This is excerpt from a text, The Prospects of Radical Politics Today, by Dr. Slavoj Zizek, which appeared in the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies.

I always appreciate Zizek and often resonate with his clear point of view, miles away from any postmodern obfuscation.

Yet, this essay, which I urge you to read for its ideological critique of many contemporary thinkers, is also very unsatisfying in the end. Granted that most (post-) postmodern ideology ‘defangs’ radical critique and action, what is the alternative that he proposes. At least here, it is not forthcoming.

The excerpt I’ve chosen deals with a crisis in property, and is analogous to my own take on netarchical capitalism, a form of capitalism which does not rely on intellectual property.

What matters is ‘access to resources’. Thus, there is a strange analogy between the way the system works today, and the way it worked in Stalinist Russia (I mentioned recently the parallel with fake accounting systems, prevalent in both systems as well).

Slavoj Zizek:

“The key antagonism of the so-called new (digital) industries is thus: how to maintain the form of (private) property, within which only the logic of profit can be maintained (see also the Napster problem, the free circulation of music). And do the legal complications in biogenetics not point in the same direction? The key element of the new international trade agreements is the “protection of intellectual property”: whenever, in a merger, a big First World company takes over a Third World company, the first thing they do is close down the research department. Phenomena emerge here which bring the notion of property to extraordinary dialectical paradoxes: in India, local com­munities suddenly discover that medical practices and materials they have been using for centuries are now owned by American companies, so they now have to be bought from them; with the biogenetic companies patenting genes, we are all discovering that parts of ourselves, our genetic components, are already copyrighted, owned by others…

However, the outcome of this crisis of private property of the means of pro­duction is by no means guaranteed – it is here that one should take into account the ultimate paradox of the Stalinist society: against the capitalism which is the class society, but in principle egalitarian, without direct hierarchical divisions, the “mature” Stalinism was a classless society articulated in precisely defined hierar­chical groups (top nomenklatura, technical intelligence, army). What this means is that, already for Stalinism, the classic Marxist notion of class struggle is no longer adequate to describe its hierarchy and domination: in the Soviet Union from the late 1920s onward, the key social division was not defined by property but by the direct access to power mechanisms and to the privileged material and cultural conditions of life (food, housing, health care, freedom of travel, educa­tion). And, perhaps, the ultimate irony of history will be that, in the same way Lenin’s vision of “central bank Socialism” can be properly read only retroactively, from today’s World Wide Web, the Soviet Union provided the first model of the developed “post-property” society, of true “late capitalism” in which the ruling class will be defined by direct access to the (informational, administrative) means of social power and control and attendant material and social privileges: the point will no longer be to own companies, but to run them directly, to have the right to use a private jet, to have access to top health care, etc. – privileges which will be acquired not by property, but by other (educational, managerial, etc.) mechanisms. The ultimate answer to the reproach that radical Left proposals are utopian should thus be that, today, the true utopia is the belief that the present liberal-democratic capitalist consensus could go on indefinitely, without radical changes. We are thus back to the old ’68 motto “Soyons realistes, demandons l’impossible!”: in order to be truly a “realist,” one must consider breaking out of the constraints of what appears “possible” (or, as we usually put it, “feasible”).“