Teoría, Cultura y Género

Leninismo en el siglo XXI - 2ª parte

Autor: Slavoj Žižek y Daniel Bensaïd

Fecha: 6/2/2004

Traductor: Guillermo Crux, especial para PI

A cyberspace Lenin: why not?
SLAVOJ ZIZEK
If there is a consensus among (whatever remains of) today's radical left, it is that, in order to resuscitate the radical political project, one should leave behind the Leninist legacy: the ruthless focusing on the class struggle, the party as the privileged form of organisation, the violent revolutionary seizure of power, the ensuing 'dictatorship of the proletariat'...are all these not 'zombie-concepts' to be abandoned if the left is to have any chance in the conditions of 'post-industrial' late capitalism?

The problem with this apparently convincing argument is that it endorses all too easily the inherited image of Lenin the wise revolutionary leader who, after formulating the basic co-ordinates of his thought and practice in What Is to Be Done?, just consistently and ruthlessly pursued them. What if there is another story about Lenin to be told? It is true that today's left is undergoing a shattering experience of the end of an entire epoch of the progressive movement, the experience of which compels it to reinvent the very basic co-ordinates of its project--however, an exactly homologous experience was what gave birth to Leninism. Recall Lenin's shock when, in the autumn of 1914, all European Social Democratic parties (with the honourable exception of the Russian Bolsheviks and the Serb Social Democrats) adopted the 'patriotic line'--Lenin even thought that the issue of Vorwärts, the daily newspaper of German Social Democracy, which reported how Social Democrats in the Reichstag had voted for the war credits, was a forgery of the Russian secret police designed to deceive the Russian workers. In that era of military conflict that cut the European continent in half, how difficult it was to reject the notion that one should take sides in this conflict, and to fight against the 'patriotic fervour' in one's own country! How many great minds (including Freud) succumbed to the nationalist temptation, even if only for a couple of weeks! This shock of 1914 was--to put it in Alain Badiou's terms--a désastre, 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 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 at the level of this opening, the one to articulate the truth of the catastrophe. This is the Lenin from which we still have something to learn. The greatness of Lenin was that, in this catastrophic situation, he wasn't afraid to succeed--in contrast to the negative pathos discernible from Rosa Luxemburg to Adorno, for whom the ultimate authentic act is the admission of failure which brings the truth to light. In 1917, instead of waiting for the right moment of maturity, Lenin organised a pre-emptive strike. In 1920, as the leader of the party of the working class with no working class (most of it having been killed in the civil war), he went on organising a state, fully accepting the paradox of the party which has to organise, recreate even, its own base, its working class.

Nowhere is this greatness more palpable than in Lenin's writings which cover the time span from February 1917, when the first revolution abolished Tsarism and installed a democratic regime, to the second revolution in October. In February, Lenin was a half-anonymous political emigré, stranded in Zurich, with no reliable contacts in Russia, mostly learning about events from the Swiss press. In October he led the first successful socialist revolution--so what happened in between? In February, Lenin immediately perceived the revolutionary chance, the result of unique contingent circumstances--if the moment was not seized, the chance for the revolution would be forfeited, perhaps for decades. In his stubborn insistence that one should take the risk and pass to the next stage, ie repeat the revolution, Lenin was alone, ridiculed by the majority of the central committee members of his own party, and the reading of Lenin's texts from 1917 provides a unique glimpse into the obstinate, patient and often frustrating, revolutionary work through which Lenin imposed his vision. However, indispensable as Lenin's personal intervention was, one should not modify the story of the October Revolution into that of the lone genius confronted with the disoriented masses and gradually imposing his vision. Lenin succeeded because his appeal, while bypassing the party nomenklatura, found an echo in what one is tempted to call revolutionary micropolitics: the incredible explosion of grassroots democracy, of local committees sprouting up all around Russia's big cities and, while ignoring the authority of the 'legitimate' government, taking things into their hands. This is the untold story of the October Revolution.

