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Slavoj Žižek

Remembering and Repeating

The title of Freud’s short text from 1914, ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working Through’, provides the best formula for the way we should relate – today, 100 years later – to the event called the October Revolution. The three concepts Freud mentions form a dialectical triad: they designate the three phases of the analytical process, and resistance intervenes in every passage from one phase to the next. The first step consists in remembering the repressed past traumatic events, in bringing them out, which can also be done by hypnosis. This phase immediately runs into a deadlock: the content brought out lacks its proper symbolic context and thus remains ineffective; it fails to transform the subject and resistance remains active, limiting the amount of content revealed. The problem with this approach is that it stays focused on the past and ignores the subject’s present constellation which keeps this past alive, symbolically active. Resistance expresses itself in the form of transference: what the subject cannot properly remember, she repeats, transferring the past constellation onto a present (e.g., she treats the analyst as if he were her father). What the subject cannot properly remember, she acts out, reenacts – and when the analyst points this out, her intervention is met with resistance. Working through is working through the resistance, turning it from the obstacle into the very resort of analysis, and this turn is self-reflexive in a properly Hegelian sense: resistance is a link between object and subject, between past and present, proof that we are not only fixated on the past but that this fixation is an effect of the present deadlock in the subject’s libidinal economy.

With regard to 1917, we also begin by remembering, by recalling, the true history of the October Revolution and, of course, its reversal into Stalinism. The great ethico-political problem of the communist regimes can best be captured under the title ‘founding fathers, founding crimes’. Can a communist regime survive the act of openly confronting its violent past in which millions were imprisoned and killed? If so, in what form and to what degree? The first paradigmatic case of such a confrontation was, of course, Nikita Khrushchev’s ‘secret’ report on Stalin’s crimes to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956. The first thing that strikes one in this report is the focus on Stalin’s personality as being the key factor in the crimes, and the concomitant lack of any systematic analysis of what made those crimes possible. The second feature is its strenuous effort to keep the Origins clear: not only is the condemnation of Stalin limited to his arrest and killing of high-ranking Party members and military officers in the 1930s (where rehabilitations were very selective: Bukharin, Zinoviev, etc., continued to be non-persons, not to mention Trotsky), ignoring the great famine of the late 1920s; but the report is also presented as announcing the return of the Party to its ‘Leninist roots’, so that Lenin emerges as the pure Origin spoiled or betrayed by Stalin. In his belated but perspicuous analysis of the report, written in 1970, Sartre noted that

it was true that Stalin had ordered massacres, transformed the land of the revolution into a police state; he was truly convinced that the USSR would not reach communism without passing through the socialism of concentration camps. But as one of the witnesses very rightly points out, when the authorities find it useful to tell the truth, it’s because they can’t find any better lie. Immediately this truth, coming from official mouths, becomes a lie corroborated by the facts. Stalin was a wicked man? Fine. But how had Soviet society perched him on the throne and kept him there for a quarter of a century.¹

Indeed, is not Khrushchev’s later fate (he was deposed in 1964) proof of Oscar Wilde’s quip that if one tells the truth, one will sooner or later be caught out? Sartre’s analysis nonetheless falls short on one crucial point: even if Khrushchev was ‘speaking in the name of the system’ – ‘the machine was sound, but its chief operator was not; this saboteur had relieved the world of his presence, and everything was going to run smoothly again’² – his report did have a traumatic impact, and his intervention set in motion a process that ultimately brought down the system itself – a lesson worth remembering today. In this precise sense, Khrushchev’s 1956 speech denouncing Stalin’s crimes was a true political act – after which, as William Taubman put it, ‘the Soviet regime never fully recovered, and neither did he’.³ Although the opportunist motives for this daring move are plain enough, there was clearly more than mere calculation to it, a kind of reckless excess which cannot be accounted for by strategic reasoning. After the speech, things were never the same again, the fundamental dogma of infallible leadership had been fatally undermined; no wonder then, that, in reaction to the speech, the entire nomenklatura sank into temporary paralysis. During the speech itself, a dozen or so delegates suffered nervous breakdowns and had to be carried out and given medical help; a few days later, Boleslaw Bierut, the hard-line general secretary of the Polish Communist Party, died of a heart attack, and the model Stalinist writer Alexander Fadeyev shot himself. The point is not that they were ‘honest communists’ – most of them were brutal manipulators who harboured no subjective illusions about the nature of the Soviet regime. What broke down was their ‘objective’ illusion: the figure of the ‘big Other’ that had provided the background against which they were able to pursue their ruthless drive for power. The Other onto which they had transposed their belief, which as it were believed on their behalf, their subject-supposed-to-believe, disintegrated.

Khrushchev’s wager was that his (limited) confession would strengthen the communist movement – and in the short term he was right. One should always remember that the Khrushchev era was the last period of authentic communist enthusiasm, of belief in the communist project. When, during his visit to the United States in 1959, Khrushchev made his famous defiant statement to the American public that ‘your grandchildren will be communists’, he effectively spelled out the conviction of the entire Soviet nomenklatura. After his fall in 1964, a resigned cynicism prevailed, up until Gorbachev’s attempt at a more radical confrontation with the past (the rehabilitations then included Bukharin, but – for Gorbachev at least – Lenin remained the untouchable point of reference, and Trotsky continued to be a non-person).

With Deng Xiaoping’s ‘reforms’, the Chinese proceeded in a radically different, almost opposite, way. While at the level of the economy (and, up to a point, culture) what is usually understood as ‘communism’ was abandoned, and the gates were opened wide to Western-style ‘liberalisation’ (private property, profit-making, hedonist individualism, etc.), the Party nevertheless maintained its ideologico-political hegemony – not in the sense of doctrinal orthodoxy (in the official discourse, the Confucian reference to the ‘Harmonious Society’ practically replaced any reference to communism), but in the sense of maintaining the unconditional political hegemony of the Communist Party as the only guarantee of China’s stability and prosperity. This required a close monitoring and regulation of the ideological discourse on Chinese history, especially the history of the last two centuries: the story endlessly varied by the state media and textbooks is one of China’s humiliation from the Opium Wars onwards, which ended only with the communist victory in 1949, leading to the conclusion that to be patriotic is to support the rule of the Party. When history is given such a legitimising role, of course, it cannot tolerate any substantial self-critique; the Chinese had learned the lesson of Gorbachev’s failure: full recognition of the ‘founding crimes’ will only bring the entire system down. Those crimes thus have to remain disavowed: true, some Maoist ‘excesses’ and ‘errors’ are denounced (the Great Leap Forward and the devastating famine that followed; the Cultural Revolution), and Deng’s assessment of Mao’s role (70 per cent positive, 30 per cent negative) is enshrined as the official formula. But this assessment functions as a formal conclusion which renders any further elaboration superfluous: even if Mao was 30 per cent bad, the full symbolic impact of this admission is neutralised, so he can continue to be celebrated as the founding father of the nation, his body in a mausoleum and his image on every banknote. We are dealing here with a clear case of fetishistic disavowal: although we know very well that Mao made errors and caused immense suffering, his figure is kept magically untainted by these facts. In this way, the Chinese communists can have their cake and eat it: the radical changes brought about by economic ‘liberalisation’ are combined with the continuation of the same Party rule as before.

