Unfortunately, my guess is that Tyler Cowen (and this is the first time that I see this part of the interview) has a very narrow understanding of nostalgia in a quite standard romanticized way. But nostalgia does not only mean that you 'miss something' or that you fantasize about the past but it also means that there is something unresolved from that past that creates an open question for you in the present and the answer to that question is (sometimes) what one desperately needs to make sense of the present.
Thing is with Stalin, him being a brutal tyrant doesn't deter from the fact he was theoretically correct, that is, from a Marxist standpoint. He did hit the right targets when it came to suppressing counterrevolution - the military, tenant farmers, soft-leftists, regional nationalists, the priests etc Now you can argue with the brutal means of suppression, but from a Marxist point of view, you can't argue with the soundness of Stalin's Marxist logic. Stalin being like an Oliver Cromwell, or a Robespierre - a brutal dictator but nonetheless correct in his theoretical application. Of course if you see communism as an evil ideology, you are always going to see Stalin as an evil despot, but from a communist standpoint, Stalin did successfully defend the revolution while improving the lives of the working class. To turn the American imperialist phrase on its head 'He might have been a sonofabitch but he was our sonofabitch' could be applied from a left-wing position, But if you are one of those leftists that always believes the Left should have higher moral standards than capitalists and fascists, then sure Stalin will always remain a brutal tyrant.
The next part is also fascinating: Zizek talks about 'nostalgia for the present', as exemplified by The Handmaid's Tale. I strongly recommend watching the whole interview with Cowen.
Joseph Autumn Innumerable links (& podcasts placements), but the Conversations with Tyler series, from which this interview originated, happens under the auspices of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University: www.mercatus.org/events/conversations-tyler-conversation-camille-paglia
Joseph Autumn Also, as blogging has faded to pique the interests of many, often due to banal content (cf. Camille Paglia’s comments in Cowen interview), Tyler Cowen has bucked this trend via his interesting, wide ranging blog at Marginal Revolution (good place to learn of upcoming Cowen interview podcasts-Conversations w Tyler): marginalrevolution.com/
@@Sobieskicharge Imagine being proudly unable to distinguish between nations, regimes and ideologies due to ignorance of history. The fall of Yugoslavia's Communist Regime literally caused a race war and a majority of Bulgarians are nostalgic for the communist years because their standard of living actually began to decline afterwards. Not all forms of 20th century communism are Maoism.
@@Sobieskicharge Force is literally required in all regimes, including capitalism, otherwise there would be no laws. Also, I don't want to revive 20th century communism, I just acknowledge there were different forms and some were better than others and in some cases preferable to what followed.
Imagine taking zizeks unironic appraisal of Stalin's tenure as nostalgia. Zizek has a portrait of stalin at the entrance of his apartment yet at the same time slams "Stalinism" and repeatedly insists it's even a thing. He's joking. He's not being serious. Stop taking everything zizek says so seriously
I'm pretty sure that 75% of the things zizek says are just him trying to see what he can get the audience to believe. I've been watching a lot of these clips and he always seems to do this, espousing a perspective and then abandoning it when pressed or just muddying the waters.
@@Varlwyll Zizek is generally considered a supporter of Lenin, yet he denounces Lenin in one of his videos. He calls himself a Marxist( sometimes) and denounces it overtimes. Zizek is best describe as a Intellectual troll that has an audience that does not actually understand anything he says.
@@Varlwyll its much simpler actually We in the Balkans had the true luck and opportunity to live in a society properly built. I too would be a nostalgic individual The Yugoslav society from the 70s leaves MUCH to wish for Imagine living in a TRUELY FREE society in which the only thing that is concerned crime is theft, murder, or detention. Everything else being catered towards the people Imagine living in an AD-free society, a place where there's ABSOLUTELY NO ONE bothering others telling them what success is, noone breathing in your neck what to do with YOUR money that you earn yourself Westerners have absolutely no idea how it is to be satisfied with being an average, there is always competition, always dirty plays, always the struggle to make it OVER someone (or something) else Rant as much as u want but the bottom line is the goal is to have a functional society for the average. If the society functions on a way where everyone has to become an entrepreneur or a business individual, it's a DYSFUNCTIONAL society to the bone The MAIN GOAL of tomorrow isn't to become better, faster, stronger, but rather CREATE A BETTER TOMORROW (on average), what is the point of having an Elon Musk or Jack Ma when the VAST MAJORITY OF PEOPLE struggle on a day to day basis (permanent) IF you ever lived in an AVERAGE-FRIENDLY and/or AVERAGE-RESPECTFUL place, you'd miss it as well..
