Lenin 2017. Slavoj Žižek

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СКАЧАТЬ analysis of Lenin’s much-maligned What Is to Be Done?, Lars T. Lih convincingly refuted the standard reading of this book as presenting an argument for a centralised elitist professional revolutionary organisation. According to this reading, Lenin’s main thesis was that the working class cannot achieve adequate class consciousness ‘spontaneously’, through its own ‘organic’ development; this truth has to be introduced into it from outside (by the Party intellectuals who provide ‘objective’ scientific knowledge).⁴⁸ Lih shifts the focus to the relationship between worker-followers and worker-leaders, and asks ‘what happens when these two meet, when they interact. What happens can be summed up in one word: a miracle. This is Lenin’s word, chudo in Russian, and, when you start looking, words like “miracle”, “miraculous”, are fairly common in Lenin’s vocabulary.’⁴⁹ To exemplify this ‘miracle’, Lih explains, Lenin looked back to the Russian populist revolutionaries from the 1870s and asked:

      Why are these people heroes? Why do we look up to them as model? Because they had a centralised, conspirational underground organisation? No, they are heroes because they were inspiring leaders. Here’s what Lenin says about these earlier revolutionaries: ‘their inspirational preaching met with an answering call from the masses awakening in elemental [stikhiinyi] fashion, and the leaders’ seething energy is taken up and supported by the energy of the revolutionary class.’⁵⁰

      What Lenin expects from the Bolsheviks is something similar: not cold ‘objective’ (non-partisan) knowledge but a fully engaged subjective stance that can mobilise the followers – it is in this sense that even a single individual can trigger an avalanche: ‘You brag about your practicability and you don’t see (a fact known to any Russian praktik) what miracles for the revolutionary cause can be brought about not only by a circle but by a lone individual.’⁵¹ Lih reads along the same lines the famous claim from What Is to Be Done?: ‘Give me an organisation of revolutionaries and I will turn Russia around!’ Again, rejecting the interpretation that ‘a band of intelligentsia conspirators can somehow wave their hands and destroy tsarism’, Lih provides his own paraphrase of Lenin:

      Comrades, look around you! Can’t you see that the Russian workers are champing at the bit to receive the message of revolution and to act on it? Can’t you see the potential for leadership that already exists among the activists, the praktiki? Can’t you see how many more leaders would arise out of the workers if we set our minds to encouraging their rise? Given all this potential, what is holding things up? Why is the tsar still here? We, comrades – we’re the bottleneck! If we could hone our underground skills and bring together what the tsarist regime wants so desperately to keep apart – worker leaders and worker followers, the message and the audience – then, by God, we could blow this joint apart!⁵²

      Such a Master is needed especially in situations of deep crisis. The function of the Master here is to enact an authentic division – a division between those who want to hang on within the old parameters and those who recognise the necessity of change. Such a division, rather than opportunistic compromises, is the only path to true unity.

      In the spirit of today’s ideology which rejects traditional hierarchy, the pyramid-like subordination to a Master, in favour of pluralising rhizomatic networks, political analysts like to point out that the anti-neoliberal protests of recent years across Europe and the US, from Occupy Wall Street to Greece and Spain, had no central agency, no Central Committee, coordinating their activity – they were just multiple groups interacting, mostly through social media like Facebook or Twitter, and coordinating their actions spontaneously. But is this ‘molecular’ spontaneous self-organisation really the most effective new form of ‘resistance’? Is it not that the opposite side, capital itself, already acts increasingly like what Deleuzian theory calls the post-Oedipal multitude? Power itself has to enter a dialogue at this level, answering tweet with tweet – the Pope and Trump are now both on Twitter.

      Furthermore, as to the molecular self-organising multitude versus the hierarchical order sustained by a charismatic Leader, note the irony of the fact that Venezuela, a country praised by many for its attempts to develop modes of direct democracy (local councils, cooperatives, worker-run factories), was also a country led by Hugo Chávez, a strong charismatic leader if there ever was one. It is as if the Freudian rule of transference is at work here also: in order for individuals to ‘reach beyond themselves’, to break out of the passivity of representative politics and engage as direct political agents, the reference to a Leader is necessary, a Leader who allows them to pull themselves out of the swamp like Baron Munchhausen, a Leader who is ‘supposed to know’ what they want. The only path to liberation leads through transference: in order to really awaken individuals from their dogmatic ‘democratic slumber’, from their blind reliance on institutionalised forms of representative democracy, appeals to direct self-organisation are not enough – a new figure of the Master is needed. Recall the famous lines from Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘A une raison’ (‘To a Reason’):

      A tap of your finger on the drum releases all sounds

      and initiates the new harmony.

      A step of yours is the conscription of the new men

      and their marching orders.

      You look away: the new love!

      You look back, – the new love!

      There is absolutely nothing inherently ‘fascist’ in these lines – the supreme paradox of the political dynamic is that a Master is needed to pull individuals out of the quagmire of their inertia and motivate them towards a self-transcending struggle for freedom.

       Master and Analyst

      No matter how emancipatory this new Master is, however, it has to be supplemented by another discursive form. As Moshe Lewin has noted, at the end of his life, Lenin himself intuited this necessity: while fully admitting the dictatorial nature of the Soviet regime, he proposed a new ruling body, the Central Control Commission (CCC). A series of features characterise Lenin’s last struggle:

      1) The insistence on full sovereignty for the national entities that composed the Soviet state: not phoney sovereignty, but full and real. No wonder that, as mentioned earlier, in a letter to the Politburo Stalin openly accused Lenin of ‘national liberalism’.⁵³

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