One of the big problems of all great revolutionary movements of the 20th century such as Russia, Cuba or China, is that they did change the social body but the egalitarian communist society was never realised. The dreams remained the old dreams and they turned into the ultimate nightmare. Now what remains of the radical left waits for a magical event when the true revolutionary agent will finally awaken? While the depressing lesson of the last decades is that capitalism has been the true revolutionising force. Even as it serves only itself. How come it is easier for us to imagine the end of all life on earth, an asteroid hitting the planet, than a modest change in our economic order? Perhaps the time has come to set our possibilities straight and to become realists by way of demanding what appears as impossible in the economic domain. The surprising explosion of Occupy Wall Street protests, the mass mobilisation in Greece, the crowds on Tahrir square, they all bear witness for the hidden potential for a different future. There is no guarantee that this future will arrive. No train of history on which we simply have to take a ride. It depends on us, on our will. In revolutionary upheavals some energy or rather some utopian dreams take place, they explode, and even if the actual result of a social upheaval is just a commercialised every day life, this excess of energy, what gets lost in the result, persists, not in reality but as a dream haunting us, waiting to be redeemed. In this sense, whenever we are engaged in radical emancipatory politics, we should never forget, as Walter Benjamin put it almost a century ago, that every revolution, if it is an authentic revolution, is not only directed towards the future but it redeems also the past failed revolutions. All the ghosts as it were; the living dead of the past revolution, which are roaming around, unsatisfied will finally, find their home in the new freedom. -S.Zizek
Posted on: Fri, 31 Oct 2014 17:18:08 +0000
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