Lenin 2017. Slavoj Žižek
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slum dwellers are indeed the living dead of global capitalism: alive, but dead in the eyes of the polis.
The term ‘eternal Truth’ should be read here in a properly dialectical way, as referring to eternity grounded in a unique temporal act (as in Christianity, where the eternal Truth can only be experienced and enacted by endorsing the temporal– historical singularity of Christ). What grounds a truth is the experience of suffering and courage, sometimes in solitude, not the size or force of a majority. This, of course, does not mean that there are infallible criteria for determining the truth: its assertion involves a kind of wager, a risky decision; one has to cut out its path, sometimes even enforce it, and at first those who tell the truth are as a rule not understood, they struggle (with themselves and others), looking for the proper language in which to express it. It is the full recognition of this dimension of risk and wager, of the absence of any external guarantee, that distinguishes an authentic truth-engagement from any form of ‘totalitarianism’ or ‘fundamentalism’.
But, again: how are we to distinguish this ‘demanding and sometimes even lethal ethics of truth’ from sectarian attempts to impose one’s own position on everyone else? How can we be sure that the voice of the minoritarian ‘part of no-part’ is indeed the voice of universal truth and not merely that of a particular grievance? The first thing to bear in mind here is that the truth we are dealing with is not ‘objective’, but a self-relating truth about one’s own subjective position; as such, it is an engaged truth, measured not by its factual accuracy but by the way it affects the subjective position of enunciation. In his (unpublished) Seminar 18 on ‘a discourse which would not be that of a semblance’, Lacan provided a succinct definition of the truth of interpretation in psychoanalysis: ‘Interpretation is not tested by a truth that would decide by yes or no, it unleashes truth as such. It is only true inasmuch as it is truly followed.’ There is nothing ‘theological’ in this precise formulation, only an insight into the properly dialectical unity of theory and practice in (not only) psychoanalytic interpretation: the ‘test’ of the analyst’s interpretation lies in the truth-effect it unleashes in the patient. This is how one should also (re)read Marx’s Thesis XI: the ‘test’ of Marxist theory is the truth-effect it unleashes in its addressees (the proletarians), in transforming them into revolutionary subjects.
The problem, of course, is that today there is no revolutionary discourse able to produce such a truth-effect – so what are we to do? The quintessential text here is Lenin’s wonderful short essay ‘On Ascending a High Mountain’, written in 1922,15 when, after winning the Civil War against all odds, the Bolsheviks had to retreat into the New Economic Policy, giving a much wider scope to the market economy and private property. Lenin uses the simile of a climber who has to return to the valley after his first attempt to reach a new mountain peak in order to describe what a retreat means in a revolutionary process, i.e., how one retreats without opportunistically betraying one’s fidelity to the Cause:
Let us picture to ourselves a man ascending a very high, steep and hitherto unexplored mountain. Let us assume that he has overcome unprecedented difficulties and dangers and has succeeded in reaching a much higher point than any of his predecessors, but still has not reached the summit. He finds himself in a position where it is not only difficult and dangerous to proceed in the direction and along the path he has chosen, but positively impossible. He is forced to turn back, descend, seek another path, longer, perhaps, but one that will enable him to reach the summit. The descent from the height that no one before him has reached proves, perhaps, to be more dangerous and difficult for our imaginary traveller than the ascent – it is easier to slip; it is not so easy to choose a foothold; there is not that exhilaration that one feels in going upwards, straight to the goal, etc. … The voices from below ring with malicious joy. They do not conceal it; they chuckle gleefully and shout: ‘He’ll fall in a minute! Serves him right, the lunatic!’ Others try to conceal their malicious glee and behave mostly like Judas Golovlyov. They moan and raise their eyes to heaven in sorrow, as if to say: ‘It grieves us sorely to see our fears justified! But did not we, who have spent all our lives working out a judicious plan for scaling this mountain, demand that the ascent be postponed until our plan was complete? And if we so vehemently protested against taking this path, which this lunatic is now abandoning (look, look, he has turned back! He is descending! A single step is taking him hours of preparation! And yet we were roundly abused when time and again we demanded moderation and caution!), if we so fervently censured this lunatic and warned everybody against imitating and helping him, we did so entirely because of our devotion to the great plan to scale this mountain, and in order to prevent this great plan from being generally discredited!’
After enumerating the achievements of the Soviet state, Lenin then goes on to focus on what was not done:
But we have not finished building even the foundations of socialist economy and the hostile powers of moribund capitalism can still deprive us of that. We must clearly appreciate this and frankly admit it; for there is nothing more dangerous than illusions (and vertigo, particularly at high altitudes). And there is absolutely nothing terrible, nothing that should give legitimate grounds for the slightest despondency, in admitting this bitter truth; for we have always urged and reiterated the elementary truth of Marxism – that the joint efforts of the workers of several advanced countries are needed for the victory of socialism. We are still alone and in a backward country, a country that was ruined more than others, but we have accomplished a great deal. More than that – we have preserved intact the army of the revolutionary proletarian forces; we have preserved its manoeuvring ability; we have kept clear heads and can soberly calculate where, when and how far to retreat (in order to leap further forward); where, when and how to set to work to alter what has remained unfinished. Those Communists are doomed who imagine that it is possible to finish such an epoch-making undertaking as completing the foundations of socialist economy (particularly in a small-peasant country) without making mistakes, without retreats, without numerous alterations to what is unfinished or wrongly done. Communists who have no illusions, who do not give way to despondency, and who preserve their strength and flexibility ‘to begin from the beginning’ over and over again in approaching an extremely difficult task, are not doomed (and in all probability will not perish).
This is Lenin at his Beckettian best, echoing the line from Worstward Ho: ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’16 Lenin’s conclusion – ‘to begin from the beginning over and over again’ – makes it clear that he is not talking merely of slowing down in order to defend what has already been achieved, but precisely of descending back to the starting point: one should ‘begin from the beginning’, not from where one had managed to get to in the previous effort. In Kierkegaard’s 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