Yang Jisheng’s massive and meticulously documented study, Tombstone: The Untold Story of Mao’s Great Famine, offers an exemplary case of remembering: the result of nearly two decades of research, it puts the number of ‘prematurely dead’ between 1958 and 1961 at 36 million.⁴ (The official stance is that the disaster was due 30 per cent to natural causes and 70 per cent to mismanagement – an exact inversion of Deng’s judgement on Mao).⁵ With the privileges afforded a senior Xinhua journalist, Yang was able to consult state archives around the country and form the most complete picture of the great famine that any researcher, foreign or local, has ever managed. He was helped by scores of collaborators within the system – demographers who had toiled quietly for years in government agencies to compile accurate figures on the loss of life; local officials who had kept ghoulish records of the events in their districts; the keepers of provincial archives who were happy to open their doors, with a nod and a wink, to a trusted comrade pretending to be researching the history of China’s grain production. The reaction? In Wuhan, a major city in central China, the office of the Committee of Comprehensive Management of Social Order put Tombstone on a list of ‘obscene, pornographic, violent and unhealthy books for children’, to be confiscated on sight. Elsewhere, the Party killed Tombstone with silence, banning any mention of it in the media but refraining from attention-grabbing attacks on the book itself. But Yang still lives in China, retired, unmolested, publishing occasionally in scientific journals. Among other important insights, Yang establishes that one reason for the famine lay in the application of bad science: the central government decreed several changes in agricultural techniques based on the ideas of the Ukrainian pseudo-scientist Trofim Lysenko. One of these ideas was close planting, where the density of seedlings is first tripled and then doubled again. Transposing class solidarity onto nature, the theory was that plants of the same species would not compete with but would help each other – in practice, of course, they did compete, which stunted growth and resulted in lower yields.⁶

This is how a combination of false remembering and repetition operates with regard to the communist past, but such falsity is in no way limited to communists who refuse to settle accounts with their past and thus condemn themselves to repeat it. The standard liberal or conservative demonisation of the October Revolution also misses the emancipatory potential clearly discernible therein, reducing it to a brutal takeover of state power. The tension between these two dimensions of the Revolution does not mean that the Stalinist turn was a secondary deviation, since one can well argue that the latter was a possibility inherent in the Bolshevik project, meaning it was doomed from the very beginning. This is why the project was genuinely tragic: an authentic emancipatory vision condemned to failure by its very victory.

This is where the working through enters as the radical rethinking of communism, re-actualising it for today. And this is why only those faithful to communism can deploy a truly radical critique of the sad reality of Stalinism and its offspring. Let’s face it: today, Lenin and his legacy are perceived as hopelessly dated, belonging to a defunct ‘paradigm’. Not only was Lenin understandably blind to many of the problems that are now central to contemporary life (ecology, struggles for emancipated sexuality, etc.), but also his brutal political practice is totally out of sync with current democratic sensitivities, his vision of the new society as a centralised industrial system run by the state is simply irrelevant, etc. Instead of desperately attempting to salvage the authentic Leninist core from the Stalinist alluvium, would it not be more advisable to forget Lenin and return to Marx, searching in his work for the roots of what went wrong in the twentieth-century communist movements?

Nevertheless, was not Lenin’s situation marked precisely by a similar hopelessness? It is true that today’s left is facing the shattering experience of the end of an entire epoch of the progressive movement, an experience which compels it to reinvent the most basic coordinates of its project. But an exactly homologous experience was what gave birth to Leninism. Recall Lenin’s shock when, in the autumn of 1914, all the European social-democratic parties (with the honourable exception of the Russian Bolsheviks and the Serbian Social Democrats) opted to toe the ‘patriotic line’. When the German Social Democrats’ daily newspaper Vorwärts reported that social democrats in the Reichstag had voted for the military credits, Lenin even thought that it must have been a forgery by the Russian secret police designed to deceive the Russian workers. In an era of a military conflict that cut the European continent in half, how difficult it was to refuse the notion that one should take sides and to reject the ‘patriotic fervour’ in one’s own country! How many great minds (including Freud) succumbed to the nationalist temptation, even if only for a couple of weeks!

The shock of 1914 was – to put it in Alain Badiou’s terms – a désastre, a catastrophe in which an entire world disappeared: not only the idyllic bourgeois faith in progress, but also the socialist movement that accompanied it. Even Lenin himself lost his footing – there is, in his desperate reaction in What Is to Be Done?, no satisfaction, no ‘I told you so!’ This moment of Verzweiflung, this catastrophe, opened up the site for the Leninist event, for breaking with the evolutionary historicism of the Second International – and Lenin was the only one at the level of this opening, the only one to articulate the Truth of the catastrophe. Born in this moment of despair was the Lenin who, via the detour of a close reading of Hegel’s Logic, was able to discern the unique chance for revolution.

Today, the left is in a situation that uncannily resembles the one that gave birth to Leninism, and its task is to repeat Lenin. This does not mean a return to Lenin. To repeat Lenin is to accept that ‘Lenin is dead’, that his particular solution failed, even failed monstrously. To repeat Lenin means that one has to distinguish between what Lenin actually did and the field of possibilities that he opened up, to acknowledge the tension in Lenin between his actions and another dimension, what was ‘in Lenin more than Lenin himself’. To repeat Lenin is to repeat not what Lenin did, but what he failed to do, his missed opportunities.

Goodbye Lenin in Ukraine

The last time Lenin made headlines in the West was during the Ukrainian uprising of 2014 that toppled the pro-Russian president Yanukovych: in TV reports on the mass protests in Kiev, we saw again and again scenes of enraged protesters tearing down statues of Lenin. These furious attacks were understandable in so far as the statues functioned as a symbol of Soviet oppression, and Putin’s Russia is perceived as a continuation of the Soviet policy of subjecting non-Russian nations to Russian domination. We should also recall the precise historical moment when statues of Lenin began to proliferate in their thousands across the Soviet Union: only in 1956, after Khruschev’s denunciation of Stalin at the 20th Congress, were statues of Stalin replaced en masse by those of Lenin. The latter was literally a stand-in for the former, as was also made clear by a weird thing that happened in 1962 on the front page of Pravda:

Lenin appeared on the masthead of Pravda in 1945 (one might speculatively suggest that he appeared there to reassert Stalin’s authority over the Party – in light of the potentially disruptive force of returning soldiers, who have seen both death and bourgeois Europe, and in light of circulating myths that Lenin had warned against him on his deathbed). In 1962 – when, at the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party, Stalin was publicly denounced – two images of Lenin suddenly appear on the masthead, as if the strange double-Lenin covered the missing ‘other leader’ who was actually never there!⁷

Why, then, were two identical profiles of Lenin printed side by side? In this strange repetition, Stalin was, in a way, more present than ever in his absence, since his shadowy presence was the answer to the obvious question: ‘why Lenin twice, why not just a single Lenin?’ There was nonetheless a deep irony in watching Ukrainians tearing down Lenin statues as a sign of their will to break with Soviet domination and assert their national sovereignty: the golden era of Ukraine’s national identity was not tsarist Russia (in which Ukrainian self-assertion as a nation had been thwarted), but the first decade of the Soviet Union when they established their full national identity. As even the Wikipedia passage on Ukraine in the 1920s notes:

The Civil War that eventually brought the Soviet government to power devastated Ukraine. It left over 1.5 million people dead and hundreds of thousands homeless. In addition, Soviet Ukraine had to face the famine of 1921. Seeing an exhausted Ukraine, the Soviet government remained very flexible during the 1920s. Thus, under the aegis of the Ukrainisation policy pursued by the national Communist leadership of Mykola Skrypnyk, Soviet leadership encouraged a national renaissance in literature and the arts. The Ukrainian culture and language enjoyed a revival, as Ukrainisation became a local implementation of the Soviet-wide policy of Korenisation (literally indigenisation). The Bolsheviks were also committed to introducing universal health care, education and social-security benefits, as well as the right to work and housing. Women’s rights were greatly increased through new laws designed to wipe away centuriesold inequalities. Most of these policies were sharply reversed by the early 1930s after Joseph Stalin gradually consolidated power to become the de facto communist party leader.

