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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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"The historical debate is over. The answer is free-market capitalism."

"Capitalism should not be condemned, since we haven't had capitalism."

"If allowed to run free of the social system, capitalism will attempt to corrupt and undermine democracy, which is after all not a natural state."

"Capitalism is the legitimate racket of the ruling class."

"The introduction of free competition is thus public declaration that from now on the members of society are unequal only to the extent that their capitals are unequal, that capital is the decisive power, and that therefore the capitalists, the bourgeoisie, have become the first class in society."

"Unemployment is capitalism's way of getting you to plant a garden."

"What the working man sells is not directly his labour, but his labouring power, the temporary disposal of which he makes over to the capitalist. this is so much the case that I do not know whether by the English Laws, but certainly by some Continental Laws, the maximum time is fixed for which a man is allowed to sell his labouring power. If allowed to do so for any indefinite period whatever, slavery would be immediately restored. Such a sale, if it comprised his lifetime, for example, would make him at once the lifelong slave of his employer."

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

"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."

"Chicago is the product of modern capitalism, and, like other great commercial centers, is unfit for human habitation."
Explore more quotes by Slavoj Zizek


"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."


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


"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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