Seize
the day: Lenin's legacy The
left is undergoing a shattering experience: the progressive movement
is being compelled to reinvent its whole project. What tends to be forgotten,
however, is that a similar experience gave birth to Leninism. Consider
Lenin's shock when, in the autumn of 1914, every European social democratic
party except the Serbs' followed the 'patriotic line'. How difficult
it must have been, at a time when military conflict had cut the European
continent in half, not to take sides. Think how many supposedly independent-minded
intellectuals, Freud included, succumbed, if only briefly, to the nationalist
temptation. In
1914, an entire world disappeared, taking with it not only the bourgeois
faith in progress, but the socialist movement that accompanied it. Lenin
(the Lenin of What Is to Be Done?) felt the ground fall away from beneath
his feet - there was, in his desperate reaction, no sense of satisfaction,
no desire to say "I told you so." At the same time, the catastrophe
made possible the key Leninist Event: the overcoming of the evolutionary
historicism of the Second International. The kernel of the Leninist
'utopia' - the radical imperative to smash the bourgeois state and invent
a new communal social form without a standing army, police force or
bureaucracy, in which all could take part in the administration of social
matters - arises directly from the ashes of 1914. It wasn't a theoretical
project for some distant future: in October 1917, Lenin claimed that
"we can at once set in motion a state apparatus consisting of 10
if not 20 million people." What we should recognise is the 'madness'
(in the Kierkegaardian sense) of this utopia - in this context, Stalinism
stands for a return to 'common sense'. The explosive potential of The
State and Revolution can't be overestimated: in its pages, as Neil Harding
wrote in Leninism (1996), "the vocabulary and grammar of the Western
tradition of politics was abruptly dispensed with." What
followed can be called, borrowing the title of Althusser's text on Machiavelli,
la solitude de Lenine: a time when he stood alone, struggling against
the current in his own party. When, in his April Theses of 1917, Lenin
identified the Augenblick, the unique chance for a revolution, the initial
response on the part of a large majority of his party colleagues was
either stupor or contempt. No prominent Bolshevik leader supported his
call to revolution, and the editorial board of Pravda took the extraordinary
step of dissociating themselves and the Party from Lenin's proposals.
Bogdanov characterised the April Theses as "the delirium of a madman";
Nadezhda Krupskaya concluded: "I am afraid it looks as if Lenin
has gone crazy." Indispensable
though Lenin's personal intervention was, the story of the October Revolution
should not be turned into the myth of a lone genius. Lenin succeeded
because his appeal, while bypassing the party nomenklatura, was understood
at the level of revolutionary micropolitics: local committees were set
up throughout Russia's big cities, determined to ignore the authority
of the 'legitimate' government and to take things into their own hands.
In
the spring of 1917, Lenin was fully aware of the paradox of the situation:
now that the February Revolution had toppled the tsarist regime, Russia
was the most democratic country in Europe, with an unprecedented degree
of mass mobilisation, and freedom of organisation and of the press -
and yet this freedom made everything ambiguous. If there is a common
thread running through everything Lenin wrote between the February and
October Revolutions, it is his insistence on the gap that separates
the political struggle from its definable goals: immediate peace, the
redistribution of land and, of course, the giving over of "all
power to the soviets", that is, the dismantling of existing state
apparatuses and their replacement with new commune-like forms of social
management. This is the gap between revolution in the sense of the imaginary
explosion of freedom at the sublime moment of universal solidarity when
"everything seems possible," and the hard work of social reconstruction
which must be performed if this explosion is to leave any traces in
the social edifice. This
gap - which recalls the interval between 1789 and 1793 in the French
Revolution - is the space of Lenin's unique intervention. The fundamental
lesson of revolutionary materialism is that revolution must strike twice.
It is not that the first moment has the form of a revolution, with the
substance having to be filled in later, but rather the opposite: the
first revolution retains the old mindset, the belief that freedom and
justice can be achieved if we simply use the already-existing state
apparatus and its democratic mechanisms, that the 'good' party might
win a free election and implement the socialist transformation 'legally'.
