very quickly; your basic point
in the introduction, in your introductions,
you know I almost am tempted to say
the way you present a communist manifesto
the simplified image and so on and so on
it's crazy to say but on many points I,
I agree with you and it's a very complex argument
Marx didn't have, for example,
a good theory of how social power exists
his idea was simply, with disappearance
of class structure; it secretly, although
he wouldn't have accepted it, a technocratic dream
like, by experts, social life will be run
as a perfect machine. although, he was at least
aware of the problem. which is why he was
so enthusiastic - Marx - about Paris Commune
you know, which was precisely not
centralized power. so I'm not just
defending Marx. I'm saying it was not
clear to him and... so let's drop that maybe
I have more interesting things to say
ah, another point:
nonetheless, where, at one point, I'm ready 
to claim, where did you find; this this goes
maybe for today's politically correct
terms and so on, that, this egalitarianism
there is one passage in his late
Critique of the Gotha Programme where Marx
directly accesses the problem of equality
and he dismisses it as a strict bourgeois category
explicitly, explicitly, for him
communism is not egalitarianism.
I had three questions, and a few of them are now
completely irrelevant, and so
I have one left I guess and I'm not sure
that it's a fair question, but maybe it is,
it seems to me to be a fair question:
you're... you're a strange Marxist
to have a discussion with; and, well, but here's why
this is not an insult
by any stretch of the imagination, I mean
one of the things that struck me when
I was looking at your work was that you're
well, first of all, you're a character, you know
and that's, that's an interesting thing
like, it's a sign of... it's a
sign of originality and and it's a sign
of a certain amount of moral courage
and, and it's a sign of a certain
temperament, and it makes you humorous
and charismatic and attractive and...
and I think you appeal to young people
the way that outside intellectual rebels
appeal to young people, and so
those are all positive things. it can be
used positively or negatively and
my question is: like, it seems to me
that your... your reputation, unless
I'm very misinformed about this, is as
a strong supporter of Marxist doctrines
on the left, or was that, and so then
my question is: given the originality of
your thought, why... why is it that you
came to presume at some point in
your life, perhaps not now, perhaps still
that the promotion of Marxism rather, say,
rather than Zizek-ism, was appropriate
because it seems to me that there's
enough originality in your body of thought
and lateral thinking in the manner
in which you approach intellectual ideas
that there's just no reason
for you to be allied with a doctrine
that's a hundred and seventy years old
and that is, if capitalism is rife
with problems, is twice as rife
with problems as that, and so you're
kind of a mystery to me in that way,
and so that's my question.
okay...
very briefly: I... developed
systematically in my books
critical insights into many traditional
Marxist theses, so no doubt here. you know what
I still admire nonetheless in Marx?
not those simplicities of Communist Manifesto
but I still think that his so-called
Critique of Political Economy
Kapital, and so on, is a tremendous
achievement as a description of
the dynamics of capitalist society
and if you read it closely, Marx is much
more ambiguous and open, for example
he mentions for example, a propos what you
refer to, he mentions that law of
diminishing return, like why crises
will arrive necessarily, poor are getting
poorer; but then he is honest enough
to enumerate seven or eight counter
tendencies. and if you read him closely,
you will see that precisely those
tendencies prevailed later. or,
forget Communist Manifesto. go to read his
political analysis of... his unsurpassable
Eighteenth Brumaire
and so on, of the 1848 revolution, which
are incredibly complex. no traces of...
traces of that class binary there.
Marx deals with middle classes,
with crucial Lumpen proletariat, with the
ambiguous role of intellectuals, and so on
and so on. first, do you really...
where did you find the data, that,
I simply don't see it. okay, let me begin by
this: you designate your - under
quotation marks - I'm not characterizing
here - enemy - or what you are fighting,
against as, sometimes you call it...
postmodern neo-Marxism. I know what
you mean;
all this, from political correctness,
these excesses, whatever, spirit of envy
so on and so on. do you think they are
really... where did you find this data?
I don't know them. I would ask you here, give me
some names or whatever. where are the Marxists here?
show me any big names of political correctness.
I think they... they fear [Marxism] like a good
vampire fears garlic, and this is why they
are already... the one who - is not a Marxist but
he approaches economic topics, Bernie
Sanders, he is already under attack as
white male and all that stuff and so on.
I simply... I simply... my problem would be
this one: what you described as
postmodern neo-Marxism, where is, really,
the Marxist element in it? they are for
equality. sorry, where, they are for equality
in this cultural struggle, proper names,
how do we call each other, do you see
in them, in political correctness and so on
any genuine will of... to change society?
