Changes

In what, then, resides Lenin's greatness? Recall Lenin's shock when, in the Fall of 1914, the Social Democratic parties adopted the "patriotic line" — Lenin even thought that the issue of Vorwarts, the daily newspaper of the German Social Democracy, which reported how Social Democrats in Reichstag voted for the military credits, was a forgery of the Russian secret police destined to deceive the Russian workers. In that era of the military conflict that cut in half the European continent, how difficult it was to reject the notion that one should take sides in this conflict, and to fight against the "patriotic fervor" in one's own country! How many great minds (inclusive of Freud) succumbed to the nationalist temptation, even if only for a couple of weeks! This shock of 1914 was — in Badiou's terms — a desastre, a catastrophe in which an entire world disappeared: not only the idyllic bourgeois faith in progress, but ALSO the socialist movement which accompanied it. Lenin himself (the Lenin of What Is to Be Done?) lost the ground under his feet — there is, in his desperate reaction, no satisfaction, no "I told you so!" THIS the moment of Verzweiflung, THIS catastrophe opened up the site for the Leninist event, for breaking the evolutionary historicism of the Second International — and only Lenin was the one at the level of this opening, the one to articulate the Truth of THIS catastrophe.30 Through this moment of despair, the Lenin who, through reading Hegel, was able to detect the unique chance for revolution, was born. His State and Revolution is strictly correlative to this shattering experience — Lenin's full subjective engagement in it is clear from this famous letter to Kamenev from July 1917:

The existential engagement is here extreme, and the kernel of the Leninist "utopia" arises out of the ashes of the catastrophe of 1914, in his settling of the accounts with the Second International orthodoxy: the radical imperative to smash the bourgeois state, which means the state AS SUCH, and to invent a new communal social form without a standing army, police or bureaucracy, in which all could take part in the administration of the social matters. This was for Lenin no theoretical project for some distant future — in October 1917, Lenin claimed that "we can at once set in motion a state apparatus constituting of ten if not twenty million people."32 This urge of the moment is the true utopia. One cannot overestimate the explosive potential of The State and Revolution — in this book, "the vocabulary and grammar of the Western tradition of politics was abruptly dispensed with."33 What then followed can be called, borrowing the title of Althusser's text on Machiavelli, la solitude de Lenine: the time when he basically stood alone, struggling against the current in his own party. When, in his "April Theses" from 1917, Lenin discerned the Augenblick, the unique chance for a revolution, his proposals were first met with stupor or contempt by a large majority of his party colleagues. Within the Bolshevik party, no prominent leader supported his call to revolution, and Pravda took the extraordinary step of dissociating the party, and the editorial board as a whole, from Lenin's "April Theses" — far from being an opportunist flattering and exploiting the prevailing mood of the populace, Lenin's views were highly idiosyncratic. Bogdanov characterized "April Theses" as "the delirium of a madman,"34 and Nadezhda Krupskaya herself concluded that "I am afraid it looks as if Lenin has gone crazy."35

Far from being a traditional Islamic regime, the Taliban rule is thus thoroughly mediated by the process of modernization: relying on the (paradigmatically modern) split between economy and life-world, it combines the inclusion into the global market (the opium sales) with the ideological autarchy. So, paradoxically, we have here a twisted version of the unconditional Moral Majority rule which turns around the Western liberal state: instead of a state which limits itself to guaranteeing the material and institutional conditions for the well-being, while allowing individuals to pursue their own private life-styles, the Taliban state is interested ONLY in the life-style, leaving economy to itself, either to persist at a meager self-subsistence level or to export opium. In short, the Taliban state is ultimately nothing but a more radical and brutal version of the Singapore model of capitalism-cum-Asiatic-values?

The entire history of the Soviet Union can be comprehended as homologous to Freud's famous image of Rome, a city whose history is deposited in its present in the guise of the different layers of the archaeological remainders, each new level covering up the preceding none, like (another model) the seven layers of Troy, so that history, in its regress towards ever older epoches, proceeds like the archaeologist, discovering new layers by probing deeper and deeper into the ground. Was the (official ideological) history of the Soviet Union not the same accumulation of exclusions, of turning persons into non-persons, of retroactive rewriting of history? Quite logically, the "destalinization" was signalled by the opposite process of "rehabilitation," of admitting "errors" in the past politics of the Party. The gradual "rehabilitation" of the demonized ex-leaders of the Bolsheviks can thus serve as perhaps the most sensitive index of how far (and in what direction) the "destalinization" of the Soviet Union was going. The first to be rehabilitated were the high military leaders shot in 1937 (Tukhachevsky and others); the last to be rehabilitated, already in the Gorbachev era, just before the collapse of the Communist regime, was Bukharin — this last rehabilitation, of course, was a clear sign of the turn towards capitalism: the Bukharin which was rehabilitated was the one who, in the 20s, advocated the pact between workers and peasants (owners of their land), launching the famous slogan "Get rich!" and opposed forced collectivization. Significantly, however, one figure was NEVER rehabilitated, excluded by the Communists as well as by the anti-Communist Russian nationalists: Trotsky, the "wandering Jew" of the Revolution, the true anti-Stalin, the arch-enemy, opposing "permanent revolution" to the idea of "building socialism in one country." One is tempted to risk here the parallel with Freud's distinction between primordial (founding) and secondary repression in the Unconscious: Trotsky's exclusion amounted to something like the "primordial repression" of the Soviet State, to something which cannot ever be readmitted through "rehabilitation," since the entire Order relied on this negative gesture of exclusion. (It is fashionable to claim that the irony of Stalin's politics from 1928 onwards was that it effectively WAS a kind of "permanent revolution," a permanent state of emergency in which revolution repeatedly devoured its own children — however, this claim is misleading: the Stalinist terror is the paradoxical result of the attempt to STABILIZE the Soviet Union into a state like other, with firm boundaries and institutions, i.e. terror was a gesture of panic, a defense reaction against the threat to this State stability.) So Trotsky is the one for whom there is a place neither in the pre-1990 nor in the post-1990 capitalist universe in which even the Communist nostalgics don't know what to do with Trotsky's permanent revolution — perhaps, the signifier "Trotsky" is the most appropriate designation of that which is worth redeeming in the Leninist legacy.

Nowhere is this greatness more palpable than in Lenin's writings of 1917, which cover the span from his initial grasp of the unique revolutionary chance (first elaborated in the "Letters From Afar") to the "Letter to Central Committee Members," which finally convinced the Bolshevik majority that the moment to seize power has arrived. Everything is here, from "Lenin the ingenious revolutionary strategist" to "Lenin of the enacted utopia" (of the immediate abolishing of the state apparatuses). To refer to Kierkegaard, what we are allowed to perceive in these writings is Lenin-in-becoming: not yet "Lenin the Soviet institution," but Lenin thrown into an OPEN situation. Are we, within our late capitalist closure of the "end of history," still able to experience the shattering impact of such an authentic historical openness?

1. See Juergen Habermas, Die Neue Unuebersichtlichkeit, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag 1985. back up