(The clearest expression of this illusion is Karl Kautsky's thesis,
formulated in the 1920s, that the logical form of the first stage leading
from capitalism to socialism would be a parliamentary coalition of bourgeois
and proletarian parties.) Those who oscillate, and are afraid to take
the second step of overcoming the old forms, are those who (in Robespierre's
words) want a "revolution without revolution". In
his writings of 1917, Lenin saves his most acerbic irony for those who
engage in a vain search for some kind of guarantee for the revolution,
either in the guise of a reified notion of social necessity ("it's
too early for the socialist revolution, the working class isn't yet
mature"), or of a normative, democratic legitimacy ("the majority
of the population isn't on our side, so the revolution would not really
be democratic"). It is as if the revolutionary agent requires the
permission of some representative of the Other before he risks seizing
state power. For Lenin, as for Lacan, the revolution 'ne s'autorise
que d'elle-même'. The wariness of taking power prematurely, the search
for a guarantee, is an expression of fear before the abyss. This is
what Lenin repeatedly denounces as "opportunism": an inherently
false position which hides fear behind a protective screen of supposedly
objective facts, laws or norms. The first step in combatting it is to
announce clearly: "What, then, is to be done? We must aussprechen
was ist, 'state the facts', admit the truth that there is a tendency,
or an opinion, in our central committee . . ." What
happened when Lenin became more conscious of the limitations of Bolshevik
power? Here a contrast should be drawn between Lenin and Stalin. In
Lenin's very last writings, long after he renounced the utopia of State
and Revolution, there are the contours of a modest 'realistic' project
for the Bolsheviks. Given the economic underdevelopment and cultural
backwardness of the Russian masses, there was, he realised, no way for
Russia to "pass directly to socialism". All that Soviet power
could do was to combine the moderate politics of "state capitalism"
with the cultural education of the peasant masses. Facts and figures
revealed "what a vast amount of urgent spadework we still have
to do to reach the standard of an ordinary west European civilised country
. . . We must bear in mind the semi-Asiatic ignorance from which we
have not yet extricated ourselves." Lenin repeatedly warns against
the direct "implantation of communism": "Under no circumstances
should we immediately introduce strictly communist ideas into the countryside.
As long as the countryside lacks the material basis for communism, it
will be harmful, in fact, I should say, fatal, for communism to do so."
His recurrent motif is: "The most harmful thing here would be haste."
Against this insistence on "cultural revolution", Stalin opted
for the anti-Leninist notion of "building socialism in one country".
This
doesn't mean, however, that Lenin silently adopted the Menshevik criticism
of Bolshevik utopianism, that revolution must follow a preordained course,
and can occur only when the necessary material conditions are in place.
Lenin realises, writing in the early 1920s, that the main task for the
Bolsheviks is to meet the responsibilities of a progressive bourgeois
regime (the universal provision of education and so on). However, the
fact that the agent of development is proletarian revolutionary power
changes the situation fundamentally: there is a chance that these measures
will be implemented in such a way as to throw off their bourgeois ideological
framework - education will serve the people, rather than being a mask
for the promotion of bourgeois class interests. The properly dialectical
paradox is that the very hopelessness of the Russian situation (the
backwardness that compels the proletarian power to engage in the bourgeois
civilising process) can be turned into an advantage: "What if the
complete hopelessness of the situation, by stimulating the efforts of
the workers and peasants tenfold, offered us the opportunity to create
the fundamental requisites of civilisation in a different way from that
of west European countries?" We
have, then, two incompatible models of the revolution: to wait for the
moment of the final crisis, when revolution will explode "at its
own proper time" according to the necessity of historical evolution;
or to assert that revolution has no "proper time", that the
opportunity for it is something that emerges and has to be seized. Lenin
insists that the extraordinary set of circumstances, like those in Russia
in 1917, can provide a way to undermine the norm itself. I would argue
that this belief is more persuasive today than ever. We live in an era
when the state and its apparatuses, including its political agents,
are less and less able to articulate key issues. The illusion that the
pressing problems facing Russia in 1917 (peace, land distribution etc)
could have been solved through parliamentary means is in effect the
same as today's illusion that the ecological threat can be avoided by
applying market logic (making polluters pay for the damage they cause).
