Living out the Half Life: Clandestine Services and (Post)Socialist Society
It is close to thirty years now from the fall of the Berlin wall. Yet have the implosion of real-socialist state really been complete? Is it really gone? In this podcast we’ll argue that this, for the most part, is not the case. If we try to understand what socialism really was, we end up realizing that as such, it is still present. The essence that survived the crumbling of political and economical system is that element of socialist project that informed the society – created a peculiar mentality shared by most if not all post-socialist nations: it’s clandestine services.
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Branko Malić
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That was interesting especially the analogy of a radioactive remnant. It reminded me of that film I think you probably know, The Lives of Others.
Here in the UK we seem to have a liberal stasi influencing the cultural sphere more than ever before but it is becoming draconian. Its quite dystopic really. England is suffering in its own way from the nineteenth century high point of industry and empire and parlimentarianism. It has no national identity now and liberalism as embodied by the BBC is offering only a grotesque hybrid of the multicultural citizen. Bizarre times.
Yugoslavia was not overtly repressive in the same sense and to a same extent the East Germany was, at least at the later stages (mind Seventies to late Eighties). But down side to this is that covert repression never really went away but just shifted to nationalism as a tool to wag the dog, i.e. the people. If there weren’t a war, then there would’ve been a chance to purge those spooks. However, in times of war it was necessary to incorporate them into new Government (especially in Croatia), because they were able to help running things in completely chaotic situation and they would not take “no” for an answer, anyway.
The thing happening in the West, including UK, is, I think, of different origin. It is the Gramscian Left that never really went all the way into Communism for various reasons, one of them being that Britain, France, etc. are wealthy nations on which you cannot experiment at will – however people may hate their own country, they love their comfort. And the only way to dissolve the country while having your ass firmly on the couch is by “long march through institutions” or some variation thereof.
Of course, in the end you get what you have now: a complete muddle of culture and identity politics with a high probability of Far Right getting into driver’s seat in reaction to 30 years of messing things up.
Read Slavoj Žižek’s essay I did video about and you’ll see how old Left thinks – he hates PC and is very good critic of it. But its not because he considers it to be wrong, but because he considers it to be eventually ineffectual to bring about the real revolution. For Communist like him, revolution necessarily entails prolonged terror and police state.
And, as I claim in this podcast, the substance of that is intelligence community. It is the true essence of socialist order.
I tried to tackle the idea of revolution in a post on Land of the Blind but I don’t think I did very well. My professors used to name drop Zizek as if he was an edgy dangerous writer which only post graduates were allowed to tackle. I will read the essay soon as I get time. There is a tendency for these leftists to indulge in rhetorical violence or violent rhetoric as long as its cloaked in emacipatory language.
I often think that the so called right wing are far less enamoured of bloodshed than the left because they don’t attract the feverish intellectual types who dream of global harmony. The left is sinister (sinistre) but projects that. quality onto the mythical right wing which is pretty much a ramshackle fragmented minority and not a threat to anyone except in leftist fantasies.
Zizek always has a runny nose and never uses a handkerchief. That is why you should never shake his hand, just smile and wave hello.