I would go even further: I think that Marxism is itself a capitalist “product”. It appeals to those within capitalism who have the least to enjoy and provides them with a perspective of power and entitlement. In the end Marxism has not led to a breach in capitalist hegemony, it has only integrated all types of revolt into the system. You can not these days be a Marxist and not be “hip” and “interesting”. Look at Zizek himself. This is why I can not consider myself a revolutionary or Marxist of any kind - to my mind, philosophy is the only way out of the symbolic order. That is, what I try is to disclose a symbolic order that encompasses capitalism and its drive structure. I think we can never move past capitalism, we can only transform it by translating it. I believe that Capitalism is ‘proper’ in that it does address the core of the human condition, whereas Socialism only addresses a small part of it.
The pockets of fascism in humans are fucking endless, Humans are fascists. The only reason the world is not a giant fascist machine is that everyone wants to be the bloody Führer, and fascism allows only for so many beneficiaries, it requires endless hordes of slaves. Capitalism has less restraints, people can behave like fascists without being seen as fascists. Most often, the most fascistic people do not even know they are being fascists, they go about priding themselves on their economic viability and their smooth ways with the system. This gets awfully close to the reason I’ve restricted my activities on ILP though, the last thing I want is to bring my emotions about unconscious fascism into this thread. I might just say that I sometimes openly behave like a brute or a tyrant because I sense that the environment is cluttered and clogged with the kind of fascist-goo that is the excess result of the Century of the Self - and which stifles, chokes what is reaching for proper self-hood, signifiership, in premature phases.
The idea of selfhood is easily attained, but the idea gives rise to such excess arrogance hypocrisy and blindness that the transition from ideating a self to fully taking responsibility for it, is rarely made. What exists instead of an army of autonomous selves now is a goo, a mob, a plaster of quasi individuals who act to preserve their idea of selfhood, at the cost of every opportunity of sacrifice that would lead them along the path to true selfhood. I believe selfhood, being a fully fledged human entity, requires that one does not expect reward or societal progress, because these all rely on accepting existent, ‘dead’ terms as the terms of ones self-valuing. Early success in life is bound to make one a slave, a sub-entity, at least on a political/potentiating level. It is bound to make one a function of whichever part of the machine has use for this particular subject.
We can not however accept this as a reason to steer away from societal dynamics, economy, etc - rather, a new kind of standard for success would have to be set. The biggest problem is that the whole concept of succeeding has been absorbed into a symbolic order - which is thereby made immune to failure.
I probably go a bit too far in generalizing literally everything under the capitalist signifier. But capitalism gets something absolutely right, and there is no way around that. What it gets right is the interplay between value and self-value. It ‘understands’ (uses, relies on) that the individual is constantly in the process of attributing value in order to persist. We value ‘desperately’ - to bestow value on objects, products, other people, systems, ideologies, countries, sports heroes, personal accomplishments, talents, love affairs, diets, drug experiences, is as crucial to our being as breathing. Perhaps even more crucial. We’d ultimately be glad to stop breathing to not have to stop valuing that which is most dear to us. Without values, we do not exist. We might live for a while, but when our sense of self as structurally being able to value in terms of itself has given way to some kind of ‘objectivity’, death has already made its introduction. Objectivity and death are, to me, the same thing. Capitalism is pure subjectivity, thus pure ‘murder’.