Alex Callinicos - What does it mean to be a revolutionary today?

[sahilmkale]

i have a friend named alex and kaykay and they mean!

[IiiERT]

The thing about immigrants is (or at least it looks to me like it is) that is the eyes of ordinary people they do not belong to any class, they're just foreigners. Our leaders are telling us of significant budget cuts coming up while at the same time bringing in more immigrants. The commoner just wants to preserve our public services and is wondering how in this situation can the foreigner possibly be an asset.

[adycousins]

@IiiERT Because the NHS runs on migrant labour - from Doctors, surgeons and nurses to cleaning and portering staff, its defence inseperable from migrant rights. Cut immigration and you cut the NHS.

[IiiERT]

What is the NHS?

[IiiERT]

National Healthcare Sysss...idiot.

[originaljawz]

everytime people about socialism, they seem to ignore the individuality spectrum. People are fueled by their own selfish desires. No one does good for the sake of doing good. There will never be social change until unless the desire for change is uniform and that everyone wants the same change.

[Croiq]

@originaljawz thats just bollocks, just think about all the aid workers who help poor people around the world, sometimes even paying to be able to do so! To say nobody does anything good for the sake of good itself, is only to talk from your own egoistic perspectiv. You judge others as you judge yourself, the saying goes.

[sturatcliffe]

@originaljawz Really sad when people say things like this, and utterly blind. bad for you if that's your experience of life, it's a minority experience. I've travelled the world and met selfless giving people in droves. The people you describe are an insignificant handful and even they can change.

[brachikamoko]

This speech is just pathetic! It has no verve at all. It is just intellectual bullshitting based on no rationality whatsoever. The intention is not revolutionary. He provides nothing but hot air. Ridiculous!

[yanovkaa]

Callinicos is probably the most important contemporary anglophone marxist theorist.He should be widely read by marxists of the world.

[Robin303]

Mr Callinicos ideas on immigration dose not take into account the damage that mass immigration of the 1970's and so on, damaged the lefts due to the manipulation of the immigrant workforce undercutting of the union workers and hence damaging the union movement, now it is a poison but it's one that the left drank willingly at the time and now seems to be hapless to purge. The working class now feels that the left has no piratical answers.

[WujekNiemaBycCCPRady]

How the heck they might call themselfs a revolutianaries? I found them just a sect! No better then the capitalists. And their says of pluralism of the left that is a bad thing make them ignorant frustrated fascistic fools eka. bolsheviks.

[kskshghg]

I like both of these thinkers. They're especially germaine now, even moreso than it was when the videos were made. Obviously there is now a banking oligarchy in the U.S. (there always was but now they're playing the same role as the capitalist oligarchs in Russia and China). There is a handful of bankers who crashed the economy before the election and now refuse to move money and credit in the economy as a form of public discipline. They must be arrested for economic espionage and executed.

[lampajoo]

what does it mean? It means you're a pompous douchebag.

How the fuck are any of these guys revolutionaries?

[mormor39]

give up alex. you said 'working class' between forty and firty times without once asking yourself the question of what this means. A Zizek would ay such repetition betrays a fear of uncertainty a desire for a fixed frame where there is none. The 'working class' is not what it was in the time of Gramsci. you need to dump the phrase entirely and start looking at other ways of reframing your struggle, actually just give up, let Slavoj lead, even if it is to the destruction of your party

[jayboselecta]

Whilst Zizek is undoubtedly an asset to the left he contradicts and neglects key aspects of what fighting for socialism is about in his effort to showcase his considerable intellect. The class struggle and the working class is pretty much the same except for the less turbulent economic environment it finds itself in. We should be unapologetic to the postmodernists and the liberals and not be afraid to call the WORKING CLASS just that!

[rudeskapunk]

You've really missed the point, Zizek was referring to the use that the right populist make of the concept working class.

[jayboselecta]

Maybe so, my comment was a response to a libertarian post that is no longer here, basically dismissing the revolutionary role of the working class in the current so-called 'post-industrial' era. That said Zizek too is a libertarian socialist as far as i can tell. As you prob know Marxism is the theory of the international workers revolution, developed in response to actual workers struggle. Libertarianism is simply ideology, divorced from practice.

[Victimoftheinsane]

i haven't seen this video in its entirety, but i'm not sure how you managed to arrive at that conclusion. it is true that zizek was, in the early stages of his career, a fellow traveller alongside the 'post-marxists' and 'radical democrats' (laclau/mouffe in particular), but he has since assumed a very different position. he has repeatedly stressed- much to laclau's chagrin (ergo l's suggestions that z has become a born-again 'trotskyist')- that class struggle REMAINS the Real of the social.

[jayboselecta]

Zizek is an academic Marxist. He is neither part of the revolutionary class nor the revolutionary party/organisation(?). It is apparent in his writing that the important thing for him is the dominant ideas of contemporary society and how we need to challenge the dominant ideas to rebuild the left. He barely mentions the role of working class in this process or of the revolutionary party. As I understand it we should refrain from engaging in fighting for reforms....

[jayboselecta]

...despite the fact that this is how workers develop consciousness, and instead question the ideological coordinates. From the point of view of the class struggle, how is this possible without a mass workers party? The idea of allowing tensions to build by doing nothing so that a mass confrontation might happen poses two problems; there will be no Marxist cadre experienced enough to give direction, and many of the gains of the last 150 yrs would be lost...

[jayboselecta]

...This position reasonably flows from his academic background and the current defensiveness of the working class. Maybe Im showing my lack of appreciation of the academic ideologies but it seems libertarian to think that the so-called denkverbot can be overcome without basic class struggle. That without recognising that this current situation is itself due to the defeats of the working class, and so will be reversed with victories, rather than politicization of the economy ...

[jayboselecta]

...(which surely needs a militant and organised working class to fight for it anyway). In developed western countries the class composition has only changed slightly in a century, it is not complex. There is a definite lack of adherence to the developments of the sruggle in the bits i have read.

[Victimoftheinsane]

also, i recommend alex callinicos' 'against postmodernism' to everyone here. apart from its evaluations of derrida and baudrillard, which i find to be somewhat injudicious/skewed by callinicos' polemical agenda, the book is cogent and powerful. the reading of habermas is especially good.

[zootsoot2006]

No, they're not your enemy, the cause of all your problems, that's them over there!

[TotoGyalazat]

Too much english to understand for me. :(

[minip64]

Callincos a revolutionary!! Best joke I've heard for weeks. Intellectual lightweight certainly...if anything a counter revolutionary, a bug in amber Trot swimming in a red romance of permanent opposition. Liberal intellectual in his writing/ anti intellectual in the tragic 'socialist' movement he packs with every liberal humanist cliche in the book.

If he didn't have such good manners Badiou would come along and tear Alex a new a**.

Thanks for posting the great Harvey and the Zizek though!

[PaashRevolutionary]

Rehashed sloganeering. Callinicos is such a light-weight.

[kkhan1981]

Why do you say that?

[Antiks72]

@PaashRevolutionary translation:  not extreme enough.

[human3485bil]

I have watched several of these videos and have enjoyed them very much. Thanks! I finally figured out that when the screen goes black and the speaker returns, they are responding to each other's comments. (i.e. Callinicos to Zizek). It would be helpful for viewers if you could indicate that this is what is happening. I realize that this is probably a lot of work but even would be to edit in the video footage that the speaker is responding to. Regardless, thanks a bunch for this!

[ptp309]

Wheres his brown leather jacket

[mistertakeda]

B-)