This ‘indigenisation’ followed the principles formulated by Lenin in quite unambiguous terms:

The proletariat cannot but fight against the forcible retention of the oppressed nations within the boundaries of a given state, and this is exactly what the struggle for the right of self-determination means. The proletariat must demand the right of political secession for the colonies and for the nations that ‘its own’ nation oppresses. Unless it does this, proletarian internationalism will remain a meaningless phrase; mutual confidence and class solidarity between the workers of the oppressing and oppressed nations will be impossible.⁸

Lenin remained faithful to this position to the end. Immediately after the October Revolution he engaged in a polemic with Rosa Luxemburg, who advocated allowing small nations to be given full sovereignty only if progressive forces predominated in the new state, while Lenin was for the unconditional right to secede, even if the ‘bad guys’ would take power. In his final struggle against Stalin’s project for a centralised Soviet Union, Lenin again advocated for the unconditional right of small nations to secede (in this case, Georgia was at stake), insisting on the full sovereignty of the national entities that composed the Soviet state; no wonder that, on 27 September 1922, in a letter to the members of the Politburo, Stalin openly accused Lenin of ‘national liberalism’. The direction in which Stalin was already blowing is clear from how he proposed to enact the decision to proclaim the government of the RSFSR also the government of the other five republics (Ukraine, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia):

If the present decision is confirmed by the Central Committee of the RCP, it will not be made public, but communicated to the Central Committees of the Republics for circulation among the Soviet organs, the Central Executive Committees or the Congresses of the Soviets of the said Republics before the convocation of the All-Russian Congress of the Soviets, where it will be declared to be the wish of these Republics.⁹

The interaction of the Central Committee (CC) with its base was thus not merely abolished, so that the higher authority simply imposed its will; to add insult to injury, it was also restaged as its opposite: the CC itself now decided what the base would ask the higher authority to enact as if it were its own wish. (But note also that Lenin himself, by imposing the prohibition of Party factions a year earlier, had opened up the very process he was now fighting.) Recall the most conspicuous case of such restaging when in 1939 the three Baltic states freely asked to join the Soviet Union, which granted their wish. What Stalin did in the early 1930s thus amounted simply to a return to tsarist foreign and national policy. For example, as part of this turn, the Russian colonisation of Siberia and Muslim Asia was no longer condemned as imperialist expansion but was celebrated as an introduction of progressive modernisation that would challenge the inertia of these traditional societies.

Today, Putin’s foreign policy is a clear continuation of this tsarist-Stalinist line. According to him, after the Revolution, it was the turn of the Bolsheviks to aggrieve Russia: ‘The Bolsheviks, for a number of reasons – may God judge them – added large sections of the historical South of Russia to the Republic of Ukraine. This was done with no consideration for the ethnic makeup of the population, and today these areas form the southeast of Ukraine.’¹⁰ In January 2016, Putin again made the same point in his characterisation of Lenin’s greatest mistake:

Ruling with your ideas as a guide is correct, but that is only the case when that idea leads to the right results, not like it did with Vladimir Ilyich. In the end that idea led to the ruin of the Soviet Union. There were many of these ideas such as providing regions with autonomy, and so on. They planted an atomic bomb under the building that is called Russia and which would later explode.¹¹

In short, Lenin was guilty of taking seriously the autonomy of the different nations that composed the Russian empire, and thus of questioning Russian hegemony. No wonder we see portraits of Stalin again during Russian military parades and public celebrations, while Lenin is obliterated. In a big opinion poll conducted a couple of years ago, Stalin was voted the third-greatest Russian of all time, while Lenin was nowhere to be seen. Stalin is not celebrated today as a communist, but as the restorer of Russia’s greatness after Lenin’s anti-patriotic ‘deviation’. For Lenin, ‘proletarian internationalism’ goes hand in hand with a defence of the rights of small nations against the big nations: for a ‘great’ nation dominating others, giving full rights to smaller nations is the key indicator of the seriousness of their professed internationalism.

Violence, Terror, Discipline

However, even if Lenin can be redeemed with regard to national liberation, what about his advocacy (and practice) of brutal violence, inclusive of terror? In the history of radical politics, violence is usually associated with the so-called Jacobin legacy, which, for that very reason, is dismissed as something that should be abandoned if we are truly to begin from the beginning again. Even many contemporary (post-) Marxists are embarrassed by the so-called Jacobin legacy of centralised state terror, from which they want to distance Marx himself – it was Lenin, so the story goes, who (re)introduced the Jacobin legacy into Marxism, thus falsifying Marx’s libertarian spirit. But is this really true? Let us take a closer look at how the Jacobins effectively opposed the recourse to a majority vote, on behalf of those who talk of an eternal Truth (how ‘totalitarian’ …). How could the Jacobins, the partisans of unity and of the struggle against factions and divisions, justify this rejection? ‘The entire difficulty resides in how to distinguish between the voice of truth, even if it is minoritary, and the factional voice which seeks only to divide artificially to conceal the truth.’¹² Robespierre’s answer is that the truth is irreducible to numbers (counting); it can be experienced also in solitude: those who proclaim a truth they have experienced should not be considered as factionalists, but as sensible and courageous people. In this case of attesting the truth, Robespierre said in the National Assembly on 28 December 1792, any invocation of majority or minority is nothing but a means to ‘reduce to silence those whom one designated by this term [minority]’: ‘Minority has everywhere an eternal right: to render audible the voice of truth.’ It is deeply significant that Robespierre made this statement in the course of the Assembly apropos the trial of the king. The Girondins proposed a ‘democratic’ solution: in such a difficult case, it was necessary to make an ‘appeal to the people’, to convoke local assemblies across France and ask them to vote on how to deal with the king – only such a move would give legitimacy to the trial. Robespierre’s answer was that such an ‘appeal to the people’ effectively cancels the sovereign will of the people which, through insurrection and revolution, had already made itself known and changed the very nature of the French state, bringing about the Republic. What the Girondins were effectively insinuating was that the revolutionary insurrection was ‘only an act of a part of the people, even of a minority, and that one should solicit the speech of a kind of silent majority’. In short, the Revolution had already decided the matter, the very fact of the Revolution (if it was just and not a crime) meant that the king was guilty, so to put that guilt to the vote would mean putting the Revolution itself into question.

Robespierre’s argument effectively points forward to Lenin, who, in his writings of 1917, saves his most acerbic irony for those who engaged in an endless search for some kind of ‘guarantee’ for the revolution. This guarantee assumed two main forms: either the reified notion of social Necessity (we should not risk the revolution too early; we must wait for the right moment, when the situation is ‘mature’ with regard to the laws of historical development; ‘it is too early for the socialist revolution, the working class is not yet advanced enough’) or a normative notion of ‘democratic’ legitimacy (‘the majority of the population is not on our side, so the revolution would not really be democratic’) – as if, before the revolutionary agent risks the seizure of the state power, it needs to secure permission from some figure of the big Other (e.g., organise a referendum to be sure that the majority supports the revolution). With Lenin, as with Lacan, the revolution ne s’autorise que d’elle-même: we must assume the revolutionary act as not being covered by the big Other – the fear of taking power ‘prematurely’, the search for the guarantee, is the fear of the abyss of the act. Therein lies the ultimate dimension of what Lenin incessantly denounces as ‘opportunism’, and his wager is that ‘opportunism’ is a position which is inherently false, masking the fear of accomplishing the act with a protective screen of ‘objective’ facts, laws or norms. This is why the first step in combating it is to announce it clearly: ‘What, then, is to be done? We must aussprechen was ist, ‘state the facts’, admit the truth that there is a tendency, or an opinion, in our Central Committee.’¹³

When we are dealing with ‘strong truths’ (les vérités fortes), shattering insights, asserting them entails symbolic violence. When la patrie est en danger, Robespierre said, one should fearlessly state the fact that ‘the nation is betrayed. This truth is now known to all Frenchmen’: ‘Lawgivers, the danger is immanent; the reign of truth has to begin: we are courageous enough to tell you this; be courageous enough to hear it.’ In such a situation, there is no space for a neutral third position. In his speech celebrating the dead of 10 August 1792, Abbé Gregoire declared: ‘there are people who are so good that they are worthless; and in a revolution which engages in the struggle of freedom against despotism, a neutral man is a pervert who, without any doubt, waits for how the battle will turn out to decide which side to take’. Before we dismiss these lines as ‘totalitarian’, let us recall a later time when the French patrie was again en danger, the situation after the French defeat in 1940, when none other than General de Gaulle, in his famous radio address from London, announced to the French people the ‘strong truth’: France is defeated, but the war is not over; against the Pétainist collaborators one must insist that the struggle goes on. The exact conditions of this statement are worth recalling: even Jacques Duclos, the second-strongest figure in the French Communist Party, admitted in a private conversation that if, at that moment, free elections had been held in France, Marshal Pétain would have won with 90 per cent of the vote. When de Gaulle, in his historic act, refused to acknowledge the capitulation to the Germans and continued to resist, he claimed that it was only he, not the Vichy regime, who spoke on behalf of the true France ( on behalf of France as such, not only on behalf of the ‘majority of the French’!). What he was saying was deeply true even if, ‘democratically’, it was not only without legitimisation but also clearly opposed to the opinion of the majority of the French people. (And the same goes for Germany: it was the tiny minority actively resisting Hitler that stood for Germany, not the active Nazis or the undecided opportunists.) This is not a reason to despise democratic elections; the point is only to insist that they are not per se an indication of Truth – as a rule, they tend to reflect the predominant doxa determined by the hegemonic ideology. There can be democratic elections which enact an event of Truth – elections in which, against the sceptic–cynical inertia, the majority momentarily ‘awakens’ and votes against the hegemonic ideological opinion – the exceptional status of such a surprising electoral result proves that elections as such are not a medium of Truth.

