A Left that Dares to Speak Its Name. Slavoj Žižek
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who are outside the production process – and thereby outside a place in social totality – are treated by Marx as “lumpenproletarians,” and he doesn’t see in them any emancipatory potential; rather, he treats them with great suspicion, as the force that is, as a rule, mobilized and corrupted by reactionary forces (like Napoleon III.).
Things got complicated with the victory of the October Revolution, when Bolsheviks exerted power in a country where not only the large majority of the population were small farmers (and Bolsheviks gained power precisely by promising them land), but where, as the result of violent upheavals during the civil war, millions of people found themselves in the position not of classic lumpenproletarians, but of homeless nomads who were not yet proletarians (reduced to the “nothing” of their working force) but literally less-than-proletarians (less-than-nothing). Their massive presence is the central topic of the work of Andrei Platonov, who described in detail their way of life, elaborating a unique “materialist ontology of poor life.”5 From the standpoint of the “ontology of poor life,” the parallel between Samuel Beckett and Platonov is fully relevant: is the experience of a “poor life” also not the core of Beckett’s great trilogy of novels Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable? The entire topic, as well as the details of Malone Dies, clearly relate to the French péripéties during the German occupation and its aftermath: Nazi and collaborationist control, terror and oppression, the revenge against collaborationists, and the way refugees were treated when returning home and recuperating. What gives such power to the novel is precisely that these three domains are condensed into a single suffocating experience of a displaced homeless individual, an individual lost in the web of police, psychiatric, and administrative measures.
The difference between Platonov and Beckett is that, while Beckett renders the experience of homeless refugees as individuals at the mercy of state institutions, Platonov focuses on displaced nomadic groups in a post-revolutionary situation when the new communist power tries to mobilize them for the communist struggle. Each of his works “departs from the same political problem of how to build communism: of what communism means and how the communist idea meets the concrete conditions and reality of the post-revolutionary society.” Platonov’s answer to this problem is paradoxical, far from the usual dissident rejection of communism. His result is a negative one; all his stories are stories of a failure; the “synthesis” between the communist project and the displaced nomadic groups end in a void; there is no unity between proletarians and less-than-proletarians:
In Chevengur (1926–28), the orphan Sasha Dvanov becomes a communist in the year of the revolution, joins the Bolsheviks and goes on a party errand to support the revolution in a village. During his long journey, Dvanov discovers “communism in one village,” established by poor peasants. The communism of the Chevengur village is accompanied by various absurd experiments with urban planning and farming, permanent terror and hunger. The wandering organic intellectuals are a supplement to the wandering masses, classes and communities, and they are all accompanied in their migration by animals, plants and natural landscape. The protagonist of Dzhan [1936; in English, “Soul”], Nazar Chagataev, returns to his native town in Turkestan on a party errand to find the lost nomadic nation Dzhan, from which he had come, in order to establish a socialist order. Dzhan was written after Platonov’s two journeys in Turkestan as a member of writers’ delegations. This was during the period when the civil war in Turkestan had just ended and a campaign against traditional nomadic forms of life had been initiated. The task of the delegation was to write an orthodox socialist realist story about a successful “civilizing” process in the local communities. The central problem of Platonov’s Dzhan may seem to conform to this brief, narrating as it does the story of a “Red Moses” leading the nomadic inhabitants of the Asian desert to socialism. However, Chagataev goes back to Moscow when his mission has ended and one is left with doubts about the future of communism in the desert…. The most famous work of Platonov, The Foundation Pit (1930), was also created in the context of the first five-year plan. It unfolds by way of a series of meetings between the protagonist Voshchev and the residents of a small provincial town, who are involved in the construction of an enormous proletarian house. While Voshchev challenges the representatives of different class groups, engaging in a Socratic inquiry into truth, the project acquires a more and more grandiose plan, before finally coming to an end with no result.
But we are at the same time as far as possible from the old conservative liberal critique of revolution as a violent attempt to impose on actual life models that are foreign to it. First, Platonov articulates his despair from the position of an engaged fighter for communism (he was actively engaged with nomadic groups in the 1920s, also at a very practical technical level, planning and organizing irrigation projects, etc.). Second, Platonov is not depicting a conflict between the traditional texture of social life and the radical revolutionary attempt to change it (in the style of Edmund Burke’s critique of the French Revolution): his focus is not on the traditional forms of life but on the dispossessed nomads whose lives were already irretrievably ruined by the process of modernization. In short, the radical cut Platonov depicts is not between the “spontaneous” proletarian crowd and the organized communist forces, but between the two aspects of the proletarian crowd itself, between the two social “nothings”: the strictly proletarian “nothing” of the modern workers generated by capitalism, and the “less-than-nothing” of those not integrated into the system, not even as its immanent negativity, as is made clear in this short exchange from Chevengur: “‘Who did you bring us?’ Chepurny asked Prokofy … ‘That’s proletarians and others,’ Prokofy said. Chepurny was disturbed ‘What others? Again the layer of residual swine?’ … ‘The others are the others. Nobody. They’re even worse than the proletariat.’” Here are some passages that describe these social “less-than nothings”:
Platonov’s heroes have different national and cultural backgrounds, but nonetheless they represent the same category: the proletariat. The idea behind “the international” and “non-Russian” faces is the idea of an average multinational proletariat that makes up one class. There is a significant explanation of the “non-Russianness” of the nomadic declassed people in Chevengur: “This is the true international proletariat: look – they’re not Russians, they’re not Armenians, they’re not Tartars – they’re not anything! I bring you live international.” It is precisely this multinational, and one can even say anticolonial, perspective that leads Platonov to the deconstruction of the dominant image of the white industrial working class that was so typical among the hard-liners in Proletkult…. He saw comrades the likes of whom he had never encountered before, people without any understanding or appearance of class and without revolutionary worth. These were instead some sort of nameless others who lived utterly without significance, without pride, and off to one side of the impending world-wide triumph. Even the age of these others was impossible to grasp, for all that could be made out was that they were poor, had bodies that grew unwillingly, and were foreign to all…. Platonov names his marginal declassed wanderers as “handmade people with an unknown designation,” “uncounted,” “mistak-able,” or “prochie” – “others,” in the English translation of Robert Chandler. The Russian word prochie also refers to the “rest,” the “remainder.” Thus others is the rest of the people; they don’t belong to any class category existing in Marxist theory, because they are too poor and detached from normal social life…. The other, therefore, refers to someone who remains unaccounted for due to their amorphous and marginal status, but who is also part of a multiplicity which is not countable – part of a scattered and nomadic people, an anomaly of humanity, trapped between life and death, social and biological.
As the last quoted sentence makes clear, one has to avoid absolutely the elevation of prochie into an original site of productivity, its living presence oppressed by state representation. Prochie are not the Deleuzian multitude, they are, on the contrary, “living dead” caught in a non-productive passivity, basically deprived of the very will to be active. This is why we should take the risk of offering yet another translation of prochie: neighbors, with all the biblical weight of this term, those who are “others” and precisely as such always too close to us, no matter how far away they are. What makes them too close is that we lack a proper distance toward them because they don’t