Lenin 2017. Slavoj Žižek

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 –