This position of a minority which stands for All is more than ever relevant today, in our post-political epoch in which a plurality of opinions reigns: under such conditions, the universal Truth is by definition a minority position. As Sophie Wahnich has pointed out, in a democracy corrupted by media, what ‘the freedom of the press without the duty to resist’ amounts to is ‘the right to say anything in a political relativist manner’ instead of defending the ‘demanding and sometimes even lethal ethics of truth’. In such a situation, the uncompromising insistent voice of truth (about ecology, about biogenetics, about the excluded …) cannot but appear as ‘irrational’ in its lack of consideration for the opinions of others, in its refusal of the spirit of pragmatic compromise, in its apocalyptic finality. Simone Weil offered a simple and poignant formulation of this partiality of truth:

There is a class of people in this world who have fallen into the lowest degree of humiliation, far below beggary, and who are deprived not only of all social consideration but also, in everybody’s opinion, of the specific human dignity, reason itself – and these are the only people who, in fact, are able to tell the truth. All the others lie.¹⁴

The 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 a new radical revolutionary left. Needless to say, such a politics of cynical ‘pedagogy’ is destined to fail, since it is fighting a losing battle: in the present politico-ideological constellation, the reaction to the inability of the welfare state to deliver will be rightist populism. In order to avoid this reaction, the left will have to propose its own positive project beyond the confines of the social-democratic welfare state. This is also why it is totally erroneous to pin one’s hopes on strong sovereign nation-states that can defend the welfare state against transnational bodies like the European Union which, so the story goes, serve as the instruments of global capital to dismantle whatever remains of the welfare state.¹⁷ From here, it is only a short step to accepting a ‘strategic alliance’ with the nationalist right worried about the dilution of national identity in transnational Europe. (As has de facto already happened with the Brexit victory in the UK.)

The walls which are now being thrown up all around the world are not of the same nature as the Berlin Wall, the icon of the Cold War. Today’s walls appear not to belong to the same notion, since the same wall often serves multiple functions: as a defence against terrorism, illegal immigrants or smuggling, as a cover for colonial land-grabbing, etc. In spite of this appearance of multiplicity, however, Wendy Brown is right to insist that we are dealing with the same phenomenon, even though its examples are usually not perceived as cases of the same notion: today’s walls are a reaction to the threat to national sovereignty posed by the ongoing process of globalisation: ‘Rather than resurgent expressions of nation-state sovereignty, the new walls are icons of its erosion. While they may appear as hyperbolic tokens of such sovereignty, like all hyperbole, they reveal a tremulousness, vulnerability, dubiousness, or instability at the core of what they aim to express – qualities that are themselves antithetical to sovereignty and thus elements of its undoing.’¹⁸ The most striking thing about these walls is their theatrical, and rather inefficient, nature: basically, they consist of old-fashioned materials (concrete and metal), representing a weirdly medieval countermeasure to the immaterial forces which effectively threaten national sovereignty today (digital and commercial mobility, advanced cyberweaponry). Brown is also right to highlight the role of organised religion, alongside globalisation, as a major trans-statal agency posing a threat to state sovereignty. For example, one can argue that China, in spite of its recent softening towards religion as an instrument of social stability, so ferociously opposes some religions (Tibetan Buddhism, the Falun Gong movement) precisely in so far as it perceives them to be a threat to national sovereignty and unity (Buddhism yes, but under the Chinese state control; Catholicism yes, but the bishops nominated by the Pope must be screened by the Chinese authorities …).

One of the trickiest forms of false fidelity to twentieth-century communism is the rejection of all Really Existing Socialisms on behalf of some authentic working-class movement waiting to explode. Back in 1983, Georges Peyrol wrote a piece entitled ‘Thirty Ways of Easily Recognising an Old Marxist’, a wonderfully ironic portrait of a traditional Marxist certain that – sooner or later, we just have to be patient – an authentic revolutionary workers’ movement will rise up again, victoriously sweeping away capitalist rule along with the corrupt official leftist parties and trade unions … Frank Ruda has pointed out that Georges Peyrol is one of the pseudonyms of Alain Badiou:¹⁹ the target of his attack were those surviving Trotskyists who continued to keep the faith that, out of the crisis of the Marxist left, a new authentic revolutionary working-class movement would somehow emerge.²⁰ How, then, to break out of this deadlock? What if we risk taking a fateful step further and reject not only state and market regulation but also their utopian shadow: the idea of a direct transparent regulation ‘from below’ of the social process of production, as the economic counterpart to the dream of the ‘immediate democracy’ of workers’ councils?

Leninist Freedom

What, then, of freedom? Here is how Lenin states his position in a polemic against the Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionaries’ critique of Bolshevik power in 1922:

Indeed, the sermons which … the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries preach express their true nature – ‘The revolution has gone too far. What you are saying now we have been saying all the time, permit us to say it again.’ But we say in reply: ‘Permit us to put you before a firing squad for saying that. Either you refrain from expressing your views, or, if you insist on expressing your political views publicly in the present circumstances, when our position is far more difficult than it was when the whiteguards were directly attacking us, then you will have only yourselves to blame if we treat you as the worst and most pernicious whiteguard elements.’²¹

This Leninist freedom of choice – not ‘Life or money!’ but ‘Life or critique!’ – combined with Lenin’s dismissive attitude towards the ‘liberal’ notion of freedom, accounts for his bad reputation among liberals. Their case largely rests on their rejection of the standard Marxist–Leninist opposition of ‘formal’ and ‘actual’ freedom: as even leftist liberals like Claude Lefort emphasise again and again, freedom is in its very notion ‘formal’, so that ‘actual freedom’ equals the lack of freedom.²² In other words, with regard to freedom, Lenin is best remembered for his famous retort ‘Freedom – yes, but for WHOM? To do WHAT?’ – for him, in the above-quoted case of the Mensheviks, their ‘freedom’ to criticize the Bolshevik government effectively amounted to the ‘freedom’ to undermine the workers’ and peasants’ government on behalf of the counter-revolution. After the terrifying experience of Really Existing Socialism, is it not all too obvious today where the fault of this reasoning resides? First, it reduces a historical constellation to a closed, fully contextualised situation in which the ‘objective’ consequences of one’s acts are fully determined (‘independently of your intentions, what you are doing now objectively serves …’); second, the position of enunciation of such statements usurps the right to decide what your acts ‘objectively mean’, so that their apparent ‘objectivism’ (the focus on ‘objective meaning’) is the form of appearance of its opposite, a thorough subjectivism: I decide what your acts objectively mean, since I define the context of the situation (for example, if I conceive of my power as the immediate equivalent/expression of the power of the working class, then everyone who opposes me is ‘objectively’ an enemy of the working class). Against this full contextualisation, one should emphasise that freedom is ‘actual’ precisely and only as the capacity to ‘transcend’ the coordinates of a given situation, to ‘posit the presuppositions’ of one’s activity (as Hegel would have put it), i.e., to redefine the very situation within which one is active. Furthermore, as many a critic pointed out, the very term ‘Really Existing Socialism’, though it was coined in order to assert socialism’s success, is in itself a proof of socialism’s utter failure, of the failure of the attempt to legitimise socialist regimes – the term appeared at that historical moment when the only legitimising reason for socialism was the mere fact that it existed.²³

