Lenin 2017. Slavoj Žižek

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СКАЧАТЬ terms, a revolutionary process is not a gradual progress, but a repetitive movement, a movement of repeating the beginning again and again. This is exactly where we are today, after the ‘obscure disaster’ of 1989. As in 1922, the voices from below ring with malicious joy all around us: ‘Serves you right, you lunatics who wanted to enforce their totalitarian vision on society!’ Others try to conceal their malicious glee, raising their eyes to heaven in sorrow, as if to say: ‘It grieves us sorely to see our fears justified! How noble was your vision of creating a just society! Our heart beat in sympathy with you, but our reason told us that your noble plans could end only in misery and new forms of servitude!’ While rejecting any compromise with these seductive voices, we certainly now have to ‘begin from the beginning’, not ‘building on the foundations of the revolutionary epoch of the twentieth century’ (from 1917 to 1989 or, more precisely, 1968), but ‘descending’ to the starting point in order to choose a different path.

      If the communist project is to be renewed as a true alternative to global capitalism, we must make a clear break with the twentieth-century communist experience. One should always bear in mind that 1989 represented the defeat not only of communist state socialism but also of Western social democracy. Nowhere is the misery of today’s left more palpable than in its ‘principled’ defence of the social-democratic welfare state. In the absence of a feasible radical leftist project, all the left can do is to bombard the state with demands for the expansion of the welfare state, knowing full well that the state will not be able to deliver. This necessary disappointment will then serve as a reminder of the basic impotence of the social-democratic left and thus push the people towards a new radical revolutionary left. Needless to say, such a politics of cynical ‘pedagogy’ is destined to fail, since it is fighting a losing battle: in the present politico-ideological constellation, the reaction to the inability of the welfare state to deliver will be rightist populism. In order to avoid this reaction, the left will have to propose its own positive project beyond the confines of the social-democratic welfare state. This is also why it is totally erroneous to pin one’s hopes on strong sovereign nation-states that can defend the welfare state against transnational bodies like the European Union which, so the story goes, serve as the instruments of global capital to dismantle whatever remains of the welfare state.¹⁷ From here, it is only a short step to accepting a ‘strategic alliance’ with the nationalist right worried about the dilution of national identity in transnational Europe. (As has de facto already happened with the Brexit victory in the UK.)

      The walls which are now being thrown up all around the world are not of the same nature as the Berlin Wall, the icon of the Cold War. Today’s walls appear not to belong to the same notion, since the same wall often serves multiple functions: as a defence against terrorism, illegal immigrants or smuggling, as a cover for colonial land-grabbing, etc. In spite of this appearance of multiplicity, however, Wendy Brown is right to insist that we are dealing with the same phenomenon, even though its examples are usually not perceived as cases of the same notion: today’s walls are a reaction to the threat to national sovereignty posed by the ongoing process of globalisation: ‘Rather than resurgent expressions of nation-state sovereignty, the new walls are icons of its erosion. While they may appear as hyperbolic tokens of such sovereignty, like all hyperbole, they reveal a tremulousness, vulnerability, dubiousness, or instability at the core of what they aim to express – qualities that are themselves antithetical to sovereignty and thus elements of its undoing.’¹⁸ The most striking thing about these walls is their theatrical, and rather inefficient, nature: basically, they consist of old-fashioned materials (concrete and metal), representing a weirdly medieval countermeasure to the immaterial forces which effectively threaten national sovereignty today (digital and commercial mobility, advanced cyberweaponry). Brown is also right to highlight the role of organised religion, alongside globalisation, as a major trans-statal agency posing a threat to state sovereignty. For example, one can argue that China, in spite of its recent softening towards religion as an instrument of social stability, so ferociously opposes some religions (Tibetan Buddhism, the Falun Gong movement) precisely in so far as it perceives them to be a threat to national sovereignty and unity (Buddhism yes, but under the Chinese state control; Catholicism yes, but the bishops nominated by the Pope must be screened by the Chinese authorities …).

      One of the trickiest forms of false fidelity to twentieth-century communism is the rejection of all Really Existing Socialisms on behalf of some authentic working-class movement waiting to explode. Back in 1983, Georges Peyrol wrote a piece entitled ‘Thirty Ways of Easily Recognising an Old Marxist’, a wonderfully ironic portrait of a traditional Marxist certain that – sooner or later, we just have to be patient – an authentic revolutionary workers’ movement will rise up again, victoriously sweeping away capitalist rule along with the corrupt official leftist parties and trade unions … Frank Ruda has pointed out that Georges Peyrol is one of the pseudonyms of Alain Badiou:¹⁹ the target of his attack were those surviving Trotskyists who continued to keep the faith that, out of the crisis of the Marxist left, a new authentic revolutionary working-class movement would somehow emerge.²⁰ How, then, to break out of this deadlock? What if we risk taking a fateful step further and reject not only state and market regulation but also their utopian shadow: the idea of a direct transparent regulation ‘from below’ of the social process of production, as the economic counterpart to the dream of the ‘immediate democracy’ of workers’ councils?

       Leninist Freedom

      What, then, of freedom? Here is how Lenin states his position in a polemic against the Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionaries’ critique of Bolshevik power in 1922:

      Indeed, the sermons which … the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries preach express their true nature – ‘The revolution has gone too far. What you are saying now we have been saying all the time, permit us to say it again.’ But we say in reply: ‘Permit us to put you before a firing squad for saying that. Either you refrain from expressing your views, or, if you insist on expressing your political views publicly in the present circumstances, when our position is far more difficult than it was when the whiteguards were directly attacking us, then you will have only yourselves to blame if we treat you as the worst and most pernicious whiteguard elements.’²¹

      This Leninist freedom of choice – not ‘Life or money!’ but ‘Life or critique!’ – combined with Lenin’s dismissive attitude towards the ‘liberal’ notion of freedom, accounts for his bad reputation among liberals. Their case largely rests on their rejection of the standard Marxist–Leninist opposition of ‘formal’ and ‘actual’ freedom: as even leftist liberals like Claude Lefort emphasise again and again, freedom is in its very notion ‘formal’, so that ‘actual freedom’ equals the lack of freedom.²² In other words, with regard to freedom, Lenin is best remembered for his famous retort ‘Freedom – yes, but for WHOM? To do WHAT?’ – for him, in the above-quoted case of the Mensheviks, their ‘freedom’ to criticize the Bolshevik government effectively amounted to the ‘freedom’ to undermine the workers’ and peasants’ government on behalf of the counter-revolution. After the terrifying experience of Really Existing Socialism, is it not all too obvious today where the fault of this reasoning resides? First, it reduces a historical constellation to a closed, fully contextualised situation in which the ‘objective’ consequences of one’s acts are fully determined (‘independently of your intentions, what you are doing now objectively serves …’); second, the position of enunciation of such statements usurps the right to decide what your acts ‘objectively mean’, so that their apparent ‘objectivism’ (the focus on ‘objective meaning’) is the form of appearance of its opposite, a thorough subjectivism: I decide what your acts objectively mean, since I define the context of the situation (for example, if I conceive of my power as the immediate equivalent/expression of the power of the working class, then everyone who opposes me is ‘objectively’ an enemy of the working class). Against this full contextualisation, one should emphasise that freedom is ‘actual’ precisely and only as the capacity to ‘transcend’ the coordinates of a given situation, to ‘posit the presuppositions’ of one’s activity (as Hegel would have put it), i.e., to redefine the very situation СКАЧАТЬ