Some Thoughts on Zizek vs Peterson

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The debate finally happened. Check it out here

As expected, Peterson didn't know what he was talking about. And Zizek should have gone much harder. I don't know why Zizek decided to attack the 'queer conspiracy'. Overall I thought he was far too polite. He should have rubbed Peterson's face in the man's own bullshit.

It was mostly the two speaking past each other. Not really much of a debate.

Peterson admits he only read the communist manifesto. That was his ‘preparation’ for the debate. He doesn’t address Zizek’s work (which he hasn’t read). He doesn’t address Das Kapital, which is the actual theoretical foundation of Marxism. Instead, he addresses the Communist Manifesto, a pamphlet that was meant summarize and exhort the principles of the League of the Just (later called the Communist League).

Peterson’s critiques are standard. Just real boilerplate reactionary talking points.

“I rarely read something that makes so many conceptual errors per sentence.”

Then he proceeds to just repeat “it’s wrong” in different ways. He claims Marx and Engels lacked a deep conceptual thinking, in the Jungian sense.

It mean, that’s a pretty laughable claim against the two. You know, considering that they took French Sociology, German Idealism, English Political Economy and the history of class struggle / revolutionary organizations and combined it all into a new conceptual way of thinking: Marxism.

Peterson claims the ‘truths’ of the CM are considered undeniable. He presents it as if Marx came to his conclusions purely through contemplation, and not as evidence. Peterson is thoroughly pedantic, here. He comes off just as what he is: a professor searching for some kind of neutral ground.

But Marx wasn’t a schoolboy. He was a revolutionary. Marxism is an ideology of liberation. It’s not some theoretical pamphlet that needs to be approved of by some bourgeois swine like Peterson. It belongs to the people, and is a weapon for their liberation. Where was Peterson to expound his philistine dereliction celebrated as his ‘original thought’ when the Vietnamese people were fighting Amerikkkan Imperialism? Where was Peterson when Che fought the dictatorship in Cuba? Where was Peterson when Chinese peasants were overthrowing their oppressive landlords in China, monsters who grew rich as they starved to death?

Peterson claims that hierarchy is inherent to human biology, and that it’s simply a reflection of the hierarchy in the animal kingdom, and nature to a larger degree.

Class struggle, he says, is simply a reflection of this.

Like most biological determinists, who take discoveries of nature and them project them back on to humans in a kind of reverse anthropomorphism, Peterson cannot grasp this conceptual thinking is purely self-affirming.

That is, he is taking his presuppositions, packaging them under the title of ‘scientific truth about nature’, then declaring them real.

This is the case not just for Peterson, but for many others. He’s just guilty of it as far as his lobster-argument goes. But the same error of projection exists for any argument claiming “humans are animals, animals are X, therefore humans are X”.

Not to deny that we have a deep genetic basis in nature. But that this method of thinking, more than clarifying what that nature is, usually ends up being lazy and self-fulfilling. In reality, what’s being described are social relations that are created by people, historically relative and unlikely to continue to exist under different social conditions.

Other examples:

“It’s natural for men to do X and women to do Y.”

“X humans naturally have Y IQ.”

“People from X naturally can ______. People from Y naturally can ______.”

These statements are ludicrous, and yet biological determinism has seen a rebirth in the past decade. It's often been the bedrock of attempts to legitimize white supremacy under the guise of 'scientific racism'. It should be no surprise that those who claim the neutral ground of being scientific rarely are.

Also just holy shit. Peterson is BORING!