I - and I still consider myself, I'm sorry to tell you, a Marxist

Host: The rain had only just stopped, leaving the streets slick with reflections—a thousand trembling mirrors beneath the streetlights. The city breathed out a damp, weary sigh, as if it too had endured an argument it didn’t win. Inside a small café near the train station, the neon sign flickered between red and white, like a pulse losing rhythm.

Jack and Jeeny sat by the window, the glow of passing cars sliding across their faces. A half-empty glass of whiskey sat by Jack’s hand, the ice long melted. Jeeny’s tea had gone cold, but she still held it, as if warmth could be remembered.

Host: Outside, the world moved, but in here, time had paused. The conversation was the only motion, a slow and deliberate storm.

Jeeny: “Zizek once said something I can’t stop thinking about. ‘I still consider myself a Marxist and a Communist,’ he said, ‘but I couldn’t help noticing how all the best Marxist analyses are always analyses of a failure.’”

Jack: “That sounds like Zizek. Romanticizing the wreckage while sipping coffee on the ashes of history.”

Host: Jack leaned back, his grey eyes glinting under the dim light. He spoke with the calm of a man who had argued too many times, and won too few.

Jeeny: “You always mock him, but there’s something brutally honest in that line, isn’t there? Maybe to analyze failure is the only way to understand truth.”

Jack: “Or maybe it’s the intellectual’s excuse for losing. Marxists spend decades explaining why the revolution failed—but never how to live without one.”

Jeeny: “But isn’t that the point? To never accept living without one?”

Host: Her voice was soft, but it carried, like a quiet bell cutting through fog.

Jack: “Jeeny, the 20th century is littered with graves dug by good intentions. Lenin, Mao, Castro—each with the dream of a classless world, each leaving behind a trail of bodies. If all the best Marxist analyses are about failure, it’s because Marxism keeps failing.”

Jeeny: “And yet, capitalism hasn’t exactly succeeded either, has it? Inequality’s wider, the planet’s dying, and people work themselves to death for screens that tell them they’re free. Maybe Zizek’s right to stay Marxist—not because it works, but because it should have.”

Host: Jack’s brow furrowed, his fingers drumming against the table, the sound like distant machinery.

Jack: “You know what that sounds like? Faith. Blind, religious faith in a theory that never delivered. Marxists always talk about liberation, but they forget the people who never asked to be liberated by them.”

Jeeny: “And capitalists never ask at all. They just buy. At least Marxists question the price.”

Host: The tension thickened, like smoke that refused to rise. The neon from outside cut through the glass, painting their faces in flickering shades of red.

Jeeny: “You call it failure. I call it courage—to keep analyzing, to keep questioning, even when history laughs. Zizek doesn’t celebrate failure, Jack—he studies it. Because failure exposes the bones of what we really are.”

Jack: “Then tell me—what did the Soviet Union expose? Or the Cultural Revolution? Or Venezuela? The same old bones: greed, power, hierarchy. Human nature doesn’t vanish with slogans.”

Jeeny: “No, it doesn’t. But capitalism worships those same bones and calls it virtue. At least Marxism admits the pain.”

Host: A pause. The rain had started again, a light, uncertain tapping on the glass—like the world listening, hesitant.

Jack: “You really think Zizek believes Marxism can still work? I think he knows it’s dead. He’s just mourning it in public.”

Jeeny: “No. He’s mourning us. Because we stopped imagining something better. That’s the failure he’s analyzing—not Marxism, but our resignation.”

Host: Jack’s eyes shifted, a shadow crossing them, the kind that belongs to old convictions turned to dust.

Jack: “You want to know what I think? The real tragedy is that both sides became caricatures. The Left worships theory, the Right worships profit, and both forget people. Zizek hides behind irony because he knows the audience has stopped listening.”

Jeeny: “Maybe irony’s the only way left to speak truth in a world that sells sincerity by subscription.”

Host: Jeeny leaned forward, her voice lower now, almost trembling.

Jeeny: “You know what failure really means, Jack? It means trying. It means someone believed enough to risk breaking. Marxism failed because it dreamed too much. Capitalism fails because it dreams too little.”

Host: Jack looked at her for a long moment, the sound of the clock on the wall marking the space between them.

Jack: “So what are we supposed to do? Keep dreaming ourselves into hunger?”

Jeeny: “No. But maybe hunger is better than apathy. At least hunger moves you.”

Host: A train rumbled somewhere in the distance, shaking the glass ever so slightly. The moment hung there—fragile, electric.

Jack: “You talk like the revolution’s a love story.”

Jeeny: “It is. Every revolution is. It starts with heartbreak—seeing the world as it is and refusing to let it stay that way.”

Jack: “And like love, it ends in disappointment.”

Jeeny: “Maybe. But disappointment’s still proof of feeling. Zizek’s Marxism isn’t about building utopia—it’s about refusing to stop grieving for the world we lost to cynicism.”

Host: The rain now drummed louder, the windows trembling. Jack rubbed his temples, exhaling smoke into the air, watching it twist, fade, disappear.

Jack: “So we’re supposed to admire the ruins?”

Jeeny: “No. We’re supposed to remember them. Because the moment we stop remembering, we start repeating.”

Host: The bartender turned down the lights. The café felt smaller, almost intimate now, as if the world had shrunk to just two souls and one truth hanging between them.

Jack: “You think analyzing failure makes you immune to it?”

Jeeny: “No. It makes you honest about it.”

Jack: “Honesty doesn’t rebuild anything.”

Jeeny: “Maybe not. But it stops us from worshiping what broke us.”

Host: Jack nodded, slowly. A reluctant understanding, like a man touching the edge of something that might still burn.

Jack: “So maybe Zizek’s not wrong. Maybe all the best analyses are of failure—because success blinds you. You don’t question what works. You only dissect what dies.”

Jeeny: “Exactly. Failure is the autopsy of hope. And maybe we need that. Because somewhere in that body, something’s still breathing.”

Host: The rain began to soften, turning from a storm to a hush. A faint light broke through the clouds, spilling onto their table—a pale, uncertain morning rising over the ruins of night.

Jack: “You really think there’s life left in that corpse of Marxism?”

Jeeny: “No. But maybe in the dream that gave it life.”

Host: Jack smiled, faintly—like a man who’d just realized cynicism was a kind of faith too.

Jack: “You know, Jeeny, you’d make a terrible revolutionary. Too poetic.”

Jeeny: “And you’d make a terrible capitalist. Too human.”

Host: They both laughed, softly—half in weariness, half in recognition. The world outside brightened, the street coming back to life, vendors opening stalls, trains arriving.

Host: The café remained still, holding the last echo of their words.

Host: “All the best Marxist analyses are analyses of failure,” Zizek had said—and maybe that was the secret both of them now understood: that in failure lies the only honest mirror of what it means to hope.

Host: Jack and Jeeny sat there a while longer, watching the light crawl across the table, two souls not reconciled, but quietly awake—the first step, perhaps, of every revolution worth remembering.