Lenin 2017. Slavoj Žižek

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