"In the good old days of Really Existing Socialism, a joke popular among dissidents was used to illustrate the futility of their protests. In the fifteenth century, when Russia was occupied by Mongols, a peasant and his wife were walking aIong a dusty country road; a Mongol warrior on a horse stopped at their side and told the peasant he would now proceed to rape his wife; he then added: "But since there is a lot of dust on the ground, you must hold my testicles while I rape your wife, so that they wil not get dirty!" Once the Mongol had done the deed and ridden away, the peasant started laughing and jumping with joy. His surprised wife asked: "How can you be jumping with joy when I was just brutally raped in your presence?" The farmer answered: "But I got him! His bals are covered with dust!" This sad joke reveals the predicament of the dissidents: they thought they were dealing serious blows to the party nomenklatura, but al they were doing was slightly soiling the nomenklatura's testicles, while th.. ruling elite carried on raping the people . .. Is today's critical Left not in a similar position? (Among the contemporary names for ever-so-slightly smearing those in power, we could list "deconstruction;' or the "protection of individual freedoms:') In a famous confrontation at the university of Salamanca in 1936, Miguel de Unamuno quipped at the Francoists: "Vencereis, pero no convencereis" ("You wil win, but you wil not convince")-is this all that today's Left can say to triumphant global capitalism? Is the Left predestined to continue to play the role of those who, on the contrary, convince but nevertheless stil lose (and are especially convincing in retroactively explaining the reasons for their own failure)? Our task is to discover how to go a step further. Our Thesis 11 should be: in our societies, critical Leftists have hitherto only succeeded in soiling those in power, whereas the real point is to castrate them .. . But how can we do this? We should learn here from the failures of twentieth century Leftist politics. The task is not to conduct the castration in a direct climactic confrontation, but to undermine those in power with patient ideologico-critical work, so that although they are still in power, one all of a sudden notices that the powers-that-be are afflicted with unnaturally high-pitched voices." from First As Tragedy, Then As Farce by Slavoj Zizek