Is this, however, the whole story? How does freedom actually function in liberal democracies themselves? In spite of all compromises, Obama’s healthcare reform amounted to a kind of act, at least in today’s conditions, since it was based on a rejection of the hegemonic notion of the need to curtail big government expenditure and administration – in a way, it ‘did the impossible’. No wonder, then, that it triggered such opposition – bearing witness to the material force of the ideological notion of ‘free choice’. That is to say, although the great majority of so-called ‘ordinary people’ were not properly acquainted with the reform programme, the medical lobby (twice as strong as the infamous defence lobby!) succeeded in imposing on the public the fundamental idea that, with universal healthcare, free choice (in matters concerning medicine) would be somehow threatened. Against this purely fictional reference to ‘free choice’, every appeal to the ‘hard facts’ (in Canada, healthcare is less expensive and more effective, with no less ‘free choice’, etc.) proved useless.

At the very nerve centre of liberal ideology is the idea of freedom of choice grounded in the notion of the ‘psychological’ subject endowed with potentials she strives to realise. And this holds all the more so today, in the era of the so-called ‘risk society’,²⁴ when the ruling ideology endeavours to sell us the very insecurity caused by the dismantling of the welfare state as an opportunity for new freedoms: you have to change your job every year, relying on short-term contracts instead of a long-term stable appointment? Why not see this as a liberation from the constraints of a fixed job, as the chance to reinvent yourself again and again, to become aware of and then realise the hidden potentials of your personality? You can no longer rely on the standard healthcare and retirement plans, so you have to take out additional insurance? Why not see this as another opportunity to choose: either a better life now or long-term security? And if this predicament causes you anxiety, the postmodern ideologist will immediately accuse you of wanting to ‘escape from freedom’ by clinging mindlessly to the old stable forms.

Phenomena like these make it all the more necessary today to reassert the opposition of ‘formal’ and ‘actual’ freedom in a new, more precise, sense. What we need is a ‘Leninist’ traité de la servitude libérale, a new version of la Boetie’s Traité de la servitude volontaire that would fully justify the apparent oxymoron ‘liberal totalitarianism’. In experimental psychology, Jean-Léon Beauvois took the first step in this direction with his precise exploration of the paradoxes that arise when the freedom to choose is conferred on the subject.²⁵ Repeated experiments established the following paradox: if, after getting two groups of volunteers to agree to participate in the experiment, one informs them that it will involve something unpleasant, against their ethical principles even, and if, at this point, one tells the first group that they are free to refuse to participate but says nothing to the other group, then in both groups the same (very high) percentage will agree to continue their participation. In other words, conferring the formal freedom of choice does not make any difference to the outcome: those given the freedom to choose will do the same thing as those (implicitly) denied it. This, however, does not mean that the reminder or bestowal of that freedom makes no difference at all: those given it will not only tend to choose the same as those denied it, on top of that they will be inclined to ‘rationalise’ their ‘free’ decision to continue to participate in the experiment: unable to endure the so-called cognitive dissonance (their awareness that they have freely acted against their interests, propensities, tastes or norms), they will tend to change their opinion about the act they were asked to accomplish. Let us say that an individual agrees to participate in an experiment that concerns changing eating habits in order to fight against famine; once in the laboratory, he is then asked to swallow a live worm, with the explicit reminder that, if he finds this repulsive, he can, of course, say no, since he has the full freedom to choose. In most cases, he will agree to do it, and then rationalise it by saying to himself something like: ‘What I am being asked to do is disgusting, but I am not a coward, I should display some courage and self-control, otherwise the scientists will see me as a weak person who pulls out at the first minor obstacle! In any case, a worm does have a lot of proteins so it could effectively be used to feed the poor – who am I to hinder such an important experiment because of my petty sensitivity? And maybe my disgust at worms is just a prejudice, maybe a worm isn’t so bad – and wouldn’t tasting it be a new and daring experience? What if it enables me to discover an unexpected, if slightly perverse, dimension of myself of which I was hitherto unaware?’

In analysing what motivates people to accomplish such an act that runs against their perceived propensities and/or interests, Beauvois identifies three distinct modes: authoritarian (the pure command ‘You should do it because I say so, without questioning it!’, sustained by a reward if the subject does it and punishment if he does not); totalitarian (with reference to some higher Cause or common Good which is greater than the subject’s perceived interest: ‘You should do it because, even if it is unpleasant, it serves our Nation, the Party, Humanity!’); and liberal (with reference to the subject’s inner nature itself: ‘What is asked of you may appear repulsive, but look deep into yourself and you will find that it’s in your true nature to do it, you will find it attractive, you will become aware of new, unexpected, dimensions of your personality!’). But Beauvois’s categorisation needs to be corrected: a direct authoritarianism is practically nonexistent – even the most oppressive regime publicly legitimises its demands with reference to some higher Good, and, ultimately, ‘you have to obey because I say so’ reverberates only as its obscene supplement discernible between the lines. If it is the specificity of standard authoritarianism to refer to some higher Good, ‘totalitarianism’, like liberalism, interpellates the subject on behalf of his own good (‘what may appear to you as an external pressure is really the expression of your objective interests, of what you really want without being aware of it!’). The difference between the two resides elsewhere: ‘totalitarianism’ imposes on the subject her own good, even if it is against her will – recall the (in)famous statement made by Charles I to the Earl of Essex: ‘If any shall be so foolishly unnatural as to oppose their king, their country and their own good, we will make them happy, by God’s blessing – even against their wills.’ Here we encounter already the later Jacobin theme of happiness as a political factor, as well as the Saint-Justian idea of forcing people to be happy. Liberalism, in contrast, tries to avoid (or rather cover up) this paradox by clinging to the fiction of the subject’s immediate free self-perception (‘I don’t claim to know better than you what you want – just look deep into yourself and decide freely!’).

Beauvois’s line of argumentation is faulty because he fails to recognise how the abyssal tautological authority (the ‘It is so because I say so!’ of the Master) does not work simply because of the sanctions (punishments or rewards) it implicitly or explicitly evokes. What, then, actually makes a subject freely choose to do something imposed on her against her interests and/or propensities? Here, the empirical inquiry into ‘pathological’ (in the Kantian sense) motivations is not sufficient: the enunciation of an injunction that imposes on its addressee a symbolic commitment evinces an inherent force of its own, so that what seduces us into obeying it is the very feature that may appear to be an obstacle – the absence of a reason ‘why’. Here, Lacan can be of some help: the Lacanian ‘Master Signifier’ designates precisely this hypnotic force of the symbolic injunction which relies only on its own act of enunciation – it is here that we encounter ‘symbolic efficacy’ at its purest. The three ways of legitimising the exercise of authority (‘authoritarian’, ‘totalitarian’, ‘liberal’) are simply three ways to cover up, to blind us to the seductive power of, the abyss of this empty call. In a way, liberalism is even the worst of the three, since it naturalises the reasons for obedience, incorporating them into the subject’s internal psychological structure. The paradox, then, is that ‘liberal’ subjects are in a way the least free: in changing their own opinion or perception of themselves, accepting what is imposed on them as originating in their ‘nature’, they are no longer even aware of their subordination.

