This is was the point of my big fight with Simon Critchley. I think it’s too easy to play this moralistic game – state power is corrupted, so let’s withdraw into this role of ethical critic of power. Here, I’m an old Hegelian. I hate the position of "beautiful soul", which is: "I remain outside, in a safe place; I don’t want to dirty my hands." In this ironic sense, I am a Leninist. Lenin wasn’t afraid to dirty his hands. That’s what I miss in today’s left. When you get power, if you can, grab it, even if it is a desperate situation. Do whatever is possible.

I realized that Europeans were beginning to resemble Americans in their attachment to creature comforts, in a certain over-simplification of their inward life and in the cult of technology and sport. I wanted to reassure myself and, bearing in mind the representatives of the new intelligentsia whom I had met in New York, Boston and New Orleans, I tried to show that many Americans were beginning to resemble Europeans: 'America is not a world that stands still, it is constantly shifting. Yesterday's puritans become hard-drinking neurotics, Hemingway characters. The sons of Baptists and Methodists read the New Yorker which satirizes Americanism. In fact, no European will ever be able to debunk America as well as the Americans do it themselves; and in this lies the promise of growth. I am certain that those Americans who criticize America are fervently patriotic. They are the new pioneers; they too are consumed with a fever, but not with "gold fever": they are searching for spiritual values; skyscrapers do not satisfy them, and if they deride these soaring buildings it is not because they prefer shacks but because they prefer soaring thoughts and soaring emotions.'

When new models were displayed to the masses at the great parades in the Red Square or elsewhere, the crowds stood in reverent silence and then broke into jubilant shouts of triumph. What was the meaning of this thunderous roar, when on the ground turtles of steel and serpents of iron rolled past, when in the sky triangles, arrows, and rockets shaped like fish, arranged themselves with lightening rapidity into ever-changing formations? Though the display was continual, in this silence and these shouts something evil, old as time, manifested itself in man, who is an outsmarter and setter of traps. Invisible, Cain and Tubulcain marched past in the parade of phantoms.

The problem is not that we have not been truly capitalist, not capitalist enough, but that capitalism by definition constantly averts its own intrinsic tendency toward self-destruction. And so a ‘true capitalism’ would amount to the end of capitalism.

Here, Slavoj Zizek’s infamous call to fully identify with the symbolic mandate, to reject the cynical/ironic distance that has passed for resistance thus far, gains a new meaning. We shouldn’t any longer try to resist capitalism, or try to live outside of capitalism, to show that ‘another world is possible’. Capitalism has only been able to sustain itself thus far by always resisting itself, by cynically applying a double standard to the developed and underdeveloped world, to capital and workers. We shouldn’t try to restrict the free flow of capital, but claim that real capitalism would grant just as much freedom of movement to workers. We shouldn’t strive for the right of greater subsidization and protection for underdeveloped countries, but totally reject the privilege of doing so that developed countries grant themselves. We shouldn’t prove we can live comfortably without engaging in capitalism, but accept that capitalism works by ‘refusing to engage in capitalism’. We must no longer deny our complete complicity with capitalism, and insodoing, deprive capital of its greatest defense mechanism.