Slavoj Zizek: The global capitalist order is approaching a crisis again, and the vanished radical legacy has to be resuscitated -- RT Op-ed

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

64% : , are just a continuation of communist totalitarianism, sometimes worse than communism itself
59% : They wanted social security, solidarity, a rough kind of justice; they wanted the freedom to live their lives outside of state control, to come together and talk as they pleased; they wanted a life of simple honesty and sincerity, liberated from primitive ideological indoctrination and the prevailing cynical hypocrisy...
58% : When dissidents like Vaclav Havel denounced the existing Communist regime on behalf of authentic human solidarity, they (unknowingly, for the most part of it) spoke from the place opened up by communism itself - which is why they tend to be so disappointed when the "really existing capitalism" does not meet the high expectations of their anti-Communist struggle.
58% : At a recent reception in Poland, a nouveau riche capitalist congratulated Adam Michnik for being a doubly successful capitalist (he helped destroy socialism, plus he heads a highly profitable publishing empire); deeply embarrassed, Michnik replied: "I am not a capitalist; I am a socialist who is unable to forgive socialism that it did not work."
54% : Maybe, we are paying the price now for something that vanished from our view after socialism was replaced by capitalist democracy.
54% : This dark side is now re-emerging forcefully, and its effects are felt in the rightist rewriting of history: first, the socialist aspect of the struggle against communism (remember that Solidarnosc was a workers trade union!) disappears, and then even the liberal aspect disappears so that a new story emerges in which the only true opposition is the one between communist legacy and the Christian-national legacy - or, as Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban put it: "
53% : In order to save what is worth saving in liberal democracy, we have to move to the left, to what Orban and his companions perceive as "communism.
50% : What vanished was not socialism but things that mediated the passage from socialism to capitalist democracy.
43% : The reason I mention all this is that the passage to capitalism in East European socialist countries was also not a direct transition: between the Socialist order and the new order, liberal-capitalist and/or nationalist-conservative, there were many vanishing mediators the new power was trying to erase from memory.
41% : At a more general level, when people protested against the communist regimes in Eastern Europe, what the large majority had in mind was not capitalism.
38% : In his The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), Daniel Bell described how the unbounded drive of modern capitalism undermines the moral foundations of the original Protestant ethic that ushered in capitalism itself.

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