Take the situation in the Eastern European countries around 1990, when Really Existing Socialism was falling apart: all of a sudden, people were faced with the ‘freedom of political choice’. But were they really at any point asked the fundamental question of what kind of new order they actually wanted? Was it not rather that they found themselves in the exact situation of the subject-victim in a Beauvois-style experiment? They were first told that they were entering the promised land of political freedom; soon afterwards, they were informed that this freedom involved unrestrained privatisation, the dismantling of social security, and so on and so forth. They still had the freedom to choose, so, if they wanted, they could refuse to take this path; but, no, our heroic Eastern Europeans did not want to disappoint their Western tutors, so they stoically persisted in the choice they had never made, convincing themselves that they should behave as mature subjects who were aware that freedom has its price. This is why the notion of the psychological subject endowed with natural propensities, who has to realise its true Self and its potential, and who is, consequently, ultimately responsible for its own failure or success, is the key ingredient of liberal freedom.

This is where one should insist on reintroducing the Leninist opposition of ‘formal’ and ‘actual’ freedom: in an act of actual freedom, one dares precisely to break this seductive power of symbolic efficacy. Therein resides the moment of truth of Lenin’s acerbic retort to his Menshevik critics: the truly free choice is a choice in which I do not merely choose between two or more options within a pre-given set of coordinates; rather I choose to change this set of coordinates itself. The catch of the ‘transition’ from Really Existing Socialism to capitalism was that the Eastern Europeans never had the chance to choose the ad quem of this transition – all of a sudden, they were (almost literally) ‘thrown’ into a new situation in which they were presented with a new set of given choices (pure liberalism, nationalist conservatism …). What this means is that ‘actual freedom’, as the act of consciously changing this set, occurs only when, in the situation of a forced choice, one acts as if the choice is not forced and ‘chooses the impossible’. This is what Lenin’s obsessive tirades against ‘formal’ freedom are all about, and therein lies the ‘rational kernel’ that is worth saving today: when he insists that there is no ‘pure’ democracy, that we should always ask apropos of any freedom, whom does it serve, what is its role in the class struggle, his point is precisely to maintain the possibility of a true radical choice. This is what the distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘actual’ freedom ultimately amounts to: the former refers to freedom of choice within the coordinates of the existing power relations, while the latter designates the site of an intervention that undermines these very coordinates. In short, Lenin’s aim is not to limit freedom of choice, but to maintain the fundamental Choice – when he asks about the role of a freedom within the class struggle, what he is asking is precisely: ‘Does this freedom contribute to or constrain the fundamental revolutionary Choice?’

Which brings us back to Jacobin revolutionary terror, wherein we should not be afraid to identify the emancipatory kernel. Let us recall the rhetorical turn often taken as proof of Robespierre’s ‘totalitarian’ manipulation of his audience.²⁶ This took place during Robespierre’s speech in the National Assembly on 11 Germinal Year II (31 March 1794); the previous night, Danton, Camille Desmoulins and others had been arrested, so many members of the Assembly were understandably afraid that they would be next. Robespierre directly addressed the moment as pivotal, ‘Citizens, the moment has come to speak the truth’, and went on to evoke the fear in the room: ‘One wants [on veut] to make you fear abuses of power, of the national power you have exercised … One wants to make us fear that the people will fall victim to the Committees … One fears that the prisoners are being oppressed.’²⁷ The opposition here is between the impersonal ‘one’ (the instigators of fear are not personified) and the collective thus put under pressure, which almost imperceptibly shifts from the plural second-person ‘you’ (vous) to the first-person ‘us’ (Robespierre gallantly includes himself in the collective). However, the final formulation introduces an ominous twist: it is no longer that ‘one wants to make you/us fear’, but that ‘one fears’, which means that the enemy stoking the fear is no longer outside ‘you/us’, the members of the Assembly; it is here, among us, among ‘you’ addressed by Robespierre, corroding our unity from within. At this precise moment, Robespierre, in a true masterstroke, assumed full subjectivisation – waiting a moment for the ominous effect of his words to sink in, he then continued in the first person singular: ‘I say that anyone who trembles at this moment is guilty; for innocence never fears public scrutiny.’²⁸ What could be more ‘totalitarian’ than this closed loop of ‘your very fear of being found guilty makes you guilty’ – a weird superego-twisted version of the well-known motto ‘the only thing we have to fear is fear itself’? We should nonetheless reject the easy dismissal of this rhetorical strategy as one of ‘terrorist culpabilisation’, and discern its moment of truth: at the crucial moment of a revolutionary decision there are no innocent bystanders, because, in such a moment, innocence itself – exempting oneself from the decision, going on as if the struggle one is witnessing is not really one’s concern – is indeed the highest treason. That is to say, the fear of being accused of treason is my treason, because, even if I ‘did nothing against the revolution’, this fear itself, the fact that it emerged in me, demonstrates that my subjective position is external to the revolution, that I experience ‘revolution’ as an external force threatening me.

But what is going on in this unique speech is even more revealing: Robespierre directly addresses the touchy question that must have arisen in the mind of his audience – how can he be sure that he won’t be next in line to be accused? He is not the master exempted from the collective, the ‘I’ outside ‘we’ – after all, he was once very close to Danton, a powerful figure now under arrest, so what if, tomorrow, that fact will be used against him? In short, how can Robespierre be sure that the process he himself unleashed will not swallow him up too? It is here that his position takes on a sublime greatness – he fully assumes that the danger that now threatens Danton will tomorrow threaten him. The reason he is so serene, unafraid of his fate, is not that Danton was a traitor while he is pure, a direct embodiment of the people’s Will; it is that he, Robespierre, is not afraid to die – his eventual death will be a mere accident that counts for nothing: ‘What does danger matter to me? My life belongs to the Fatherland; my heart is free from fear; and if I were to die, I would do so without reproach and without ignominy.’²⁹ Consequently, in so far as the shift from ‘we’ to ‘I’ can effectively be determined as the moment when the democratic mask falls off and Robespierre openly asserts himself as a ‘Master’ (up to this point, we follow Lefort’s analysis), the term Master has to be given here its full Hegelian weight: the Master is the figure of sovereignty, the one who is not afraid to die, who is ready to risk everything. In other words, the ultimate meaning of Robespierre’s first-person-singular ‘I’ is: I am not afraid to die. What authorises him is just this, not any kind of direct access to the big Other, i.e., he does not claim that it is the people’s Will which speaks through him.

Another ‘inhuman’ dimension of the Virtue–Terror couple promoted by Robespierre is the rejection of habit (in the sense of the agency of realistic compromises). Every legal order, or every order of explicit normativity, has to rely on a complex ‘reflexive’ network of informal rules which tells us how we are to relate to and apply the explicit norms; to what extent we’re meant to take them literally; how and when we’re allowed, solicited even, to disregard them; etc. – this is the domain of habit. To know the habits of a society is to know the meta-rules of how to apply its norms: think of the polite offer-that-is-meant-to-be-refused – it is ‘habitual’ to refuse such an offer, and anyone who accepts it commits a vulgar blunder. The same goes for many political situations in which a choice is given us only on condition that we make the right decision: we are solemnly reminded that we can say no – but we are expected to reject this offer and enthusiastically say yes. With many sexual prohibitions, the situation is the opposite: the explicit ‘no’ effectively functions as the implicit injunction ‘do it, but in a discreet way!’ Measured against this background, revolutionary egalitarian figures from Robespierre to John Brown are (potentially at least) figures without habits: they refuse to take into account the habits that qualify the functioning of a universal rule. As Robespierre himself explained:

Such is the natural dominion of habit that we regard the most arbitrary conventions, sometimes indeed the most defective institutions, as absolute measures of truth or falsehood, justice or injustice. It does not even occur to us that most are inevitably still connected with the prejudices on which despotism fed us. We have been so long stooped under its yoke that we have some difficulty in raising ourselves to the eternal principles of reason; anything that refers to the sacred source of all law seems to us to take on an illegal character, and the very order of nature seems to us a disorder. The majestic movements of a great people, the sublime fervours of virtue often appear to our timid eyes as something like an erupting volcano or the overthrow of political society; and it is certainly not the least of the troubles bothering us, this contradiction between the weakness of our morals, the depravity of our minds, and the purity of principle and energy of character demanded by the free government to which we have dared aspire.³⁰

