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"Liberal democracy - as you know, in the old days, we were saying we want socialism with a human face. Today's left effectively offers global capitalism with a human face, more tolerance, more rights and so on. So the question is, is this enough or not? Here I remain a Marxist: I think not."
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"Under capitalism each individual engages in economic planning."

"There is a serious tendency toward capitalism among the well-to-do peasants."

"It has been true in Western societies and it seems to be true elsewhere that you do not find democratic systems apart from capitalism, or apart from a market economy, if you prefer that term."

"Capitalism is destroying the planet. The two old tricks that dug it out of past crises--War and Shopping--simply will not work."

"You know you are capitalism's ideal puppet (and that education betrayed you) when winning the lottery is your only chance to realizing financial freedom."

"I don't think that capitalism should be unbridled, if by "unbridled" you mean unregulated."

"Capitalism is not a form of government. Capitalism is a symptom of freedom. It is the result of individual rights, which include property rights."

"Capitalism: Teach a man to fish, but the fish he catches aren't his. They belong to the person paying him to fish, and if he's lucky, he might get paid enough to buy a few fish for himself."

"The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of its commodities are the heavy artillery with which it batters down all Chinese walls, with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image."

"It is the lash of hunger which compels the poor man to submit. In order to live he must sell - 'voluntarily' sell - himself every day and hour to the 'beast of property.'"
Explore more quotes by Slavoj Zizek


"Without the communist oppression, I am absolutely sure I would now be a local stupid professor of philosophy in Ljubljana."


"What if the Soviet intervention was a blessing in disguise? It saved the myth that if the Soviets were not to intervene, there would have been some flowering authentic democratic socialism and so on. I'm a little bit more of a pessimist there. I think that the Soviets - it's a very sad lesson - by their intervention, saved the myth."


"I am what you might call abstractly anti-capitalist. For instance, I am suspicious of the old leftists who focus all their hatred on the United States. What about Chinese neo-colonialism? Why are the left silent about that? When I say this, it annoys them, of course. Good!"


"I - and I still consider myself, I'm sorry to tell you, a Marxist and a Communist, but I couldn't help noticing how all the best Marxist analyses are always analyses of a failure."


"You could say, in a vulgar Freudian way, that I am the unhappy child who escapes into books. Even as a child, I was most happy being alone. This has not changed."


"I agree with Sophocles: the greatest luck is not to have been born - but, as the joke goes on, very few people succeed in it."


"My instinct as a philosopher is that we are effectively approaching a multicentric world, which means we need to ask new, and for the traditional left, unpleasant questions."
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