Lenin 2017. Slavoj Žižek
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reach the standard of an ordinary Western European civilised country … We must bear in mind the semi-Asiatic ignorance from which we have not yet extricated ourselves.’43 So Lenin repeatedly warns against any kind of direct ‘implantation of communism’: ‘Under no circumstances must this be understood to mean that we should immediately propagate purely and strictly communist ideas in the countryside. As long as our countryside lacks the material basis for communism, it will be, I should say, harmful, in fact, I should say, fatal, for communism to do so.’44 His recurrent motif is thus: ‘The most harmful thing here would be haste.’45 Against this stance of ‘cultural revolution’, Stalin opted for the thoroughly anti-Leninist notion of ‘building socialism in one state’.
Does this mean that Lenin silently accepted the standard Menshevik criticism of Bolshevik utopianism, embracing their idea that revolution must follow necessary preordained stages? It is here that we can observe Lenin’s refined dialectical sense at work: he was fully aware that, in the early 1920s, the main tasks for the Bolsheviks were those of a progressive bourgeois regime (general education of the population, etc.); however, the very fact that it was a proletarian revolutionary power undertaking these tasks changed the situation fundamentally – there was a unique chance that these ‘civilising’ measures could be implemented in such a way as to break with their limited bourgeois ideological framework (general education would be really in the service of the people, rather than an ideological mask for propagating narrow bourgeois class interests, etc.). The properly dialectical paradox is thus that it was the very hopelessness of the Russian situation (the backwardness compelling the proletarian power to initiate a bourgeois civilising process) that could be turned into a unique advantage.
We have here two models, two incompatible logics, of revolution: either to wait for the teleological moment of the final crisis when the revolution will explode ‘at the proper time’ by necessity of historical evolution; or to recognise that the revolution has no ‘proper time’, and see the revolutionary chance as something that emerges and has to be seized upon in the detours of ‘normal’ historical development. Lenin was not a voluntarist ‘subjectivist’ – what he insisted on was that the exception (an extraordinary set of circumstances, like those in Russia in 1917) offered a way to undermine the norm itself. And is not this line of argumentation, this fundamental stance, more relevant than ever today? Do we not also live in an era when the state and its apparatuses, inclusive of its political agents, are simply less and less able to articulate the key issues? The illusion of 1917 that the pressing problems facing Russia (peace, land distribution, etc.) could be solved through ‘legal’ parliamentary means is the same as the contemporary illusion that, say, the ecological threat can avoided by expanding the logic of the market to ecology (making the polluters pay the price for the damage they cause, etc.).
The Miracle of a New Master
This, however, is not all that we can learn from Lenin today. Towards the end of his life, he played with another idea which, marginal as it may appear, has tremendous consequences and opens up new horizons. It concerns the basic discursive status of the Soviet regime (we understand ‘discourse’ here in Lacan’s sense of ‘social link’). In terms of Lacan’s formalisation of the four discourses, what type of discourse was Bolshevik power?46 Let us begin with capitalism, which remains a master discourse but one in which the structure of domination is repressed, pushed beneath the bar (individuals are formally free and equal, domination is displaced onto relations between things/commodities). In other words, the underlying structure is that of a capitalist Master pushing his other (the worker) to produce surplus-value that he (the capitalist) appropriates. But since this structure of domination is repressed, its appearance cannot be a(nother) single discourse: it can only appear split into two discourses. Both university discourse and hysterical discourse are products of the failure of the Master’s discourse: when the Master loses his authority and becomes hystericised (after his authority is questioned, experienced as fake), that authority reappears but is now displaced, de-subjectivised, in the guise of the authority of neutral expert-knowledge (‘it’s not me who exerts power, I just state objective facts and/or knowledge’).
Now we come to an interesting conclusion: if capitalism is characterised by the parallax of hysterical and university discourses, is the resistance to capitalism, then, characterised by the opposite axis of master and analyst? The recourse to the Master does not designate the conservative attempt to counteract capitalist dynamism with a resuscitated figure of traditional authority; rather, it points towards the new type of communist master or leader emphasised by Badiou, who is not afraid to oppose the necessary role of the Master to our ‘democratic’ sensitivity: ‘I am convinced that one has to reestablish the capital function of leaders in the communist process, whichever its stage.’47 A true Master is not an agent of discipline and prohibition, his message is not ‘You cannot!’ or ‘You have to …!’, but a releasing ‘You can!’ – what? Do the impossible – in other words, what appears impossible within the coordinates of the existing constellation. And today, this means something very precise: you can think beyond capitalism and liberal democracy as the ultimate framework of our lives. A Master is a vanishing mediator who gives you back to yourself, who delivers you to the abyss of your freedom: when we listen to a true leader, we discover what we want (or, rather, what we always already wanted without knowing it). A Master is needed because we cannot accede to our freedom directly – to gain this access we have to be pushed from outside, since our ‘natural state’ is one of inert hedonism, of what Badiou calls the ‘human animal’. The underlying paradox here is that the more we live as ‘free individuals with no Master’, the more we are effectively non-free, caught within the existing frame of possibilities – we have to be pushed or disturbed into freedom by a Master.
Lenin was fully aware of this urgent need for a new Master. In his extraordinary 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