To break the yoke of habit means, for example, that if all men are equal, then all men are to be effectively treated as equal; if blacks are also human, then they should be immediately treated as such. Recall the early stages of the struggle against slavery in the US, which, even prior to the Civil War, culminated in the armed insurrection led by the unique figure of John Brown:

African Americans were caricatures of people, they were characterized as buffoons and minstrels, they were the butt-end of jokes in American society. And even the abolitionists, as antislavery as they were, the majority of them did not see African Americans as equals. The majority of them, and this was something that African Americans complained about all the time, were willing to work for the end of slavery in the South but they were not willing to work to end discrimination in the North … John Brown wasn’t like that. For him, practicing egalitarianism was a first step toward ending slavery. And African Americans who came in contact with him knew this immediately.³¹

For this reason, John Brown is a key political figure in the history of the US: in his fervently Christian ‘radical abolitionism’, he came closest to introducing a Jacobin logic into the US political landscape: ‘John Brown considered 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 that reason as one that had to be creatively exploited for new political choices. With the notion of ‘socialism in one country’, Stalin re-normalised the situation, drafting it into a new narrative of linear development in ‘stages’. In other words, while Lenin was fully aware that what had happened was an ‘anomaly’ (a revolution in a country lacking the preconditions for developing a socialist society), he rejected the vulgar evolutionist conclusion that the revolution had taken place ‘prematurely’, so that one had to take a step back and develop a modern democratic capitalist society, which would then slowly create the conditions for socialist revolution. It was precisely against this vulgar conclusion that Lenin insisted the ‘complete hopelessness of the situation’ offered ‘the opportunity to create the fundamental requisites of civilisation in a different way from that of the Western European countries’. What he was proposing here was effectively an implicit theory of ‘alternate history’: under the ‘premature’ domination of the force of the future, the same ‘necessary’ historical process (that of modern civilisation) can be (re)run in a different way.

Even Badiou was perhaps too hasty here in ultimately locating the betrayal of the Event in the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution, indeed, in the revolutionary takeover of the state power itself – in that fateful moment when the Bolsheviks abandoned their focus on the revolutionary self-organisation of the proletarian masses. Badiou is fully justified in emphasising that only by reference to what happens after the revolution, to the ‘morning after’, to the hard work of fidelity to the Event, can we distinguish between pathetic libertarian outbursts and true revolutionary events: these upheavals lose their energy when one has to take up the prosaic work of social reconstruction – at this point, lethargy sets in. In contrast to this, recall the immense creativity of the Jacobins just prior to their fall: the numerous proposals for a new civic religion, for how to preserve the dignity of old people, and so on. Therein also resides the interest of reports about daily life in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s, with its enthusiastic urge to invent new rules for quotidian existence: how does one get married? What are the new rules of courting? How does one celebrate a birthday? How should one be buried?³⁶

It was at this point that the Cultural Revolution miserably failed. It is difficult to miss the irony of the fact that Badiou, who adamantly opposes the notion of the act as negative, locates the historical significance of the Cultural Revolution in the negative gesture of signalling ‘the end of the party-state as the central production of revolutionary political activity’ – it is precisely here that, in order to be consistent, Badiou should have denied the evental status of the Cultural Revolution: far from being an Event, it was rather a supreme display of what he likes to refer to as the ‘morbid death drive’. The destruction of old monuments was not a true negation of the past, it was an impotent passage à l’acte bearing witness to a failure of that negation.

So, in a way, there is a kind of poetic justice in the fact that the final result of Mao’s Cultural Revolution was the unprecedented explosion of capitalist dynamism in China. In other words, with the full deployment of capitalism, it is the predominant form of ‘normal’ life itself which, in a sense, becomes ‘carnivalised’, with its constant self-revolutionising, its reversals, crises and reinventions. There is thus, beyond all cheap jibes and superficial analogies, a profound structural homology between the Maoist permanent self-revolutionising, its constant struggle against the ossification of state structures, and the inherent dynamic of capitalism. One is tempted here to paraphrase Brecht’s ‘What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?’: what are the violent and destructive outbursts of a Red Guard caught up in the Cultural Revolution compared to the true Cultural Revolution, the permanent dissolution of all stable life-forms necessitated by capitalist reproduction? Today, the tragedy of the Great Leap Forward is repeating itself as the comedy of a rapid capitalist Great Leap Forward into modernisation, with the old slogan ‘an iron foundry in every village’ re-emerging as ‘a skyscraper in every street’. This revolutionary aspect of the Cultural Revolution is sometimes admitted even by conservative critics compelled to take note of the ‘paradox’ of the ‘totalitarian’ leader teaching people to ‘think and act for themselves’, to rebel and destroy the very apparatus of ‘totalitarian domination’. Take, for example, Gordon Chang’s remarks in the conservative magazine Commentary:

Paradoxically, it was Mao himself, the great enslaver, who in his own way taught the Chinese people to think and act for themselves. In the Cultural Revolution, he urged tens of millions of radical youths … to go to every corner of the country to tear down ancient temples, destroy cultural relics, and denounce their elders, including not only mothers and fathers but also government officials and Communist Party members … The Cultural Revolution may have been Mao’s idea of ruining his enemies, but it became a frenzy that destroyed the fabric of society. As government broke down, its functions taken over by revolutionary committees and ‘people’s communes’, the strict restraints and repressive mechanisms of the state dissolved. People no longer had to wait for someone to instruct them what to do – Mao had told them they had ‘the right to rebel’. For the radical young, this was a time of essentially unrestrained passion. In one magnificent stroke, the Great Helmsman had delegitimized almost all forms of authority.³⁷

The Cultural Revolution can thus be read at two different levels. If we read it as a part of historical reality (Being), we can easily submit it to a ‘dialectical’ analysis which perceives the final outcome of a historical process as its ‘truth’: the ultimate failure of the Cultural Revolution bears witness to the inherent inconsistency of the very project (or ‘notion’) of Cultural Revolution, as the explication-deployment-actualisation of these inconsistencies (in the same way that, for Marx, the vulgar, non-heroic, daily reality of capitalist profit-seeking was the ‘truth’ of Jacobin revolutionary heroism). If, however, we analyse it as an Event, as an enactment of the eternal Idea of egalitarian Justice, then the ultimate factual result of the Cultural Revolution, its catastrophic failure and then reversal into the capitalist dynamic, does not exhaust the real of the Cultural Revolution: the eternal Idea of the Cultural Revolution survives its defeat in sociohistorical reality; it continues to lead a spectral life as the ghost of a failed utopia which returns to haunt future generations, patiently awaiting its next resurrection. This brings us back to Robespierre and his simple faith in the eternal Idea of freedom which persists through all defeats, and without which a revolution ‘is just a noisy crime that destroys another crime’, a faith most poignantly expressed in Robespierre’s very last speech on 8 Thermidor 1794, the day before his arrest and execution:

But there do exist, I can assure you, souls that are feeling and pure; it exists, that tender, imperious and irresistible passion, the torment and delight of magnanimous hearts; that deep horror of tyranny, that compassionate zeal for the oppressed, that sacred love for the homeland, that even more sublime and holy love for humanity, without which a great revolution is just a noisy crime that destroys another crime; it does exist, that generous ambition to establish here on earth the world’s first Republic.³⁸

Does not the same hold even more for the last big instalment in the life of this Idea, the Maoist Cultural Revolution – without this Idea which sustained revolutionary enthusiasm, the Cultural Revolution was to an even greater degree ‘just a noisy crime that destroyed another crime’. We should recall here Hegel’s sublime words on the French Revolution from his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History:

It has been said that the French revolution resulted from philosophy, and it is not without reason that philosophy has been called Weltweisheit [world wisdom]; for it is not only truth in and for itself, as the pure essence of things, but also truth in its living form as exhibited in the affairs of the world. We should not, therefore, contradict the assertion that the revolution received its first impulse from philosophy … Never since the sun had stood in the firmament and the planets revolved around him had it been perceived that man’s existence centres in his head, i.e. in thought, inspired by which he builds up the world of reality … not until now had man advanced to the recognition of the principle that thought ought to govern spiritual reality. This was accordingly a glorious mental dawn. All thinking being shared in the jubilation of this epoch. Emotions of a lofty character stirred men’s minds at that time; a spiritual enthusiasm thrilled through the world, as if the reconciliation between the divine and the secular was now first accomplished.³⁹

This, of course, did not prevent Hegel from coldly analysing the inner necessity of this explosion of abstract freedom turning into its opposite: self-destructive revolutionary terror. But we should never forget that Hegel’s critique is immanent, accepting the basic principle of the French Revolution (and its key supplement, the Haiti Revolution). And one should do exactly the same apropos the October Revolution (and, later, the Chinese Revolution), which was, as Badiou has pointed out, the first case in the entire history of humanity of a successful revolt of the exploited poor – they were the zero-level members of the new society; they set the standards. The revolution stabilised itself into a new social order; a new world was created and miraculously survived for decades, amid unthinkable economic and military pressure and isolation. This was effectively ‘a glorious mental dawn. All thinking beings shared in the jubilation of this epoch.’ Against all hierarchical orders, egalitarian universality came directly to power.