How,
then, does Hélène Carrère d'Encausse's new study stand in the light
of all this? Her basic approach is that, now communism is over, it is
time for an objective assessment of Lenin's contribution. Within these
co-ordinates, the book tries to give Lenin his due. Carrère d'Encausse
makes it clear that the Stalinist state apparatus grew out of the NEP
compromise. If the state was to step back and make room for the market,
private property and so on, it had to achieve a tighter control of society
so that the gains of the revolution would not be endangered by the emerging
new classes. A capitalist economic infrastructure was to be counterbalanced
by a socialist political and ideological superstructure. Carrère
d'Encausse also foregrounds how, in the struggle to succeed Lenin, Trotsky,
Bukharin and the rest had nothing but contempt for Stalin's new administrative
role as general secretary, dismissing him as a mere manager: they failed
to appreciate the power that went with the post. When, in 1922, Lenin
submitted to Pravda the article Better Fewer, but Better, which was
directed against Stalin's authoritarianism, Bukharin, the editor-in-chief,
saw no reason to publish it; one member of the Politburo suggested that
they print a single copy of the paper containing the text, and give
it to Lenin. On
the national question, Carrère d'Encausse writes that Lenin unconditionally
opposed the nationalism of large countries and endorsed the right to
sovereignty of small nations, independently of who was in control of
them. For Russia itself, he advocated a policy that would favour the
oppressed small nations - "a sort of affirmative action before
the fact". Today, this stance is more resonant than ever. It is
no surprise that anti-Americanism in Europe is most clearly discernible
in the 'big' nations. The complaint is often made that globalisation
threatens the sovereignty of nation states; but it is not the small
states so much as the second-rank (ex-)world powers - countries like
the UK, Germany and France - which fear that, once fully immersed in
the newly emerging global empire, they will be reduced to the same level
as, say, Austria, Belgium or even Luxembourg. The hostility to Americanisation
in France, expressed by both leftists and right-wing nationalists, is
ultimately a refusal to accept the fact that France is losing its hegemonic
role in Europe. The
levelling of larger and smaller nation-states should be counted among
the beneficial effects of globalisation: the contempt shown in the west
for the post-communist eastern European states betrays a wounded narcissism.
Interestingly, the same logic was at work in the former Yugoslavia:
not only Serbs, but most of the western powers, thought Serbia alone
had enough substance to form a state on its own. Throughout the 1990s,
even the radical democratic critics of Milosevic who rejected Serb nationalism
acted on the presupposition that only Serbia, after overthrowing Milosevic,
could become a thriving democracy; the other ex-Yugoslav nations were
too provincial to do so. This brings to mind Engels's dismissal of the
small Balkan nations as reactionary relics. On
Lenin's personality, Carrère d'Encausse rehashes all the old arguments
about his ruthless cruelty and indifference towards mass suffering,
but discussing the fate of the Worker's Opposition in 1921, she does
note that "this was another example of Lenin's singular method,
consisting of eliminating not his opponents but their ideas, allowing
the losers to remain in the governing bodies." It's hard to imagine
a stronger contrast to Stalinist policies. Lenin's detractors like to
evoke his reaction to Beethoven's Appassionata - he started to cry,
then claimed that a revolutionary cannot afford such sentimentality
- as proof of his excessive powers of self-control. However, might this
anecdote not simply bear witness to an extreme sensitivity, and Lenin's
knowledge that it needed to be kept in check for the sake of the political
struggle? In
their very triviality, the details of the Bolsheviks' daily lives in
1917 and the following years make it obvious how different they were
from the Stalinist nomenklatura. Leaving his flat for the Smolny Institute,
on the evening of 24 October 1917, Lenin took a tram and asked the conductress
if there was any fighting going on in the city centre that day. In the
years immediately after the October Revolution, he mostly travelled
around in a car with only his driver and bodyguard Gil for protection;
they were shot at, stopped by the police and arrested (the policemen
did not recognise Lenin). Once, after a visit to a school in the suburbs,
bandits posing as police stole the car, and Lenin and Gil had to walk
to the nearest police station to report the theft. On 30 August 1918,
Lenin was shot while talking to workers outside a factory he had just
visited. Gil drove him to the Kremlin, where there were no doctors;
Nadezhda Krupskaya suggested that someone should run out to the nearest
grocer's shop for a lemon. As
