He's the guy who helps you realize you went up the mountain the wrong way. He's not the map for how to build a trail others can actually climb.

Where I still draw a line is, Zizek's negative dialectics and psychoanalysis are great for blowing up bad narratives (especially among the middle class, the academic left, Trotskyist fantasies, etc.), but they don't tell you how to reduce risk, build durable organizations, or survive repression.

The whole "they know very well what they're doing, and they do it nonetheless" line actually fits my own point that people can be lucid and still reproduce the system.

So my "good/bad ideology" spectrum still applies, but it's not a simple "workers = good ideology, PMC = bad ideology." Precarity narrows the room for bullshit, it doesn't erase it. Zizek isn't some crude "false consciousness" guy.

PS-
Even in social democratic contexts, people act as if they deserve their position and feel anxious about wanting too much. The explanation of how you're being screwed isn't pre given, fascist, reactionary, or nationalist frames can win workers too.

When it comes to immediate material interests for precarious workers, like whether they can pay rent next month or if they'll get fired for speaking up, psychoanalysis doesn't really help much.

It shows that workers aren't immune to bad ideology either. But those are things people pick up trying to make sense of bigger, more abstract complexities that aren't part of their immediate reality which can be falsified or proven by their own common sense.

and of course the very notion of good/bad ideology, I made up to explain my point here, is itself ideological. But it is helpful. I mean psychoanalysis does work in working class contexts when you're dealing with nationalism, racism, the whole hard work pays off fantasy, religious stuff, whatever.

It is a slow game, only for the most resilient.

It is a slow game, only for the most resilient.

Yes, we need Zizek, but to treat the psychosis of the middle class and way up. But for the precarious workers, you just need to do what Zohran is doing, making their lives better and win them over, then stay in power and enact your socialist agendas in the future.

Whoever they find genuinely promises it to them, they will vote for him. They don't care about the socialist fantasy. They just understand their immediate. Assuming they know beyond their immediate is idealization of them, which a lot of socialists are victims of.

Yes, the workers need leadership, but it doesn't mean that they are waiting for when it will arrive and they will become revolutionary. No, they are in such a precarious situation that all they expect from their leaders is to improve their immediate conditions.

is very good at handling. If Zizek thinks the workers are in a bind and are waiting on a political form or leadership that can actually change the situation, then it is also him who needs psychoanalysis to treat his psychosis.

The workers, fortunately, are reasonable enough to know it. Again, this Trotskyist fantasy is also an educated middle class bad ideology (now here bad in the sense it doesn't do anything materially to organize the workers but is waiting for a fantastical revolutionary party), which psychoanalysis

This is totally delusional. It is very much the material constraints that are holding the workers back from organizing and not an absence of a serious revolutionary party. Even if you have one, the system will come down hard cracking on it.