In April 2011, the Chinese government prohibited on TV and films

and in novels all stories that contain alternate reality or time travel. This is a good sign for China. It means that people still dream about alternatives, so you have to prohibit this dream. Here we don’t think of prohibition. Because the ruling system has even suppressed our capacity to dream. Look at the movies that we see all the time. It’s easy to imagine the end of the world. An asteroid destroying all life and so on. But you cannot imagine the end of capitalism. So what are we doing here?



Let me tell you a wonderful old joke from communist times. A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors. So he told his friends: Let’s establish a code. If the letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I said. If it is written in red ink, it is false. After a month his friends get a first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theaters show good films from the West. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink. This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink. The language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom, war and terrorism, and so on falsifies freedom.



-Slavoj Žižek





Now we are told not to bother the market.. do not upset the market... We find ourselves in a new era of the Golden Calf. Priests get on television and tell us so and so will upset things very much, even the mention of certain ideas could very well throw the whole world into chaos! We cannot ask this false idol for anything - it only takes. With this incredible redistribution, seemingly overnight, we have not only lost our nationalities, our families, our religion, but also our democracy. Nothing must constrain or block the market, they told us in the 80's, but suddenly anything good for the rest of us is constraining and blocking the market. Even our idea of control economy has been hijacked, commodified, and now lives in service to the market. Capitalism in overdrive. Consume and destroy.





"It's the end of the world as we know it." - REM





So as we suck dry the resources in the ground just to turn around and throw it back in the ocean, rivers, streams, and groundwater, we will all develop cholera and die. As the market staggers to its greatest peaks it will predictably crash in a major way. Wars will break out over resources... not so we can turn them into gas guzzlers on the highway, but just to feed our populations.



The biggest achievement of Neoliberalism, of course, is that it was fostered and emerged from the empty spaces left in Marxist and Institutionalist thought. The Left could not fix everything, so this monster grew in the spaces untouched, and, knowing the Left's weaknesses, slew the remaining options with speed and ease. Now that it is all ground underfoot, these skeletal tools of no use anyway, what is the answer? In this world of cynicism, can the protests minus the radicals get us anywhere? When there are only moderates left to negotiate, the parties can only inch closer and closer towards the edge of the cliff. I ask you: what is to be done?