The Year of Dreaming Dangerously [Paperback]

This is a really enjoyable and bracing romp through last year's news headlines. Zizek gleefully deconstructs the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, the Middle East 'peace process', the Breivik massacres and the EU sovereign debt crisis, unpicking their unspoken ideologies and deadlocked paradoxes as only he can. He is brilliantly unapologetic about his own (uncompromisingly theoretical) post-Lacanian Marxism, and he sets out his stall right at the start of the book: "if reality does not fit our concept, so much the worse for reality!" There are aphorisms this good on just about every page. What's great about reading Zizek is that he's as dismissive of the liberal Left as he is scornful of the conservative Right - on Planet Zizek, anyone who's not a post-Lacanian Marxist is by definition a moron - so unless you're a post-Lacanian Marxist yourself, you can be sure will have your worldview brutally challenged by Zizek's deliberately provocative essays.

Docked one star for recycling quite a lot of his own journalism without attribution. Still, if you're only going to read one book this year by a bearded Slovenian Stalinist, then you should look no further!

Very disappointing!.

Zizek does his usual dribble about Marx and Hegel, with Lacan making the odd appearance here and there. I get the impression Zizek has just googled Arab Spring and UK riots and financial crisis 2008. Then he has gone and copy and pasted a few facts, and then inserted a massive load of his own rubbish. This book could easily of been around 40 pages if you had taken out all the waffle.

If your looking for a detailed view at the causes of the current crisis and what the solution might be. Don't buy this book.

If you do wish to understand the current financial crisis and how capitalism is an unstable system read either:
The Enigma of Capital (newest version) by David Harvey
or
A Brief History of Neoliberalism by David Harvey

Good points about this book.
* I like his observation that the market has become a pagan god which is called upon by the news. The "market" often has various people that speak for it. Sometimes we just here "The market is down today" "the market is worried".
* More choice needs to be brought about in democracies. At the moment people can only choose between centre-right or centre-left parties. There is very little difference between most major political parties these days. Their policies are almost exactly the same.
* Police violence was essentially used to brush up the Occupy movements.
* Zizek mentions the journalist arrests in Turkey recently (which has received little mainstream media attention) **Especially as Turkey is often used as an ideal democratic/secular model that other Muslim countries should head towards.
* Where did the secular left in Arab countries go?
* Where did the secular left in once communist Afghanistan go?
* Good point about how some people have started to blame immigrants in Greece.
* Most people agree Greece will eventually default.
* US debt is out of control.

Bad points
* Zizek fails to mention the widespread TAX avoidance in Greece.
* Zizek fails to mention US financial companies helped Greece hide their government budget figures.
* A whole chapter waffling on about The Wire. (TV Show)

Conclusion.
As usual Zizek doesn't bother to even try and come up with a solution for the ills of capitalism. He can type all day about how is exploits workers, how it damages the environment etc. But never offers any solutions.
Do we scrap private property?
Do we let the state take over more companies?
Do we scrap money?
Do we limit people to one house max? (that way preventing investment bubbles in housing, which was the cause of the financial crisis in the first place)
Do we shut down all the stock markets?
Do we ban short-selling?
Do we ban certain forms of financial speculation?
Do we start to tax financial companies more? So hopefully more people may invest in factories/research and development of new technologies instead?

As an undergraduate in the 90s I had a friend who was a full-blaze Marxist firebrand. Between glasses of red wine, strong coffee and Gauloises, she would declaim that the moment of revolutionary emancipation was upon us, knitting together harbingers of the end times of capitalist hegemony with soundbites from Lenin and Camus. It was heady, captivating rhetoric, and I was keen to impress her with my solidarity in the struggle.

Reading Zizek's book drew me back to those long afternoons, though also reminded me of why I was never entirely convinced by her arguments. It's not easy to pick out a theme from this disjointed, fragmentary and internally contradictory book, but one seems to be that we should be seeking common cause with all those fighting against the current world order, from the revolutionaries of Egypt to migrant workers to marching students on London streets.

This is a noble aspiration; I simply don't believe that it's a realistic one. Much like the 99% movement, what unites us is opposition, an entirely negative agenda. To claim we should unite requires us to elide the numerous conflicts of interest among us as if these are less important than the one class struggle (or to agree that it's all class struggle abstracted). When pressed, I doubt that many would concur. Can we really propose that liberal feminists in the West will unite with Islamic revolutionaries to overthrow our common class oppressor?

Zizek doesn't ignore this problem, though his expected outcome is avowedly Utopian. He celebrates those moments of opportunity when society comes together and everything seems possible. Times like the Prague spring, the aftermath of the 1980 Iranian revolution, the early days of protest in Tahrir Square. Rather than providing a manifesto, he assumes that a new and better society will be forged in the cauldrons of such debates. That it has failed to do so to date is only because each revolution was betrayed - they were not strong enough. Yet paradoxically he argues in the eighth chapter that the best way to protest might be... withdrawal from protest! He also earlier states that "It is the people who have the answers, they just do not know the questions to which they have (or rather are) the answer." This represents exactly the kind of faux-insight that he (correctly) lampoons earlier in the book; it's not deep, just obscure.

I remain a socialist, and the case against the present world order is as strong as ever. Sadly I am also more cynical, and with my head no longer clouded by youthful hormones it's too easy to see through this naive vision, even when wrapped in inspirational quotations and social theory. I want to believe that our common humanity will overcome all barriers between us; the evidence of history strongly suggests otherwise. I want to believe, as Zizek contends in the last chapter, that a reformed communism is the inevitable end-point of history, but I suspect that he has misidentified the light in the tunnel. I want to believe that 2011 marked a turning point in the relationship between people and capital, yet wonder whether we're just going round in circles.

That's not to say there aren't perspicacious insights here, which cause you to reconsider your view of events that have been well-trodden by the news media. Zizek is certainly a provocative and sometimes original thinker. There may yet be an argument that brings down the walls of capitalism and opens the gates to a more open, egalitarian society. This book isn't it.