The first thing to strike the eye of today's reader is how directly readable Lenin's texts from 1917 are. There is no need for long explanatory notes--even if the strange-sounding names are unknown to us, we immediately get what was at stake. From today's distance the texts display an almost classical clarity of the contours of the struggle in which they participate. Lenin is fully aware of the paradox of the situation: in the spring of 1917, after the February Revolution which toppled the Tsarist regime, Russia was the most democratic country in the whole of Europe, with an unprecedented degree of mass mobilisation, freedom of organisation and freedom of the press--and yet this freedom rendered the situation non-transparent, thoroughly ambiguous. If there is a common thread that runs through all Lenin's texts written 'in between the two revolutions' (the February one and the October one), it is his insistence on the gap which separates the 'explicit' formal contours of the political struggle between the multitude of parties and other political subjects from its actual social stakes (immediate peace, the distribution of land, and, of course, 'all power to the soviets', ie the dismantling of the existing state apparatus and its replacement with the new commune-like forms of social management).

This gap--the repetition of the gap between 1789 and 1793 in the French Revolution--is the very space of Lenin's unique intervention: the fundamental lesson of revolutionary materialism is that revolution must strike twice, and for essential reasons. The gap is not simply the gap between form and content. What the 'first revolution' misses is not the content, but the form itself--it remains stuck in the old form, thinking that freedom and justice can be accomplished if we simply put to use the already existing state apparatus and its democratic mechanisms. What if the 'good' party wins the free elections and 'legally' implements socialist transformation? (The clearest expression of this illusion, bordering on the ridiculous, is Karl Kautsky's thesis, formulated in the 1920s, that the logical political form of the first stage of socialism, of the passage from capitalism to socialism, is the parliamentary coalition of bourgeois and proletarian parties.) The parallel here is perfect with the era of early modernity, in which the opposition to the church's ideological hegemony first articulated itself in the very form of another religious ideology, as a heresy. Along the same lines, the partisans of the 'first revolution' want to subvert the capitalist domination within the very political form of capitalist democracy. This is the Hegelian 'negation of the negation': first the old order is negated within its own ideologico-political form; then this form itself has to be negated. Those who oscillate, those who are afraid to make the second step of overcoming this form itself, are those who (to repeat Robespierre) want a 'revolution without revolution'--and Lenin displays all the strength of his 'hermeneutics of suspicion' in discerning the different forms of this retreat.

In his writings of 1917 Lenin saves his utmost acerbic irony for those who engage in the endless search for some kind of 'guarantee' for the revolution. This guarantee assumes two main forms: either the reified notion of social necessity (one should not risk the revolution too early; one has to 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 mature') or the normative ('democratic') legitimacy ('the majority of the population is not on our side, so the revolution would not really be democratic')--as Lenin repeatedly puts, as if, before the revolutionary agent risks the seizure of state power, it should get permission from some figure of the big Other (organise a referendum which will ascertain that the majority supports the revolution). With Lenin, as with Lacan, the point is that the revolution can only be authorised by itself: one should assume the revolutionary act is not covered by the big Other--the fear of taking power 'prematurely', the search for a guarantee, is the fear of the abyss of the act. Therein resides the ultimate dimension of what Lenin incessantly denounces as 'opportunism', and his wager is that 'opportunism' is a position which is in itself inherently false, masking fear to accomplish the act with the protective screen of 'objective' facts, laws or norms.

Lenin's answer is not the reference to a different set of 'objective facts', but the repetition of the argument made a decade before by Rosa Luxemburg against Kautsky: those who wait for the objective conditions of the revolution to arrive will wait forever--such a position of the objective observer (and not of an engaged agent) is itself the main obstacle to the revolution. Lenin's counter-argument against the formal-democratic critics of the second step is that this 'pure democratic' option itself is utopian: in the concrete Russian circumstances, the bourgeois-democratic state has no chances of surviving--the only 'realistic' way to protect the true gains of the February Revolution (freedom of organisation and the press, etc) is to move forward to the socialist revolution--otherwise the Tsarist reaction will win.

