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“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 white guards were directly attacking us, then you will have only yourselves to blame if we treat you as the worst and most pernicious white guard elements.’”
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This dismissive attitude towards the “liberal” [[notion ]] of [[freedom ]] accounts for Lenin’s bad reputation among [[liberals]]. Their [[case ]] largely rests upon their [[rejection ]] of the standard [[Marxist]]-Leninist opposition of “formal” and “actual” freedom, but as even ;eftist liberals like Claude [[Lefort ]] emphasize again and again, freedom is in its very notion “formal“[[formal]],” so that “actual freedom” equals the [[lack ]] of freedom. Lenin is best remembered for his famous retort “Freedom - yes, but for <em>whom</em>? To do <em>what</em>?” 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 counterrevolution.<br><br> But today, after the terrifying experience of the Really Existing [[Socialism]], is it not more than obvious where the fault of this reasoning resides? First, it reduces a historical constellation to a closed, fully contextualized [[situation]] in which the “objective” consequences of one’s [[acts]] are fully determined (“independent 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” is the [[form]] of its opposite, a thorough <i>subjectivism</i>: I decide what your acts objectively mean, since I define the context of a situation (say, 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]]).<br><br>
==Source==* [[What Is To Be Done (With Lenin)?]] ''[[In These Times]]''. January 21, 2004. <http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/135/>