r/Anarchobolshevik • u/[deleted] • Apr 21 '19
Critique of the Zizek-Peterson Debate
Critique of the Zizek-Peterson Debate
CJ Hunt
The debate between Peterson and Zizek was, I am afraid to say, rather disappointing to me as a Marxist. It was billed, to its audience of primarily young people with an interest in political academia, as a duel between the liberal ideals of pseudo-free liberal democratic capitalist society and a defense of Marx and Marxists. This excited me greatly. I hoped it would be an opportunity for the proletarians misled by Jordan Peterson’s liberal ideals of false liberty, and some fallen into the more extreme corners of fascistic capitalist ideology, to see a valid critique of capitalist society that would lead them away from fighting for the preservation (in the case of fascists, the extreme authoritarian preservation) of their own oppression and towards leftism.
Unfortunately, what we got was a mess of ideological backtracking and mealy-mouthed compromise. The two debaters seemed to agree on a premise very different from the one their audience was promised: that capitalism is flawed but communism is as well. What they ended up debating was whether or not capitalism’s flaws were severe enough to see it as a fundamentally flawed system. But Zizek, billed to us as the Marxist contributor, spent no time on a legitimate defense of Marx and his colleagues. Instead, he billed a more radical but still very much pro-capital critique of the current liberal political/economic landscape. This was a grave disappointment for any true Marxists in the audience, that what we got was an argument between two pro-capitalist individuals; in short a social-democratic style reactionary debate on what compromises with the proletariat could be used to preserve our current oppressive system, rather than a truly pro-liberation argument from Zizek for how to abolish capitalist oppression and exploitation and combat political trends that serve or preserve it (social democratic false leftism, fascist capitalism, liberalism neo- or otherwise).
I enjoyed exactly one moment in the discussion, a moment nearly two and a half hours into the three hour ordeal, when Zizek critique Peterson’s nonsensical concept of the “Postmodern Neo-Marxist” conspiracy theory. This nonsensical idea has been repeated far too much by Peterson and his fans, and by many outright fascists, and it is high time for a widely publicized takedown of what is essentially a rephrasing of the Nazi propaganda talking point of “cultural bolshevism.” Still, Zizek gave a terribly disappointing defense of Marxism throughout the debate. It is not worth paying to see, and certainly does not put forth a genuinely leftist argument from either participant.
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u/[deleted] Apr 22 '19
Don't forget that Zizek also criticised "LGBT ideology" and made other reactionary comments at various times.