When I write, there is a feeling of necessity, of something that is stronger than myself, that demands that I must write as I write. I have never renounced anything I’ve written, because I’ve been afraid of certain consequences.
Mr. Show—24 Is the Highest Number
The need to reinvent communism also means that it is not enough to stick to the communist idea. One should locate in our actual predicament tendencies which point in this direction, concrete antagonisms which cannot be resolved within the global capitalist space. Today’s historical situation, I think, not only does not compel us to drop the notion of proletariat—on the contrary, it compels us to radicalize the Marxist notion of a proletarian, the exploited worker whose product is taken away from him so that he is reduced to subjectivity without substance. It should be radicalized to an existential level, well beyond Marxist imagination, a subject reduced to the evanescent point almost of the Cartesian cogito, deprived of all substantial content. What is ecological crisis, if not another form of proletarization? We are being deprived of the natural substance of our existence. What is all the struggle for intellectual property, if not an attempt to deprive us of the symbolic substance of our lives? What are biogenetics—manipulations—if not an attempt to deprive us even of our genetic legacy? And so on. The same goes for slum-dwellers and other living dead, deprived of the most elementary conditions of life—even at a psychological level, the so-called post-traumatic subjects, the living dead, deprived of their substance. I claim we should renovate Marx, not by making a compromise—Marx was too utopian, we should stay within capitalism—but by pushing his notion of proletarization even further—I’m almost shamelessly to say, as a materialist, to an apocalyptic level. […] This would be for me the beginning of being a communist today: to locate these dimensions of the ongoing proletarization.
— Slavoj Žižek, “What does it mean to be a revolutionary today?”
The State is a miraculous piece of work
Call me old-fashioned, but…
Shaun Boothe, “Unauthorized Biography of Bob Marley”
seriously, this guy is awesome/totally worthy of new fave rapper status