We have here two models, two incompatible logics, of the revolution: those who wait for the ripe teleological moment of the final crisis when revolution will explode 'at its own proper time' by the necessity of historical evolution; and those who are aware that revolution has no 'proper time', those who perceive the revolutionary chance as something that emerges and has to be seized in the very detours of 'normal' historical development. Lenin is not a voluntarist 'subjectivist'--what he insists on is that the exception (the extraordinary set of circumstances, like those in Russia in 1917) offers a way to undermine the norm itself. And is this line of argument, this fundamental stance, not more actual today than ever? Do we not also live in an era when the state and its apparatus, inclusive of its political agents, are simply less and less able to articulate the key issues (ecology, degrading healthcare, poverty, the role of multinational companies, etc)? The only logical conclusion is that a new form of politicisation is urgent, which will directly 'socialise' these crucial issues. The illusion of 1917 that the pressing problems which faced Russia (peace, land distribution, etc) could have been solved through 'legal' parliamentary means is the same as today's illusion that, say, the ecological threat could be avoided by way of expanding the market logic to ecology (making the polluters pay the price for the damage they cause). However, how relevant are Lenin's specific insights here? According to orthodox thinking, Lenin's declining faith in the creative capacities of the masses in the years after the October Revolution led him to emphasise the role of science and the scientists, to rely on the authority of the expert. He hailed 'the beginning of that very happy time when politics will recede into the background...and engineers and agronomists will do most of the talking'.1 Technocratic post-politics? Lenin's ideas about how the road to socialism runs through the terrain of monopoly capitalism may appear dangerously naive today:

Capitalism has created an accounting apparatus in the shape of the banks, syndicates, postal service, consumers' societies, and office employees' unions. Without big banks socialism would be impossible...our task is here merely to lop off what capitalistically mutilates this excellent apparatus, to make it even bigger, even more democratic, even more comprehensive... This will be country-wide book-keeping, country-wide accounting of the production and distribution of goods; this will be, so to speak, something in the nature of the skeleton of socialist society.2

Is this not the most radical expression of Marx's notion of the general intellect regulating all social life in a transparent way, of the post-political world in which 'administration of people' is supplanted by 'administration of things'? It is, of course, easy to play against this quote the tune of the 'critique of instrumental reason' and 'administered world [verwaltete Welt]'. The 'totalitarian' potential is inscribed in this very form of total social control. It is easy to remark sarcastically how, in the Stalinist epoch, the apparatus of social administration effectively became 'even bigger'. Furthermore, is this post-political vision not the very opposite of the Maoist notion of the eternity of the class struggle ('everything is political')?

Are things really so unambiguous, however? What if one replaces the (obviously dated) example of the central bank with the world wide web, today's perfect candidate for the General Intellect? Dorothy Sayers claimed that Aristotle's Poetics is effectively the theory of detective novels before they were written--since the poor Aristotle didn't yet know of the detective novel, he had to refer to the only examples at his disposal, the tragedies... Along the same lines, Lenin was effectively developing the theory of the role of the world wide web, but, since the web was unknown to him, he had to refer to the unfortunate central banks. Consequently, can one also say that 'without the world wide web socialism would be impossible...our task here is merely to lop off what capitalistically mutilates this excellent apparatus, to make it even bigger, even more democratic, even more comprehensive'? In these conditions, one is tempted to resuscitate the old, opprobrious and half forgotten Marxian dialectics of the productive forces and the relations of production. It is already commonplace to claim that, ironically, it was these very dialectics which buried 'really existing socialism': socialism was not able to sustain the passage from industrial to post-industrial economy. One of the tragi-comic victims of the disintegration of socialism in ex-Yugoslavia was an old Communist apparatchik interviewed by Ljubljana student radio in 1988. Communists knew they were losing power, so they desperately tried to please everyone. When this old cadre was asked provocative questions about his sex life by the student reporters, he also desperately tried to prove that he was in touch with the young generation. Since, however, the only language he knew was wooden bureaucratese, the result was an uncanny obscene mixture--statements like, 'Sexuality is an important component of my daily activity. Touching my wife between her thighs gives me great new incentives for my work of building socialism.' And when one reads East German official documents from the 1970s and early 1980s, formulating their project of turning the GDR into a kind of Silicon Valley of the Eastern European Socialist bloc, one cannot avoid the impression of the same tragi-comic gap between form and content. While they were fully aware that digitalisation was the way of the future, they approached it in the terms of the old socialist logic of industrial central planning--their very words betrayed the fact that they were not getting what is effectively going on, the social consequences of digitalisation. However, does capitalism really provide the 'natural' frame of the relations of production for the digital universe? Is there not also an explosive potential for capitalism itself in the world wide web? Is not the lesson of the Microsoft monopoly precisely the Leninist one: instead of fighting its monopoly through the state apparatus (recall the court-ordered split of the Microsoft corporation), would it not be more 'logical' just to socialise it, rendering it freely accessible? Today one is thus tempted to paraphrase Lenin's well-known motto, 'Socialism = electrification + the power of the soviets': 'Socialism = free access to internet + the power of the soviets.'

