SLAVOJ ZIZEK: First, of course, I like to provoke and so on. No, these lost causes are of course communism, terror and so on, no? But what I really try to do—it’s a very critical book, especially critical towards the left—it’s to analyze brutally the failures of the left and hint at least how to totally reinvent these old lost causes, because, as we all know, the left, around thirty years ago, simply stopped to ask certain questions. I remember when I was young, we were still debating: will capitalism last? Will the state go on? Now, we accept all this. Maybe it is—the time is coming to start asking these fundamental, tough questions again, but, of course, fully learning the lesson of the past.

Since I often like to use Stalinist metaphors and so on, for example, people almost suspect me of being some kind of a closet Stalinist. No, OK, my first reaction is to provoke even more and to say, “Why closet Stalinist?” But what I really think is that I think that Stalinism was—that’s why I am obsessed with it—was such a tragedy, much more difficult to explain than fascism. It’s for me the singular greatest catastrophe of the twentieth century, precisely because it wasn’t simply communist totalitarianism. What’s difficult to think is the authentic emancipatory explosion of October Revolution and then how this turned into Stalinism. So, it’s not that we should—we, the left, should behave with bad conscience, like, you know, “Oh, but you also had your problems, Nazism.” We should do the job of analyzing Stalinism better than the anti-communist right is doing it.

That’s what I see as one of my tasks. I’m returning—
so I’m going through all of this, Stalinism, structure of fascism, today’s ideology, different modalities of the left. I mean, I almost give at a certain point a simple catalog of what the left is doing today: either the third way left—that is to say, we accept the capitalist game; we will just try to make capitalism better, more human and so on—then this, the one I was attacking yesterday, the resisting left—you can do, you just resist, criticize from outside—then this utopian Toni Negri left, that like revolution is around the corner but a totally different one for this new multitude stuff and so on. I simply try to ask the hard questions. And I don’t give great answers; my answers are very modest.

But I think it’s really a matter of survival of the left to break out this deadlock. It’s always a fatal deadlock of either pragmatism or abstract moralism. They are like, you know, like horrible. Again, you see, I succumb to my Stalinist adaptation. Like Stalin said, social democracy and fascism are the left and the right hand of capitalism, stupidity, but I think that this conformist third way, pragmatic social democracy—basically, Clinton here, Blair in the UK and so on—and this moralistic radical left, politically correct all the time, are like twin phenomena, the one is parasitic—how to break out of this deadlock? I mean, I don’t—I’m not saying I have a clear answer, but the problem is to be confronted.