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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."

"Capitalism and the market are presented as synonymous, but they are not. Capitalism is both the enemy of the market and democracy."

"I think commercialism helps Christmas and I think that the more capitalism we can inject into the Christmas holiday the more spiritual I feel about it"

"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."

"Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite."

"We've each given the hours of our lives in dull rote jobs for other men's profit, and have been asked to be grateful for doing that."

"Today, in American imperialism, the commodity has reached its most grandiose historical manifestation."

"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."

"Man will never be enslaved by machinery if the man tending the machine be paid enough."

"The business card does not fully reflect who we are. We are being judged, we feel, in a humiliating way. We feel there is so much in us that has not got an expression in capitalism. You know, capitalism is a machine that recognizes outward financial, external achievement. And most of us carry all kinds of richness which we are unable to translate into that language."
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."


"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 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."


"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."


"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."


"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."
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