Yes he certainly has.. and more polemically than those he borrowed it from, too. Slogans against slogans still being slogans, etc.

I think you’re confusing a reluctant, enraged compromise born out of sheer necessity with outright delusion.

Granted this happens all the time, and american democrats against the neoliberal market fundamentalism/new DLC/DNC influx should probably be used to it.

Isn’t what is interesting about Zizek over the last few years (and by association other figures I find potentially useful but untrustworthy, eg Badiou) is that there has been a serious attempt to rehabilitate certain political strategies - Leninism - which has been derided both by liberals and the remains of the left for some time now. So you have his obsessive interest in the anti-clean hands Brechtian rhetoric, in vanguardism and voluntarism. My problem with this is 1) funnily enough, the left is currently so disengaged that our hands are clean whether we like it or not and 2) it totally ignores all the serious Marxist critiques of vanguardism, not just Menshevism or what have you but Luxemburg, council Communism, Victor Serge etc…and not only that, but the positive ideas of both Leninist and non-leninist currents, whether Fourier or LEF, all of which seem to hold little interest for him (although the current fashionable use of term ‘utopianism’ implies that there’s a been more thinking about it going on lately than there has been for a while…)

In a theoretical sense I think his general war on liberals entirely valid, but as for actual political change, what (at least in the UK) is needed is some sort of unity - a coalition of the few Marxist parties (who would have to stop hating each other), the Greens (who would have to stop being petit-bourgeois moralists) and the Labour left (who would have to lose their sentimental Party attachment). Considering the mess we’re in right now, such a group would actually do very well, I’d guess. Mind you I hold out around 0.005% of hope it’ll happen. Yet one of the reasons it isn’t happening is the persistent belief, almost like some spell that has to be broken, that New Labour, Barack Obama, Lula (etc) are somehow on ‘our’ side, rather than Thatcherism with a human face - and Zizek has made this point more often than most.

Isn’t the positive vision what it has always been: that is, class struggle? As far as intellectuals, what we need are broader coalitions on the left, but ones that have the kind of cut to them that allows for some coherence. A minimum set of anti-capitalist principles that’s a bit better defined than those of the World Social Forum. Something with some visibility that could demonstrate the different forms of thinking on the far left, and demonstrate especially that people are aware of, and have thought long and hard about, the failures and dirty hands of the 20th cent. Sophisticated ideology critique a la Zizek, as useful as it is, would be much better served with such a coalition as one of its targets and platforms. It might not be the subject-object of history, but a start. . .

‘The left,’ overwhelmingly, proposes neither viable alternatives to capitalism nor viable ways to use capitalism itself to achieve these goals. The viability of alternatives to capitalism should be judged not just in a moral contest with capitalism but also on efficiency - that is, we must defeat/replace capitalism on its own terms. What’s needed here is someone who understands the tools of the ‘enemy’ in order to create a more effective form of social relations that maintains certain benefits of capitalism while restructuring the systemic mechanisms thereof. As for strategies for this defeat and replacement, these same tools need to be turned against themselves not to encourage the collapse of capitalism but to begin building its replacement.

These don’t seem popular approaches on the part of ‘the left,’ since they seem blinded by their moral revulsion to systemic inadequacy to the point of being, as Zizek formerly accused them, a purely ideological dissent.