jews have done in their time.

Slavoj Zizek and How Not to Recycle Other People's Ideas

  

My take on Slavoj Zizek's latest essay, The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie:

 

"It is the very success of capitalism (greater efficiency, raised productivity etc) which produces unemployment, rendering more and more workers useless: what should be a blessing – less hard labour needed – becomes a curse."

This makes no sense. Increased productivity has no necessary relation to the rate of unemployment. Capitalism redeploys workers rendered redundant for whatever reason to other jobs. Capitalism is even capable of inventing new types of work as technology, economy, society, and government evolve. The only kink in the machine, the reason why the percentage of the population that is employed has entered a period of decline in the rich world, is the socialist interference in the capitalist system in the form of welfare programs which induce an unwillingness to work in much of the population.  And the idea that labor is pricing itself out of the system, attributed to Fredric Jameson, only occurs, once again, due to socialist interference in the balance of demand and supply of labor. The socialists and their union base demand wages above the market rate and consequently find that the number who are employable declines. Effectively, the unions are a rentier class, who collect their rents primarily from non-union workers, but also from each other. Zizek wants holders of intellectual property rights to be considered rent collectors, but doesn’t bother to explain the trade-off between such rights and the incentive to create intellectual property in the first instance. This is once again rudimentary economics. I wonder what percent of the advanced economies now operate on the basis of IP income streams. Surely it increases, and the structure of this part of the economy, including the legal structure, becomes ever more important to abetting productivity and ensuring justice.

He is, at last, correct about the transition from the old capitalism of small businessmen and small farmers (owners) to the new capitalism of large businesses and big government employing the former class of owners as salaried employees. This process is far from complete and may turn in another direction, but the trend began with the industrial revolution and gathered pace in the early years of the 20th century.  He follows this with a generally accurate summary:

This new bourgeoisie still appropriates surplus value, but in the (mystified) form of what has been called ‘surplus wage’: they are paid rather more than the proletarian ‘minimum wage’ (an often mythic point of reference whose only real example in today’s global economy is the wage of a sweatshop worker in China or Indonesia), and it is this distinction from common proletarians which determines their status. The bourgeoisie in the classic sense thus tends to disappear: capitalists reappear as a subset of salaried workers, as managers who are qualified to earn more by virtue of their competence (which is why pseudo-scientific ‘evaluation’ is crucial: it legitimises disparities). Far from being limited to managers, the category of workers earning a surplus wage extends to all sorts of experts, administrators, public servants, doctors, lawyers, journalists, intellectuals and artists. The surplus takes two forms: more money (for managers etc), but also less work and more free time (for – some – intellectuals, but also for state administrators etc).

 

Directly after this Zizek presents the most interesting analysis offered in the essay (an analysis which doesn't happen to be his):

 

The evaluative procedure used to decide which workers receive a surplus wage is an arbitrary mechanism of power and ideology, with no serious link to actual competence; the surplus wage exists not for economic but for political reasons: to maintain a ‘middle class’ for the purpose of social stability. The arbitrariness of social hierarchy is not a mistake, but the whole point, with the arbitrariness of evaluation playing an analogous role to the arbitrariness of market success. Violence threatens to explode not when there is too much contingency in the social space, but when one tries to eliminate contingency. In La Marque du sacré, Jean-Pierre Dupuy conceives hierarchy as one of four procedures (‘dispositifs symboliques’) whose function is to make the relationship of superiority non-humiliating: hierarchy itself (an externally imposed order that allows me to experience my lower social status as independent of my inherent value); demystification (the ideological procedure which demonstrates that society is not a meritocracy but the product of objective social struggles, enabling me to avoid the painful conclusion that someone else’s superiority is the result of his merit and achievements); contingency (a similar mechanism, by which we come to understand that our position on the social scale depends on a natural and social lottery; the lucky ones are those born with the right genes in rich families); and complexity (uncontrollable forces have unpredictable consequences; for instance, the invisible hand of the market may lead to my failure and my neighbour’s success, even if I work much harder and am much more intelligent). Contrary to appearances, these mechanisms don’t contest or threaten hierarchy, but make it palatable, since ‘what triggers the turmoil of envy is the idea that the other deserves his good luck and not the opposite idea – which is the only one that can be openly expressed.’ Dupuy draws from this premise the conclusion that it is a great mistake to think that a reasonably just society which also perceives itself as just will be free of resentment: on the contrary, it is in such societies that those who occupy inferior positions will find an outlet for their hurt pride in violent outbursts of resentment.

The first sentence above overstates the case that jobs are awarded without reference to competence—though I concede competence is rarely the only factor and increasingly in our “no-accountability” world not even the first priority. The problem is mainly confined to the large non-capitalist and anti-capitalist sectors of the economy, especially government, non-profits, and unions. Dupuy adopts a counterintuitive line of psychological analysis, but I think it contains much of the story. However, to complicate this perspective with a further injection of reality, it seems to me that in addition to these four procedures of justification most thinking people also sense that some part of most instances of socioeconomic superiority is grounded in superior merit, a merit that they recognize as reality, not a social construct. But these defenses against social humiliation are no doubt effectual at virtually every level of the social and intellectual scales. How far a strenuously merit-based system of social organization would incite envy and instability has never been tested. Most men, though, consider their lives to be just as valuable as the lives of more accomplished men—and this fundamental fact sets a limit to how much less they would consent to receive in power and status, regardless of externally derived measures of merit. Certainly, humiliation may lead to instability and revolution—recall the nationalist pride that was one of the main passions driving the collapse of the Soviet Empire, or the 2011 revolts against contemptuous dictators throughout the Arab world.  

Zizek’s concluding paragraph is useless. He’s conflating multiple problems as one issue of capitalist instability. Instead, what we see is a typical example of capitalism’s boom and bust logic, involving an especially severe bust for the advanced economies (but decidedly not severe for most emerging economies). In addition, we see the strains imposed on capitalism by excessive socialist welfare policies and union protections—these parasitisms have grown so large in many places as to be unaffordable. Finally, adding to the strain, we have the quasi-capitalist (or state capitalist) competition of the emerging world’s businesses with the rich world’s businesses. These are the three main factors underlying our present economic malaise. The salary disparities Zizek mentioned in his inane attempt at a conclusion have little to do with the problem, howsoever unjustifiable they may be. On the whole, the only really useful part of the essay was lifted entirely from good Monsieur Dupuy, Zizek having spent most of his words playing the semi-clever malinterpreter of this incoherent ramble through the remnants of Marxist thought processes.