One very important adendum that goes along with the nostalgia as well There's one ABSOLUTE DISASTER in the modern world today, and that is NOONE QUESTIONS COMPETITIVENESS. It's praised often (blindly even), never gets limited, ridiculed, e.t.c. That's why he's PESSIMISTIC toward the future IMO (and so am I as well), you can't have a better tomorrow for the average if the MAIN PREMISE is something that can only be described as COMPETITIVE SPIRIT Let's be honest, as much good the competitive spirit has done, it's done much worse actually toward the society and the humanity in general. The main way how competition and competitiveness provides is via technology, but at the end of days technology won't make a better tomorrow, easier ?, sure, better ? - (multiple question marks here) ????? It's VERY IMPORTANT in my opinion (and so believe in his) that people be SKEPTICS toward the competition, competitive spirit, and in general the general motive to "move ahead". It's not "there" that needs to be better, it's not "somewhere else", it's right under your feet, everyday, you don't need to MOVE somewhere in order things to be better, you just have to take a good care of what there is already present THAT is something that the competitive spirit and competition destroys tbh, mainly cause there are 2 main motives, like 2 MAJOR BOTTOMLINE motives a person would strive to be ahead 1. The will to make the world a better place 2. The desire for personal domination over the others The SAD PART is that without a GENERAL CONSENSUS of questioning the competition and not allowing it to thrive everywhere, the "competitors" are usually "forced" to think twice before "hopping in", without it everything gets lost (slowly, gradually, but with a certainty rate of 100%) For every Elon Musk there will be a Henry Ford, for every Bill Gates there will be a Martin Skrelli, for every Jack Ma there will be a Jeff Bezos, and even away from business/science, for every Rhonda Rousey there will be a Paris Hilton or whatever.. It's VERY SIMPLE, billionaires shoulndn't be the "role model", there must be a DISTRUST/SKEPTICISM toward the "everyone can reach the top" hypothesis. Distrust them just as everyone else and you MIGHT get somewhere.. OTHERWISE we'll end up in this "alternate reality" where every sadistic maniac can come up to "screw the rules" with another and another AND ANOTHER workaround on a day by day basis. They'll "turn unturned stones" either from the past or from "another similar case" in order to "save" their skin (or skin it from someone else's body) and they can do it PRACTICALLY FOREVER. The only way to preventing manipulation is to LIMIT it, same with power, the only way to control power is to LIMIT It's undeniable and everywhere, the "lack of questioning competitiveness" has done SOOOOOO MUCH DAMAGE, that you practically have what seems to be a whole new generation where in general the thought (and disrespect) toward the reality and past is infinite. The average youth American individual (the "snowflakes" if you like) probably right now believe NOT ONLY that they're better than their parents, but ALSO better than everyone else combined that has ever lived 7000 years of worth of Human history, wisdom, storytelling, patriotism, culture, ALL GONE, cause we have a bunch of "idiots" thinking that NO MATTER WHAT, they know better.. And yes, MAKE NO MISTAKE, that thought/mindset of the youth is NOT THEIR OWN, it's been PROJECTED UPON THEM by the society itself
Good challenge. Would be interesting to challenge your own nostalgia base regardless of who you are. I feel like his adherence to stalinist image is entirely a joke sometimes, to provide an image, and alienate himself from the masses. Self isolation. That is powerful stuff to use.
This debate was so annoying because all Cowen did the entire time was tell Zizek "Just stop calling yourself a communist." as if that's even possible. You can't change the mind of someone you don't even understand.