In this context, the myth to be debunked is that of the diminishing role of the state. What we are witnessing today is the shift in its functions: while partially withdrawing from its welfare functions, the state is strengthening its apparatus in other domains of social regulation. In order to start a business now one has to rely on the state to guarantee not only law and order, but the entire infrastructure (access to water and energy, means of transportation, ecological criteria, international regulations, etc), to an incomparably larger extent than 100 years ago. Last year's electricity supply debacle in California makes this point palpable: for a couple of weeks in January and February 2001 the privatisation ('deregulation') of the electricity supply changed Southern California, one of the most highly developed 'post-industrial' landscapes in the entire world, into a Third World country with regular blackouts. Of course, the defenders of deregulation claimed that it was not thorough enough, thereby engaging in the old false syllogism of, 'My fiancée is never late for the appointment, because the moment she is late, she is no longer my fiancée': deregulation by definition works, so if it doesn't work, it wasn't truly deregulation... Does the recent mad cow disease panic (which probably presages dozens of similar phenomena which await us in the near future) also not point towards the need for a strict state and global institutionalised control of agriculture?

So what about the basic reproach according to which Lenin is irrelevant for us today because he remained stuck within the horizon of industrial mass production (recall his celebration of Fordism)? How does the passage from factory production to 'post-industrial' production change these co-ordinates? How are we to situate not only the Third World manual labour sweatshops, but the digital sweatshops, like the one in Bangalore in which tens of thousands of Indians are programming software for Western corporations? Is it adequate to designate these Indians as the 'intellectual proletariat'? Will they be the final revenge of the Third World? What are the consequences of the (for the conservative Germans, at least) unsettling fact that, after decades of importing hundreds of thousands of manual immigrant workers, Germany has now discovered that it needs at least tens of thousands of intellectual immigrant workers, mostly computer programmers? The disabling alternative of today's Marxism is, what to do apropos of this growing importance of 'immaterial production' today (cyber-workers)? Do we insist that only those involved in 'real' material production are the working class, or do we accomplish the fateful step of accepting that the 'symbolic workers' are the (true) proletarians today? One should resist this step, because it obfuscates the division between immaterial and material production, the split in the working class between (as a rule geographically separated) cyber-workers and material workers (programmers in the US or India, the sweatshops in China or Indonesia).

Perhaps it is the figure of the unemployed who stands for the pure proletarian today: the unemployed's substantial determination remains that of a worker, but they are prevented from actualising it or from renouncing it, so they remain suspended in the potentiality of workers who cannot work. Perhaps we are today in a sense 'all jobless'--jobs tend to be more and more based on short term contracts, so that the jobless state is the rule, the zero level, and the temporary job the exception. This, then, should also be the answer to the advocates of 'post-industrial society' whose message to workers is that their time is over, that their very existence is obsolete, and that all they can count on is purely humanitarian compassion--there is less and less place for workers in the universe of today's capital, and one should draw the only consistent conclusion from this fact. If today's 'post-industrial' society needs fewer and fewer workers to reproduce itself (20 percent of the workforce, on some accounts), then it is not workers who are in excess, but capital itself.

The key antagonism of the so called new (digital) industries is thus: how to maintain the form of (private) property, within which only the logic of profit can be maintained (see also the Napster problem, the free circulation of music)? And do the legal complications in biogenetics not point in the same direction? The key element of the new international trade agreements is the 'protection of intellectual property'--whenever, in a merger, a big Western company takes over a Third World company, the first thing they do is close down the research department. Phenomena emerge here which involve the notion of property in extraordinary dialectical paradoxes: in India, local communities suddenly discover that medical practices and materials they have been using for centuries are now owned by American companies, so they should be bought from them; with the biogenetic companies patenting genes, we are all discovering that parts of ourselves, our genetic components, are already copyrighted, owned by others.