There is a basic philosophical dilemma underlying this alternative: it may seem that the only consistent Hegelian standpoint is one which measures the notion by the success or failure of its actualisation, so that, from the perspective of the total mediation of the essence by its appearance, any transcendence of the idea over its actualisation is discredited. The consequence of this is that, if we insist on the eternal Idea which survives its historical defeat, this necessarily entails – in Hegelese – a regression from the level of the Notion as the fully actualised unity of essence and appearance to the level of the Essence supposed to transcend its appearing. Is this true, however? One can also claim that the excess of the utopian Idea that survives its historical defeat does not contradict the total mediation of Idea and its appearing: the basic Hegelian insight, according to which the failure of reality to fully actualise an Idea is simultaneously the failure (limitation) of this Idea itself, continues to hold. What one should add is simply that the gap separating the Idea from its actualisation signals a gap within the Idea itself. This is why the spectral Idea that continues to haunt historical reality signals the falsity of the new historical reality itself, its inadequacy in relation to its own Notion – the failure of the Jacobin utopia, for example, its actualisation in utilitarian bourgeois reality, is simultaneously the limitation of this utilitarian reality itself. Its failure was precisely the failure to create a new form of everyday life: it remained a carnivalesque excess, with the state apparatus guaranteeing the continuation of daily life, of production.

The lesson of this failure is that we should shift the focus from the utopian goal of the full reign of productive expressivity that no longer needs representation, a state order, capital, and so on, to the problem of what kind of representation should replace the existing liberal-democratic representative state. This problem exploded soon after 1917 when the revolutionary state of exception gradually gave way to the task of organising everyday life. Trotsky pleaded for an interplay between class self-organisation and political leadership of the revolutionary vanguard party.⁴⁰ Lenin’s solution was an almost Kantian one: freely debate at public meetings during the weekends, but obey and work while at work:

Before the October Revolution [a worker] did not see a single instance of the propertied, exploiting classes making any real sacrifice for him, giving up anything for his benefit. He did not see them giving him the land and liberty that had been repeatedly promised him, giving him peace, sacrificing ‘Great Power’ interests and the interests of Great Power secret treaties, sacrificing capital and profits. He saw this only after October 25, 1917, when he took it himself by force, and had to defend by force what he had taken … Naturally, for a certain time, all his attention, all his thoughts, all his spiritual strength, were concentrated on taking a breath, on unbending his back, on straightening his shoulders, on taking the blessings of life that were there for the taking, and that had always been denied him by the now overthrown exploiters. Of course, a certain amount of time is required to enable the ordinary working man not only to see for himself, not only to become convinced, but also to feel that he cannot simply ‘take’, snatch, grab things, that this leads to increased disruption, to ruin, to the return of the Kornilovs. The corresponding change in the conditions of life (and consequently in the psychology) of the ordinary working men is only just beginning. And our whole task, the task of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks), which is the class-conscious spokesman for the strivings of the exploited for emancipation, is to appreciate this change, to understand that it is necessary, to stand at the head of the exhausted people who are wearily seeking a way out and lead them along the true path, along the path of labour discipline, along the path of co-ordinating the task of arguing at mass meetings about the conditions of work with the task of unquestioningly obeying the will of the Soviet leader, of the dictator, during the work … We must learn to combine the ‘public meeting’ democracy of the working people – turbulent, surging, overflowing its banks like a spring flood – with iron discipline while at work, with unquestioning obedience to the will of a single person, the Soviet leader, while at work.⁴¹

It is easy to make fun of Lenin here (or to be horrified by what he is saying), easy to accuse him of being caught up in the industrialist paradigm, and so on – but the problem remains. The main form of direct democracy of the ‘expressive’ multitude in the twentieth century was the so-called workers’ councils (‘soviets’) – (almost) everybody in the West loved them, including liberals like Hannah Arendt, who perceived in them an echo of the ancient Greek polis. Throughout the era of Really Existing Socialism, the secret hope of ‘democratic socialists’ lay in the direct democracy of the ‘soviets’, as the form of self-organisation of the people; it is deeply symptomatic how, with the decline of Really Existing Socialism, this emancipatory shadow which continually haunted it also disappeared. Is this not ultimate confirmation of the fact that the conciliar version of ‘democratic socialism’ was no more than a spectral double of the ‘bureaucratic’ Really Existing Socialism, its inherent transgression with no substantial positive content of its own, unable to serve as the permanent basic organising principle of a society? What both Really Existing Socialism and council democracy shared was a belief in the possibility of a self-transparent organisation of society that would preclude political ‘alienation’ (state apparatuses, institutionalised rules of political life, a legal order, police, etc.). Is not the basic experience of the end of Really Existing Socialism precisely the rejection of this shared feature, the resigned ‘postmodern’ acceptance of the fact that society is a complex network of ‘sub-systems’, which is why a certain level of ‘alienation’ is constitutive of social life, so that a totally self-transparent society is a utopia replete with totalitarian potential?⁴² No wonder, then, that the same holds for contemporary practices of ‘direct democracy’, from the favelas to the ‘postindustrial’ digital culture (do not the descriptions of the new ‘tribal’ communities of computer hackers often evoke the logic of council democracy?): they all have to rely on a state apparatus since, for structural reasons, they cannot take over the entire field.

According to the ideologists of postmodern capitalism, Marxist theory (and practice) remains caught within the constraints of the hierarchical centralised state-control logic, and thus cannot cope with the social effects of the new information revolution. There are good empirical reasons for this claim: again, it is a supreme irony of history that the disintegration of communism is the most convincing example of the validity of the traditional Marxist dialectic of forces of production and relations of production, on which Marxism counted in its endeavour to overcome capitalism. What effectively ruined the communist regimes was their inability to adjust to the new social logic ushered in by the ‘information revolution’: they tried to steer this revolution into another large-scale centralised state-planning project. Today, however, there are increasingly signs that capitalism itself cannot cope with the informational revolution (problems with ‘intellectual property’ and the rise of ‘cooperative commons’, etc.).

What happened, then, when in his last years Lenin became fully aware of the limitations of Bolshevik power? It is here that once again we should oppose Lenin and Stalin: in Lenin’s very last writings, long after he had renounced the utopia of State and Revolution, we can discern the contours of a modest ‘realistic’ project for what Bolshevik power should do. Because of the economic underdevelopment and cultural backwardness of the Russian masses, there was no way for the country to ‘pass directly to socialism’; all the Soviet power could do was combine the moderate politics of ‘state capitalism’ with an intense cultural education of the inert peasant masses – not ‘communist propaganda’ brainwashing, but simply the patient, gradual imposition of developed standards of civilisation. Facts and figures revealed ‘what a vast amount of urgent spadework we still have to do to 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 if we set our minds to encouraging their rise? Given all this potential, what is holding things up? Why is the tsar still here? We, comrades – we’re the bottleneck! If we could hone our underground skills and bring together what the tsarist regime wants so desperately to keep apart – worker leaders and worker followers, the message and the audience – 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