Marx was and remains a giant of economic thought, who understood the value for workers when they maintain mutual control over the surplus-value of their labor, separate from their individual thoughts and expressions. Bolshevism was the furnace that forged the Soviet State. A state having a corporate structure, it's foundation cast in ideological purity. An incindiary ideology that smothered any individual thought or expression through propaganda, intimidation and/or other means. When any elite, corporate, bureaucratic, religious, academic and so forth, thinks for us, compels our speech, we will have begun a perilous journey, inevitably descending into a neo-postmodern and/or neo-fascist inferno.
Democratic Socialism, which places checks and balances on free markets for the good of the society through a democratic process, is the antithesis of Communism, which is an ideologically driven corporate state, coercing the society through propaganda, intimidation and other means, a particularly insidious form of Oligarchy.
The New Deal quelled Fascism in a world war and Communism in a cold war. A commoditized citizenry, a privatized tyranny would have emerged, if Neo-liberalism had won that day.
Tyler is ignorant. He doesn't know how to truly hear the other side and understand it. He doesn't know shit about Balkan aperently, neither about the meaning ofNostalgia and for sure nothing he understands in the tearms of the word communism. If anything is clear with Zizek that's that he is not nostalgic communist, as he declared so many times.
Thats not a broblem with Tyler, that's a problem with liberalism itself. Unlike its name, liberal democracy is neither liberal nor democratic anymore. Liberals show zero tolerance against the people who think out of the liberal system. Not even in society, but also in academic settings they marginalize non-liberal thinkers! Liberalism is indeed another term for dogmatism!
I think Cowen confuses nostalgia with experience. According to him historical science should not use first hand oral witnesses or even the written ones because it is nostalgia? His stance at least biased. And does he mean get rid of the past and get free? What is his concept of freedom? He should be a priest.
'Balkans are a disappointment'...to who are they a disappointment? I would say the USA is a far greater disappointment. What are its great achievements? What will be our abiding memory of the American dream?
Zizek hardly ever gets to his point. Every time he's about to arrive at the point he's trying to make, he veers of into some sidetrack, conjures up another anecdote illustrating some subpoint, and wanders off further and further. Listeing to Zizek is like watching a dog fetching a stick, and seeing it be distracted by a bird, then chasing the bird, and when he almost has caught it, getting distracted by a sound, a smell, chasing its tail, releaving itself against a tree and so on and so on...
So Tyler Cowen basically implies that you should only be allowed to be nostalgic about your youth if you live in a capitalist country ? People don't seem to understand that normal life existed behind the iron curtain, just like in the West. People went to work, they made love, they cried, they laughed, they got drunk, they argued, they went on vacation, they went to the movies, they played sports etc. Sure there were shortages, restrictions and a certain degree of opression (which varied from country to country and from period to period). But if you were not a political activist, your life wasn't that much different from that of working people in western Europe and the USA. As a Pole, I know this for a fact. I can not speak for the stalinist period, but what I'm saying is certainly true about the 1960's and onwards.
exactly, this too is big part of the answer. another part should be an authentic freedom and natural solidarity, a lack of a financial considerations on life events at the degree they limit life now that i live in capitalism, a small economic disparity in between classes and social segments, lack of globalism but great internationalism, administration and regulation of social-economical life to the capillary level, and so on.
You have a very rudimentary understanding of life in USSR. Life there was heavily regulated. You cannot just move from city to city without a job and registration (propiska), you cannot express a nonconformist idea or you will lose your job and never get an apartment. The salaries were extremely low and getting an apartment, cars etc was dependant were you worked and how you were perceived by local communist organs. Even worse was racism. There were 15 republics and each of them promoted its own nationals. My father and other relatives had a hard time and were told in person that they are not welcomed in University due to their ethnicity. Who are you gonna call? The funny thing during those times was how communists expressed their anger about the "exploitation of negroes in capitalist societies etc etc". In some Baltic republics, Russian were perceived as occupiers. Just ask Lithuanians, Latvians about their experience. In their view, they lived under occupation. I don't even want to talk about how entire economics was directed for the creation of a giant army and nuclear threat. But hey, if you want to idealize that hell hole, be my guest.
@@Mishkafofer I'm gonna have to refer to my own comment : "Sure there were shortages, restrictions and a certain degree of opression". I didn't use these words lightly or just for effect.
