Lenin 2017. Slavoj Žižek
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himself a complete egalitarian. And it was very important for him to practice egalitarianism on every level … He made it very clear that he saw no difference, and he didn’t make this clear by saying it, he made it clear by what he did.’32 Even today, long after the abolition of slavery, Brown is a divisive figure in American collective memory. Those whites who supported him are all the more precious – among them, surprisingly, Henry David Thoreau, the great opponent of violence: against the standard dismissal of Brown as bloodthirsty, foolish and insane, Thoreau painted a portrait of a peerless man whose embrace of a cause was unparalleled; he even goes so far as to liken Brown’s execution to the death of Christ.33 Thoreau vents at the scores of those who voiced their displeasure and scorn for Brown: they cannot relate to him because of their ‘dead’ existences; they are truly not living, for only a handful of men have lived.
It is, however, precisely this consistent egalitarianism which simultaneously marks the limitation of Jacobin politics. Recall Marx’s fundamental insight regarding the ‘bourgeois’ limitation of the logic of equality: capitalist inequalities are not ‘unprincipled violations of the principle of equality’, but are absolutely inherent in the logic of equality, the paradoxical result of its consistent realisation. What we have in mind here is not only the tired motif of how market exchange presupposes formally equal subjects who meet and interact in the marketplace; the crucial point in Marx’s critique of ‘bourgeois’ socialists is that capitalist exploitation does not involve any kind of ‘unequal’ exchange between the worker and the capitalist – the exchange is fully equal and ‘just’, since (in principle) the worker gets paid the full value of the commodity he is selling (his labour power). Of course, radical bourgeois revolutionaries are aware of this limitation, but they try to overcome it by way of a direct ‘terroristic’ imposition of more and more de facto equality (equal salaries, equal access to health services, etc.) which can only be imposed through new forms of formal inequality (i.e., preferential treatment of the underprivileged). In short, the axiom of ‘equality’ is either not enough (it remains the abstract form of actual inequality) or too much (it requires the enforcing of ‘terroristic’ equality) – it is a formalist notion in a strict dialectical sense, i.e., its limitation is precisely that its form is not concrete enough, but a mere neutral container for some content that eludes this form.
The problem here is not terror as such – our task today is precisely to reinvent emancipatory terror. The problem lies elsewhere: egalitarian ‘extremism’ or ‘excessive radicalism’ should always be read as a phenomenon of ideologico-political displacement: as an index of its opposite, of a limitation, of a refusal effectively to ‘go to the end’. What was the Jacobins’ recourse to radical ‘terror’ if not a kind of hysterical acting-out bearing witness to their inability to disturb the fundamentals of the economic order (private property, etc.)? And could we not even say the same about the so-called ‘excesses’ of Political Correctness? Do they not also display a retreat from disturbing the effective (economic, etc.) causes of racism and sexism? Perhaps, then, the time has come to problematise the standard topos shared by practically all ‘postmodern’ leftists, according to which political ‘totalitarianism’ somehow results from the dominance of material production and technology over intersubjective communication and/or symbolic practice, as if the root of political terror lies in the fact that the ‘principle’ of instrumental reason, of the technological exploitation of nature, is also extended to society, so that people are treated as raw materials to be transformed into the New Man. What if it is the exact opposite which holds? What if political ‘terror’ signals precisely that the sphere of (material) production is denied in its autonomy and subordinated to political logic? Is it not that political ‘terror’, from the Jacobins to Mao’s Cultural Revolution, presupposes the foreclosure of production proper, its reduction to the terrain of political battle? In other words, what it amounts to is nothing less than the abandonment of Marx’s key insight into how political struggle is a spectacle which, in order to be deciphered, has to be referred to the sphere of economics: ‘if Marxism had any analytical value for political theory, was it not in the insistence that the problem of freedom was contained in the social relations implicitly declared “unpolitical” – that is, naturalized – in liberal discourse’?34
In his last years, Lenin did indeed courageously confront this key point.
From Lenin to Stalin … and Back
No doubt the early Bolsheviks would have been shocked at what the Soviet Union had turned into by the 1930s (as many of those still alive were, before being themselves ruthlessly liquidated in the great purges). Their tragedy, however, was that they were not able to perceive in the Stalinist terror the ultimate offspring of their own acts. What they needed was their own version of ta twam atsi (‘thou art that’). This old saw – which, let me state clearly, cannot be dismissed as cheap anti-communism: it has its own logic, and it acknowledges a tragic grandeur in the Bolshevik old guard – is what one should nonetheless problematise. Here, the left should propose its own alternative to the rightist ‘What If’ histories: the answer to the eternal leftist query ‘What would have happened had Lenin survived ten years longer with his health intact, and succeeded in deposing Stalin?’ is not as clear as it may appear (basically, nothing – or nothing essentially different: the same Stalinism, just without its worst excesses), in spite of many good arguments on its behalf (did not Rosa Luxemburg herself, as early as 1918, predict the rise of bureaucratic Stalinism?).
But, although it is clear how Stalinism emerged from the initial conditions of the October Revolution and its immediate aftermath, one should not discount a priori the possibility that, had Lenin remained in good health and deposed Stalin, something different would have emerged – not, of course, the utopia of ‘democratic socialism’, but nonetheless something substantially different from the Stalinist ‘socialism in one country’, something resulting from a much more ‘pragmatic’ and improvisatory series of political and economic decisions, fully aware of its own limitations. Lenin’s desperate last struggle against a reawakened Russian nationalism, his support of Georgian ‘nationalists’, his vision of a decentralised federation, etc., were not just tactical compromises: they implied a vision of state and society incompatible in their entirety with Stalin’s. Two years before his death, when it became clear that there would be no immediate pan-European revolution, and given that the idea of building socialism in one country was nonsense, Lenin wrote: ‘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 the Western European countries?’35
Note here how Lenin uses a class-neutral term, ‘the fundamental requisites of civilisation’, and how, precisely when emphasising Russia’s distance from the Western European countries, he clearly refers to them as the model. Communism is a European event, if ever there was one. When Marxists celebrate the power of capitalism to disintegrate old communal ties, when they detect in this disintegration an opening up of the space of radical emancipation, they speak on behalf of the emancipatory European legacy. Walter Mignolo and other postcolonial anti-Eurocentrists dismiss the idea of communism as being too European, and instead propose Asian, Latin American or African traditions as sources of resistance to global capitalism. There is a crucial choice to be made here: do we resist global capitalism on behalf of the local traditions it undermines, or do we endorse this power of disintegration and oppose global capitalism on behalf of a universal emancipatory project? The reason anti-Eurocentrism is so popular today is precisely because global capitalism functions much better when its excesses are regulated by some ancient tradition: when global capitalism and local traditions are no longer opposites, but are on the same side.
To put it in Deleuzian terms, Lenin’s moment is that of the ‘dark precursor’, the vanishing mediator, the displaced object never to be found at its own place, operating between the two series: the initial ‘orthodox’ Marxist series of revolution in the most developed countries, and the new ‘orthodox’ series of Stalinist ‘socialism in one country’ followed by the Maoist identification of Third World nations with the new world proletariat. The shift from Lenin to Stalinism here is clear and easy to determine: Lenin perceived the situation as desperate, unexpected, but for