However, the outcome of this crisis of private property of the means of production is by no means guaranteed--it is here that one should take into account the ultimate paradox of Stalinist society. Against the capitalism which is the class society, but in principle egalitarian, without direct hierarchical divisions, 'mature' Stalinism is a classless society articulated in precisely defined hierarchical groups (top nomenklatura, technical workers, army, etc). What this means is that, already for Stalinism, the classic Marxist notion of the class struggle is no longer adequate to describe its hierarchy and domination--in the Soviet Union from the late 1920s onwards the key social division was not defined by property, but by direct access to power mechanisms and to privileged material and cultural conditions of life (food, accommodation, healthcare, freedom of travel, education). And perhaps the ultimate irony of history will be that, in the same way, Lenin's vision of 'central bank socialism' can be properly read only retroactively, from today's world wide web. The Soviet Union provided the first model of the developed 'post-property' society, of the true 'late capitalism' in which the ruling class will be defined by direct access to the (informational, administrative) means of social power and control and to other material and social privileges: the point will no longer be to own companies, but directly to run them, to have the right to use a private jet, to have access to top healthcare, etc--privileges which will be acquired not by property, but by other mechanisms (educational, managerial, etc).

This, then, is the forthcoming crisis which will offer the perspective of a new emancipatory struggle, of the thorough reinvention of the political--not the old Marxist choice between private property and its socialisation, but the choice between the hierarchical and egalitarian post-property society. Here the old Marxist thesis on how bourgeois freedom and equality are based on private property and market conditions acquires an unexpected twist: what market relations enable are (at least) 'formal' freedom and 'legal' equality--since social hierarchy can be sustained through property, there is no need for its direct political assertion. If, then, the role of private property is diminishing, the danger is that this gradual vanishing will create the need for some new (racist or expert-rule) form of hierarchy, directly founded on individuals' properties, and thus cancelling even 'formal' bourgeois equality and freedom. In short, in so far as the determining factor of social power will be the inclusion/exclusion from the privileged set (of access to knowledge, control, etc), we can expect the rise of the different modes of exclusion, up to direct racism. The first clear sign which points in this direction is the new alliance between politics (government) and natural sciences. In the newly emerging biopolitics, the government is instigating 'embryo industry', the control over our genetic legacy outside democratic control, justified by an offer no one can refuse: 'Don't you want to be cured of cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer's...?' However, while politicians are making such 'scientific' promises, scientists themselves remain deeply sceptical, often emphasising the need for decisions reached through a large social consensus.

The ultimate problem of genetic engineering does not reside in its unpredictable consequences (what if we create monsters--say, humans with no sense of moral responsibility?), but in the way biogenetic engineering fundamentally affects our notion of education: instead of educating a child to be a good musician, will it be possible to manipulate his genes so that he will be 'spontaneously' inclined towards music? Instead of instilling in him a sense of discipline, will it be possible to manipulate his genes so that he will 'spontaneously' tend to obey orders? The situation is here radically open--if two classes of people will gradually emerge, the 'naturally born' ones and the genetically manipulated ones, it is not even clear in advance which class will occupy the higher level in social hierarchy. Will the 'naturals' consider the manipulated ones as mere tools, not truly free beings, or will the much more perfect manipulated ones consider 'naturals' as belonging to a lower level of evolution?

The forthcoming struggle thus has no guaranteed outcome--it will confront us with an unheard-of urgency to act, since it will concern not only a new mode of production, but a radical rupture in what it means to be a human being. Today we can already discern the signs of a kind of general unease--recall the series of events usually listed under the name of 'Seattle'. The ten-year honeymoon of triumphant global capitalism is over, the long overdue 'seven year itch' is here--witness the panicky reactions of the big media, which, from Time magazine to CNN, all of a sudden started to warn about Marxists manipulating the crowd of 'honest' protesters. The problem is now the strictly Leninist one--how to actualise the media's accusations, how to invent the organisational structure which will confer on this unrest the form of the universal political demand. Otherwise the momentum will be lost, and what will remain is marginal disturbance, perhaps organised as a new Greenpeace, with a certain efficiency, but also strictly limited goals, marketing strategy, etc. In other words, the key 'Leninist' lesson today is that politics without the organisational form of the party is politics without politics, so the answer to those who want just the (quite adequately named) 'new social movements' is the same as the answer of the Jacobins to the Girondin compromisers: 'You want revolution without a revolution!' Today's obstacle is that there seem to be only two ways open for socio-political engagement: either play the game of the system, engage in the 'long march through the institutions', or get active in new social movements, from feminism through ecology to anti-racism. And again the limit of these movements is that they are not political in the sense of the Universal Singular; they are 'single-issue movements' which lack the dimension of universality, ie they do not relate to the social totality.