to Lenin's historical achievement, Carrère d'Encausse rightly emphasises
that his genius lay in his ability to move beyond the typical narrative
of the revolution, in which a brief, ecstatic explosion of utopian energy
is followed by a sobering morning after. Lenin possessed the strength
to prolong the utopian moment. Nowhere in his work is there any trace
of what Lacan called the "narcissism of the lost cause", displayed
by those who cannot wait for the revolution to fail so that they might
admire and bemoan it. This is what made Lenin the politician of the
20th century - the century of the passion of the real. As
Alain Badiou has said, whereas the 19th century was characterised by
utopian or 'scientific' projects and ideals which were to be fulfilled
in the future, the 20th aimed at delivering the thing itself, at realising
the longed-for New Order. The ultimate and defining experience of the
20th century was the direct experience of the real as distinct from
everyday social reality - the real, in its extreme violence, is the
price to be paid for peeling off the deceiving layers of reality. Recalling
the trenches of the first world war, Ernst Jünger celebrated face-to-face
combat as the authentic intersubjective encounter: authenticity resides
in the act of violent transgression, whether in the form of an encounter
with the Lacanian real - the thing Antigone confronts when she violates
the order of the city - or of Bataillean excess. In the domain of sexuality,
the icon of this passion of the real is Oshima's Ai No Corrida, in which
the couple's love is radicalised into mutual torture and eventually
death - a clear echo of Bataille's Story of the Eye. Another example
would be the hardcore websites that allow you to observe the inside
of a vagina from the vantage point of a tiny camera at the tip of a
penetrating dildo. When one gets too close to the desired object, erotic
fascination turns into disgust at the real of the bare flesh. Walking
to his theatre in July 1956, Brecht passed a column of Soviet tanks
rolling towards the Stalinallee to crush the workers' rebellion. He
waved at them and later that day wrote in his diary that, at that moment,
he was for the first time in his life tempted to join the Communist
party - an exemplary case of the passion of the real. It wasn't that
Brecht supported the military action, but that he perceived and endorsed
the violence as a sign of authenticity. According
to Badiou, the underlying premise of our post-political era, in which
the administration of social affairs is replacing politics proper, is,
to put it bluntly, that the 20th century did not take place. What took
place in those tormented years was a monstrous futile passion, a contingent
deviation, the ultimate results (and truth) of which were the Gulag
and the Holocaust. The conclusion to be drawn is that attempts to change
society for the Good result merely in radical Evil, the only Absolute
admitted today. The way to lead our lives is therefore along the path
of pragmatic compromise, cynical wisdom, awareness of our limitations,
resistance to the temptation of the Absolute. Against this attitude,
fidelity to Lenin's legacy compels us to insist that the 20th century
was not just a contingent aberration, but an explosion of emancipatory
potential. The true difficulty - and the task of authentic theory -
is to link together this explosion and its tragic outcome. In
her attempt to normalise Lenin, to reduce him to one historical figure
among many to be dispassionately assessed, Carrère d'Encausse misses
Lenin's real breakthrough, the Event of Lenin, which cannot be reduced
to, or accounted for, in terms of tragic historical circumstances -
it takes place in another dimension. Carrère d'Encausse's failure to
appreciate this is most evident in her treatment of The State and Revolution,
where she rehashes the boring argument about Lenin's oscillation between
support for revolutionary spontaneity and recognition of the need for
the controlling influence of the party elite. She makes it clear that
the Bolsheviks' Decree of Peace, issued immediately after the October
Revolution, inaugurated a new politics that bypassed the state: it was
addressed not to other states, but directly to the people, to society
as a whole. What she fails to recognise is that at the core of The State
and Revolution is the same vision, of a societal self-organisation that
bypasses state mechanisms. This puts into perspective the alleged contradiction
between Lenin's elitism (his belief that enlightened professionals should
import class consciousness to the working class) and the "undisguised
call for spontaneity" in The State and Revolution. Not unlike Adorno,
who argued that spontaneous enjoyment is the most difficult thing to
achieve in modern society, Lenin was fully aware that true spontaneity
is very rare: in order to achieve it, one must get rid of false, imposed
ideological spontaneity. His position was, therefore: within the realm
of the state, a Bolshevik dictatorship; outside it, popular 'spontaneity'.
