"Communism will win"
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"Communism will win" lands less like prophecy than like provocation in Zizek's signature key: a deliberately blunt slogan dropped into a world trained to treat communism as either historical embarrassment or rhetorical dead end. The point is to force the listener into an uncomfortable second thought. If you react with ridicule, you’ve already revealed the ideology he’s diagnosing: the reflex that capitalism is the only adult reality, everything else a childish relapse. If you react with hope, you’ve revealed another fantasy: that history is a morality play with a guaranteed redemption arc.
Zizek’s intent is to reopen the question that liberal common sense declares closed. He isn’t selling a nostalgic return to the USSR; he’s baiting an argument about inevitability. The subtext is that capitalism’s celebrated “pragmatism” is itself utopian: it depends on endless growth, manageable inequality, and a planet that can absorb the costs. When those assumptions crack under climate catastrophe, mass migration, pandemics, AI-driven labor displacement, or financial volatility, “communism” returns less as a party program than as a name for collective coordination at scale: rationing, planning, public ownership of infrastructure, hard constraints on markets.
Context matters because Zizek thrives in post-1989 cynicism, when the left is told to be modest, managerial, and grateful. He answers with an obnoxiously maximalist line. The wager is rhetorical: say the unsayable, and you expose how narrow the range of “serious” political imagination has become. “Will win” is the twist of the knife - not a guarantee, but a challenge to the audience’s belief that there is no alternative, even when the status quo is busy generating alternatives the hard way.
Zizek’s intent is to reopen the question that liberal common sense declares closed. He isn’t selling a nostalgic return to the USSR; he’s baiting an argument about inevitability. The subtext is that capitalism’s celebrated “pragmatism” is itself utopian: it depends on endless growth, manageable inequality, and a planet that can absorb the costs. When those assumptions crack under climate catastrophe, mass migration, pandemics, AI-driven labor displacement, or financial volatility, “communism” returns less as a party program than as a name for collective coordination at scale: rationing, planning, public ownership of infrastructure, hard constraints on markets.
Context matters because Zizek thrives in post-1989 cynicism, when the left is told to be modest, managerial, and grateful. He answers with an obnoxiously maximalist line. The wager is rhetorical: say the unsayable, and you expose how narrow the range of “serious” political imagination has become. “Will win” is the twist of the knife - not a guarantee, but a challenge to the audience’s belief that there is no alternative, even when the status quo is busy generating alternatives the hard way.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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