Lenin 2017. Slavoj Žižek

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