On
7 November 1920, on the third anniversary of the October Revolution,
a re-enactment of the Storming of the Winter Palace was performed in
Petrograd. Tens of thousands of workers, soldiers, students and artists
had worked round the clock, living on kasha (tasteless porridge), tea
and frozen apples, to prepare the performance, which took place just
where the original event had occurred. Their work was coordinated by
army officers, as well as avant-garde artists, musicians and directors,
from Malevich to Meyerhold. Although this was theatre and not 'reality',
the soldiers and sailors who took part played themselves. Many of them
had not only participated in 1917, but were, at the time of the performance,
fighting in the civil war - Petrograd was under siege in 1920 and suffering
from severe food shortages. A contemporary commented: "The future
historian will record how, throughout one of the bloodiest and most
brutal revolutions, all of Russia was acting"; the Formalist theoretician
Viktor Shklovsky noted that "some kind of elemental process is
taking place where the living fabric of life is being transformed into
the theatrical." Such performances - particularly in comparison
with Stalin's celebratory Mayday parades - are evidence that the October
Revolution was not a simple coup d'état carried out by a small group
of Bolsheviks, but an event that unleashed a tremendous emancipatory
potential. Other
elements of Lenin's breakthrough retain their force today: his critique
of "Leftism as the Child Illness of Communism", for example,
and his stance against economism. He was aware that political "extremism"
or "excessive radicalism" should always be understood as evidence
of an ideologico-political displacement, indicating the limitations
on what it was possible actually to achieve. The Jacobins' recourse
to the Terror was a hysterical acting out, evidence of their inability
to disturb the fundamentals of the economic order (private property
etc). Today's 'excesses' of political correctness similarly reveal an
inability to overcome the actual causes of racism and sexism. Perhaps
the time has come to question the belief held by many modern leftists
that political totalitarianism somehow results from the predominance
of material production and technology over human relations and culture.
What if the exact opposite is the case? What if political 'terror' signals
precisely that the sphere of material production has been subordinated
to politics? Perhaps, in fact, all political 'terror', from the Jacobins
to the Maoist Cultural Revolution, presupposes the displacement of production
onto the terrain of political battle. Lenin's
opposition to economism is crucial today, given the divided views held
on economic matters in (what remains of) radical circles: on the one
hand, politicians have abandoned the economy as the site of struggle
and intervention; on the other, economists, fascinated by the functioning
of today's global economy, preclude any possibility of political intervention.
We seem to need Lenin's insights more than ever: yes, the economy is
the key domain - the battle will be decided there; one has to break
the spell of global capitalism - but the intervention should be properly
political, not economic. Today, when everyone is anti-capitalist - even
in Hollywood, where several conspiracy movies (from Enemy of the State
to The Insider) have recently been produced in which the enemy is the
big corporation and its ruthless pursuit of profit - the label has lost
its subversive sting. In
the end, the universal appeal to freedom and democracy, the belief that
they will save us from the abuses of capitalism, will have to be challenged.
Liberal democracy, in truth, is the political arrangement under which
capital thrives best. This is Lenin's ultimate lesson: it is only by
throwing off our attachment to liberal democracy, which cannot survive
without private property, that we can become effectively anti-capitalist.
The disintegration of communism in 1990 confirmed the 'vulgar' Marxist
thesis that the economic base of political democracy is the private
ownership of the means of production - that is, capitalism with its
attendant class distinctions. The first urge after the introduction
of political democracy was privatisation, the frantic effort to find
- at any price, in whatever way - new owners for the property that had
been nationalised when the communists took power: former apparatchiks,
mafiosi, whoever, just to get a 'base' for democracy. But all this is
taking place too late - at exactly the moment when, in the first world
post-industrial societies, private ownership has started to lose its
central regulating role. John
Berger recently wrote about a French advert for an internet broker called
Selftrade. Under an image of a solid gold hammer and sickle studded
with diamonds, the caption reads: "And if the stock market profited
everybody?" The strategy is obvious: today, the stock market fulfils
the egalitarian communist agenda - everybody can participate in it.
Berger proposes a comparison: "Imagine a communications campaign
today using an image of a swastika cast in solid gold and embedded with
diamonds! It would, of course, not work. Why? The swastika addressed
potential victors, not the defeated. It invoked domination not justice."
In contrast, the hammer and sickle invokes the hope that "history
would eventually be on the side of those struggling for fraternal justice".
At the very moment this hope is proclaimed dead according to the hegemonic
ideology of the "end of ideologies", a paradigmatic post-industrial
enterprise (is there anything more post-industrial than dealing in stocks
on the internet?) mobilises it once more. The hope continues to haunt
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