The guy doesn’t get that Zizek loves to analyse that bit of his past, and that while nostalgia might be there, freeing oneself from it means absolutely nothing in reality, it’s just a gesture, and so on...
This Bougie Liberal( Tyler Cowen) treats nostalgia as a bad thing. My guess is that he thinks it's okay when rich western people do it. If you lived in any Marxist-Leninist state, you do have a right to feel nostalgic. because lot's of these nations collapsed into war, destruction and crippling poverty brought by the very thing( capitalism) that promised freedom and opportunity. In Ethiopia, people are nostalgic for the DERG. in Afghanistan, women use to get education under communism. In the USSR, depression( the mental health definition and the economic definition) plague the country. People do not feel nostalgic for past regimes for the sake of it. There has to be a reason.
Yea, countries had to take the red plague by its root and rip it good. Instead, they stopped mid way and now have to feel "nostalgia." Btw it's not even nostalgia in many instances, and USSR was just as much of an imperialist project as Western metropolies were. Russians fetishize USSR and Stalin to this day not because life was better, but because they were a part of an Empire. Western people who have 0 clue about the life in the Soviet Union and take their ideology too seriously don't ever want to understamd why there is "nostalgia". That nostalgia, in many places, isn't for communism, it is for imperialism. Btw "the creation of the new human" lead to record social alienation and alienation with one's labor, but not like Marxists would ever care.
@Joseph Autumn I'm not American and I don't frankly see why you're even talking about that. I'm talking about communism, not "0mg uncle sam propaganda on tv". Whataboutism at its finest.
@@stark1862 0iq play which doesn't answer the question "why communist leaders, who despised and never wanted to introduce any sorts of capitalism, were forced to?"
@@Haganenno121 1. anti-communism is one hell of a Drug. 2. Yes, I agree that the soviet union was Social Imperialistic. However, many Russian communist are lower class. People generally don't mindlessly support a type of social order without getting some form of benefit or perceived advantage. The USSR was at one point a semi-feudal mix economy that was birthed from Tsarist Russia, and it transformed into a type of regime of constant development and social transformation. Nostalgia does not simply exist for foreign policy, but rather from the domestic policies of the regime. 3. Yes I agree bureaucracy was a thing, but many citizens of Russia see it as more preferable to capitalism. 4. To get a better understanding of this debate, I would be interested in knowing your ideology.
at that point. it is a complement. we should have a nostalga for questioning everything and not canceling and not surpressing. ... which well one could wonder if that is Stalinist at all but that's something else.
Sometimes i suspect that Zizek use these philosophical pseudo answers about communism and being communist to avoid discussing the actual historical materialism, because he knows that would be unpopular and less entertaining.
The more I listen to Slavoj, the more he seems like a very smart pidgeon taking a complicated shit on the proverbial chessboard whenever he's cornered. The kind of person who would take up the position that the sky isnt blue and when confronted with the blue sky over his head would say "People say that the sky is blue, and yet they also contend that the ocean is blue and so on and so on, but we can see clearly that the ocean and the sky are different colors so how do you know that it is the sky which is blue?"
Nostalgia is an emotion, to accuse someone of basing their political views on emotions you must first demonstrate that they have no valid arguments to support their positions.. When a favorable view of the past is the result of a genuine belief presented with coherent arguments for its superiority, then it isn't "nostalgia", it's loyalty to a universal principle.
Coherent theory of Stalinism? Do we have all those dead people come back to confess ? Isn't murder and concentration camps different from concert camps and love ??? He obviously doesn't know himself. This will understand only the illuminated soul.
He said "probably" which means he is just guessing and doesn't have any specific evidence to support this claim. Also the thing with ancient greeks was more complicated than homosexuality in its contemporary meaning. The warfare was also a lot different back then, a strong bonding between adjacent units is something especially beneficial when you are fighting in a phalanx formation. If one solder breaks line a gap is created which significantly weakens the formation of the whole phalanx. With that said, the army is generally dominated by right-wing, conservative culture which isn't particularly tolerable towards homosexuality.
