Slavoj Zizek: Occupy Wall-Street and modern Anti-Capitalism

”There is the hippie deviation. Some people, I was asking them on Wall Street (about their political claims) and I received answers like:

”Don’t ask me about program, we’re here to have a good time, to have fun!”

And I find it most disgusting because I can tell you what will happen 10 years from now. They will become ordinary businessmen and once in a while they will meet in the cafeteria and share their ”good memories”…and then they will return to their bank jobs.”


”Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.”
Kurt Vonnegut
”Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.”
Karl Marx
“… those who preach the need for a return from financial speculation to the “real economy” of producing goods to satisfy real people’s needs, miss the very point of capitalism: self-propelling and self-augmenting financial circulation is its only dimension of the real, in contrast to the reality of production. This ambiguity was made clear in the recent meltdown when we were simultaneously bombarded by calls for a return to the “real economy” and by reminders that financial circulation, a sound financial system, is the lifeblood of our economies. What strange lifeblood is this which is not part of the “real economy”? Is the “real economy” in itself like a bloodless corpse? The populist slogan “Save Main Street, not Wall Street!” is this totally misleading, a form of ideology at its purest: it overlooks the fact that what keeps Main Street going under capitalism is Wall Street!”
Slavoj Zizek-First as Tragedy, Then as Farce

Oriana Fallaci, Italian journalist and former Partisan during World War II.