Verso Books have posted a video of the philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek on his favourite topic — the “idea of communism”. In discussion with Alex Callinicos and John Holloway at this weekend’s Marxism 2010 event, he returns to a theme explored at last year’s sell-out conference at Birkbeck University.
Callinicos begins the meeting by emphasising the need not just for a critique of the capitalist economy, but for its complete replacement with another system of social relations: “The idea of communism is [principally] about the alternative to the idea of capitalism.”
“To grasp today’s capitalist dynamic the logic of exploitation is no longer enough,” Žižek says. “[We] need to take into account the new role as a source of wealth of raw materials, which for Marx were out of the equation… and intellectual property.”
You can read Žižek’s writing for the NS here.
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