Lenin 2017. Slavoj Žižek
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– 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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