1789 meet 1979 (1917, stand aside please)

Slavoj Zisek in the Guardian:

Even in the case of clearly fundamentalist movements, one should be careful not to miss the social component. The Taliban is regularly presented as a fundamentalist Islamist group enforcing its rule with terror. However, when, in the spring of 2009, they took over the Swat valley in Pakistan, The New York Times reported that they engineered "a class revolt that exploits profound fissures between a small group of wealthy landlords and their landless tenants". If, by "taking advantage" of the farmers' plight, the Taliban are creating, in the words of the New York Times "alarm about the risks to Pakistan, which remains largely feudal," what prevented liberal democrats in Pakistan and the US similarly "taking advantage" of this plight and trying to help the landless farmers? Is it that the feudal forces in Pakistan are the natural ally of liberal democracy?


The collapse of the left's ideology is in large part due to a lack of development of an economic theory of global processes which could serve as a credible alternative to neoliberalism. We have always been on one planet, but now it is obvious to all. Yet while the plutocracy has effectively abandoned the nation-state -- the left has not really managed to do it.