Alan Johnson: The New Authoritarian Marxism

[Alan Johnson is a professor of democratic theory and practice at Edge Hill University in Lancashire, England and was the founder and editor of Democratiya, a free online journal of international politics that has now merged with Dissent.]

In his book Did Somebody say Totalitarianism?, Slavoj Žižek tells us what has gone wrong on the Left and how we are to put things right.

The Left has accepted the basic coordinates of liberal democracy (“democracy” versus “totalitarianism“) and is now trying to define its (op)position within this space. The first thing to do, therefore, is fearlessly to violate these liberal taboos: So what if one is accused of being “anti-democratic,” “totalitarian...“
There are three things to say about this.

First, it says a lot about the state of our intellectual culture that Žižek is idolized–just listen to the fawning from the academics and the teeny-bopper shrieking from the students at his talks–while speaking in this ignorant and menacing way.

Second, we should note that there is a very serious point in Clive James’ joke in the London Review of Books that Žižek “should be encouraged to put away his inverted commas until he can use them responsibly.”

Third, Žižek makes clear a defining feature of the new authoritarian Marxism. It takes precious ideas hewn from bitter experience and the mutilated lives of the anti-Stalinist left, and it re-presents those ideas in bowlderized form to the historically ignorant as nothing but the ideological props of the right....

Today’s new authoritarian Marxism is not a wild aberration. It is only the latest example of the “authoritarian forms of socialist thinking and organization” that have always disgraced the socialist idea.