I don't see it. I think it's a hyper
moralization... hyper moralization which is
a silent admission of a defeat. that's
my problem; why do you call; it's not a rhetorical
question for politely saying you are an idiot and
don't know what you're talking about;
it's simply, I would like to know - because
you - and I like this - often when you
attack somebody, you said aggressively
- and one should - read more, tell me whom
so I'm asking you now, not read more, I don't
advise you, but who are... give me some
names and so on, and who are these
post-modern egalitarian neo-Marxists and
where do you see any kind even of
Marxism? I see in it mostly... an...
an impotent, an utterly impotent
moralization. please... I'm so sorry...
well, I mean, an organization like
Jonathan Haidt's, what's it called...
Heterodox Academy and other organizations, like...
that have documented an absolute dearth
of conservative voices in the social
sciences and the humanities and about 25%
according to the... what I think are
reliable surveys, approximately 25% of
social scientists in the US identified
themselves as Marxists, and so there's that.
can you name one? I know a couple of Marxists.
David Harvey writes very serious books on economic analysis.
then the old guy, who is far from simplification:
Frederick Jensen, and so on. but they're
totally marginalized today in this politically
correct mainstream. you know, I don't see it.
well, yeah, your question seemed to me
to focus more on the... peculiar
relationship that I've noticed, and that
people have disputed, between
post-modernism and and neo-Marxism. and
I see the connection between the postmodernist
types and the Marxists as a sleight
of hand that replaced the notion
of the oppression of the proletariat
by the bourgeoisie, as the oppression by one
identity group by another. (totally agree.)
with that so now look...
that's precisely a non-Marxist gesture!
that's where we might have a dispute.
I see what happened especially in France in
the 1960s, as the as the radical
Marxist postmodern types like Derrida
and Foucault realized that they were
losing the moral battle, especially after
the information came out of the Soviet
Union in the manner that it came out,
(Solzhenitsyn...) yeah that the whole bloody
the whole Stalinist catastrophe
along with the entire Maoist catastrophe,
they didn't really have a leg to stand on.
and instead of revising their notion that
human history - and this is a Marxist
notion - should be regarded as the eternal
class struggle between the economically
deprived and the oppressors. they just
recast it and said: well, it's not based
on economics, it's based on identity,
but it's still fundamentally oppressor
against oppressed. and to me that meant
that they smuggled the...
the fundamental narrative of Marxism
and many of its goals back into the argument
without ever admitting that they did so.
now, I've been criticized - you know
- for this opposition, because people who are
post modernists say: look, one of the
hallmarks of post-modernism is
skepticism of meta-narratives. it's like...
I know that perfectly well, and I also
know that Marxism is a meta-narrative,
and so you shouldn't be able to be a
post modernist and a Marxist. but I still
see the union of those two things in the
insistence that the best, the appropriate way
to look at the view... world, is to view it
as the battleground between groups
defined by a particular... group...
by a particular group identity, so that
the group identity becomes paramount.
and then the proper reading is always
oppressor versus oppressed. with the
secondary insistence that it's very
similar to Marx's insistence upon the
moral superiority of the proletariat,
that the oppressors are by definition,
because they're oppressed, morally
superior. and... and there's the call for,
perhaps not revolutionary change,
although that comes up about, but change
in the structure, so that oppression
disappears, so that a certain form of
equality comes about. now, you argue that
Marx wasn't a believer in equality of
outcome, and I'm not so sure about that
because his notion of the eventual
utopia that would constitute genuine
communism was a place where all class
divisions were eradicated, and so does it...
...well, well there's at least
an implication that the most important of
the hierarchies had disappeared. and so
maybe he had enough sophistication
to talk about other forms of
hierarchies. but if if that's the case
then I can't imagine why he thought that
the utopia that would emerge as
a consequence of the elimination of
economic hierarchies, would be a utopia.
because if there are other forms of
hierarchies that still existed, people
would be just as contentious about them
as they are now. like, we have hierarchies
of attractiveness for example, that have
nothing to do with economics, or very
little to do with economics, and there's
no shortage of contention around that,
or any other form of ability. and so that's
why I associate the social justice types
- who are basically postmodernist -
wtih Marx... the post-modernists
with Marxism.
it's the insistence that you view the world
through the narrative of oppressed vs.
oppressor. and I think it's
a catastrophe. I think it's a catastrophe,
and you appear to think; ...just one sentence,
and then he you can reply. it's so
strange that you mentioned, for example
somebody like Foucault, who, for me,
his main target was Marxism. okay, for him
represented in... his game was never
a radical change, but - and this is what
i don't like in this, what you call
postmodern, let's not call them Marxists
but revolutionaries - it's enjoying your own
self-marginalization; the good thing is to be
on the margin; you know, like, not in the
center and so on, and so on. it almost
made me nostalgic for old communists who
at least had the honesty to say: no,
we don't enjoy our marginal position.
we want to do something... central power.
i find so disgusting...
it's no wonder you don't
get invited to lots of places.
yeah...
