Lenin 2017. Slavoj Žižek
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revolutionary terror. But we should never forget that Hegel’s critique is immanent, accepting the basic principle of the French Revolution (and its key supplement, the Haiti Revolution). And one should do exactly the same apropos the October Revolution (and, later, the Chinese Revolution), which was, as Badiou has pointed out, the first case in the entire history of humanity of a successful revolt of the exploited poor – they were the zero-level members of the new society; they set the standards. The revolution stabilised itself into a new social order; a new world was created and miraculously survived for decades, amid unthinkable economic and military pressure and isolation. This was effectively ‘a glorious mental dawn. All thinking beings shared in the jubilation of this epoch.’ Against all hierarchical orders, egalitarian universality came directly to power.
There is a basic philosophical dilemma underlying this alternative: it may seem that the only consistent Hegelian standpoint is one which measures the notion by the success or failure of its actualisation, so that, from the perspective of the total mediation of the essence by its appearance, any transcendence of the idea over its actualisation is discredited. The consequence of this is that, if we insist on the eternal Idea which survives its historical defeat, this necessarily entails – in Hegelese – a regression from the level of the Notion as the fully actualised unity of essence and appearance to the level of the Essence supposed to transcend its appearing. Is this true, however? One can also claim that the excess of the utopian Idea that survives its historical defeat does not contradict the total mediation of Idea and its appearing: the basic Hegelian insight, according to which the failure of reality to fully actualise an Idea is simultaneously the failure (limitation) of this Idea itself, continues to hold. What one should add is simply that the gap separating the Idea from its actualisation signals a gap within the Idea itself. This is why the spectral Idea that continues to haunt historical reality signals the falsity of the new historical reality itself, its inadequacy in relation to its own Notion – the failure of the Jacobin utopia, for example, its actualisation in utilitarian bourgeois reality, is simultaneously the limitation of this utilitarian reality itself. Its failure was precisely the failure to create a new form of everyday life: it remained a carnivalesque excess, with the state apparatus guaranteeing the continuation of daily life, of production.
The lesson of this failure is that we should shift the focus from the utopian goal of the full reign of productive expressivity that no longer needs representation, a state order, capital, and so on, to the problem of what kind of representation should replace the existing liberal-democratic representative state. This problem exploded soon after 1917 when the revolutionary state of exception gradually gave way to the task of organising everyday life. Trotsky pleaded for an interplay between class self-organisation and political leadership of the revolutionary vanguard party.40 Lenin’s solution was an almost Kantian one: freely debate at public meetings during the weekends, but obey and work while at work:
Before the October Revolution [a worker] did not see a single instance of the propertied, exploiting classes making any real sacrifice for him, giving up anything for his benefit. He did not see them giving him the land and liberty that had been repeatedly promised him, giving him peace, sacrificing ‘Great Power’ interests and the interests of Great Power secret treaties, sacrificing capital and profits. He saw this only after October 25, 1917, when he took it himself by force, and had to defend by force what he had taken … Naturally, for a certain time, all his attention, all his thoughts, all his spiritual strength, were concentrated on taking a breath, on unbending his back, on straightening his shoulders, on taking the blessings of life that were there for the taking, and that had always been denied him by the now overthrown exploiters. Of course, a certain amount of time is required to enable the ordinary working man not only to see for himself, not only to become convinced, but also to feel that he cannot simply ‘take’, snatch, grab things, that this leads to increased disruption, to ruin, to the return of the Kornilovs. The corresponding change in the conditions of life (and consequently in the psychology) of the ordinary working men is only just beginning. And our whole task, the task of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks), which is the class-conscious spokesman for the strivings of the exploited for emancipation, is to appreciate this change, to understand that it is necessary, to stand at the head of the exhausted people who are wearily seeking a way out and lead them along the true path, along the path of labour discipline, along the path of co-ordinating the task of arguing at mass meetings about the conditions of work with the task of unquestioningly obeying the will of the Soviet leader, of the dictator, during the work … We must learn to combine the ‘public meeting’ democracy of the working people – turbulent, surging, overflowing its banks like a spring flood – with iron discipline while at work, with unquestioning obedience to the will of a single person, the Soviet leader, while at work.41
It is easy to make fun of Lenin here (or to be horrified by what he is saying), easy to accuse him of being caught up in the industrialist paradigm, and so on – but the problem remains. The main form of direct democracy of the ‘expressive’ multitude in the twentieth century was the so-called workers’ councils (‘soviets’) – (almost) everybody in the West loved them, including liberals like Hannah Arendt, who perceived in them an echo of the ancient Greek polis. Throughout the era of Really Existing Socialism, the secret hope of ‘democratic socialists’ lay in the direct democracy of the ‘soviets’, as the form of self-organisation of the people; it is deeply symptomatic how, with the decline of Really Existing Socialism, this emancipatory shadow which continually haunted it also disappeared. Is this not ultimate confirmation of the fact that the conciliar version of ‘democratic socialism’ was no more than a spectral double of the ‘bureaucratic’ Really Existing Socialism, its inherent transgression with no substantial positive content of its own, unable to serve as the permanent basic organising principle of a society? What both Really Existing Socialism and council democracy shared was a belief in the possibility of a self-transparent organisation of society that would preclude political ‘alienation’ (state apparatuses, institutionalised rules of political life, a legal order, police, etc.). Is not the basic experience of the end of Really Existing Socialism precisely the rejection of this shared feature, the resigned ‘postmodern’ acceptance of the fact that society is a complex network of ‘sub-systems’, which is why a certain level of ‘alienation’ is constitutive of social life, so that a totally self-transparent society is a utopia replete with totalitarian potential?42 No wonder, then, that the same holds for contemporary practices of ‘direct democracy’, from the favelas to the ‘postindustrial’ digital culture (do not the descriptions of the new ‘tribal’ communities of computer hackers often evoke the logic of council democracy?): they all have to rely on a state apparatus since, for structural reasons, they cannot take over the entire field.
According to the ideologists of postmodern capitalism, Marxist theory (and practice) remains caught within the constraints of the hierarchical centralised state-control logic, and thus cannot cope with the social effects of the new information revolution. There are good empirical reasons for this claim: again, it is a supreme irony of history that the disintegration of communism is the most convincing example of the validity of the traditional Marxist dialectic of forces of production and relations of production, on which Marxism counted in its endeavour to overcome capitalism. What effectively ruined the communist regimes was their inability to adjust to the new social logic ushered in by the ‘information revolution’: they tried to steer this revolution into another large-scale centralised state-planning project. Today, however, there are increasingly signs that capitalism itself cannot cope with the informational revolution (problems with ‘intellectual property’ and the rise of ‘cooperative commons’, etc.).
What happened, then, when in his last years Lenin became fully aware of the limitations of Bolshevik power? It is here that once again we should oppose Lenin and Stalin: in Lenin’s very last writings, long after he had renounced the utopia of State and Revolution, we can discern the contours of a modest ‘realistic’ project for what Bolshevik power should do. Because of the economic underdevelopment and cultural backwardness of the Russian masses, there was no way for the country to ‘pass directly to socialism’; all the Soviet power could do was combine the moderate politics of ‘state capitalism’ with an intense cultural education of the inert peasant masses – not ‘communist propaganda’