The promise of the 'Seattle' movement resides in the fact that it is the very opposite of its usual media designation (the 'anti-globalisation protest'); it is the first kernel of a new global movement, global with regard to its content (it aims at a global confrontation with today's capitalism) as well as to its form (it is a global movement, involving a mobile international network, able to react from Seattle to Prague). It is more global than 'global capitalism', since it brings into the game its victims, ie those excluded by capitalist globalisation. Perhaps one should take the risk and apply Hegel's old distinction between 'abstract' and 'concrete' universality here: the capitalist globalisation is 'abstract', focused on the speculative movement of capital, while the 'Seattle' movement stands for 'concrete universality', ie for the totality of global capitalism and its excluded dark side.

Here Lenin's reproach to liberals is crucial: they only exploit the working classes' discontent to strengthen their position vis-à-vis the conservatives, instead of identifying with it to the end.3 Is this not also the case with today's left liberals? They like to evoke racism, ecology, workers' grievances, etc, to score points over the conservatives without endangering the system. Recall how, in Seattle, Bill Clinton himself deftly referred to the protesters on the streets outside, reminding the gathered leaders inside the guarded palaces that they should listen to the message of the demonstrators (the message which, of course, Clinton interpreted, depriving it of its subversive sting attributed to the dangerous extremists introducing chaos and violence into the majority of peaceful protesters). This Clintonesque stance later developed into an elaborated 'carrot and stick' strategy of containment: on the one hand, paranoia (the notion that there is a dark Marxist plot lurking behind); on the other hand, in Genoa, none other than Berlusconi provided food and shelter to the anti-globalisation demonstrators--on condition that they 'behaved properly' and didn't disturb the official event. It's the same with all new social movements, up to the Zapatistas in Chiapas. Systemic politics is always ready to 'listen to their demands', depriving them of their proper political sting. The true 'third way' we have to look for is this third way between institutionalised parliamentary politics and the new social movements.

As a sign of this emerging uneasiness and need for a true third way, it is interesting to see how, in a recent interview, even a conservative liberal like John le Carré had to admit that, as a consequence of the 'love affair between Thatcher and Reagan', in most of the developed Western countries and especially in the United Kingdom 'the social infrastructure has practically stopped working', which then leads him to make a direct plea for, at least, 'renationalising the railways and water'.4 We are effectively approaching a state in which (selective) private affluence is accompanied by the global (ecological, infrastructural) degradation which will soon start to affect us all: the quality of water is a problem not only in the UK--a recent survey showed that the entire basin out of which the Los Angeles area draws its water is already so affected by man-made toxic chemicals that it will soon be impossible to render it drinkable, even through the use of the most advanced filters. Le Carré formulated his fury at Blair for accepting the Thatcherite basic co-ordinates in very precise terms: 'I thought last time, in 1997, that he was lying when he denied he was a socialist. The worst thing I can say about him is that he was telling the truth'.5 More precisely, even if, in 1997, Blair was 'subjectively' lying, even if his secret agenda was to save whatever is possible of the socialist agenda, he was 'objectively' telling the truth: his (eventual) subjective socialist conviction was a self deception, an illusion which enabled him to fulfil his 'objective' role, that of finishing the Thatcherite 'revolution'.

The ultimate answer to the reproach that the radical left's proposals are utopian should thus be that today the true utopia is the belief that the present liberal-democratic capitalist consensus could go on indefinitely, without radical changes. We are thus back at the old 1968 motto 'Soyons réalistes, demandons l'impossible!' ('Be realistic--demand the impossible!'): in order to be truly a 'realist', one must consider breaking out of the constraints of what appears 'possible' (or, as we usually term it, 'feasible'). If there is a lesson to be learned from Silvio Berlusconi's electoral victory in May 2001, it is that the true utopians are the Third Way leftists--why? The main temptation to be avoided apropos Berlusconi's victory in Italy is to use it as a pretext for yet another exercise in the tradition of the conservative-leftist Kulturkritik (from Adorno to Virilio), which bemoans the stupidity of the manipulated masses, and the eclipse of the autonomous individual capable of critical reflection. This, however, does not mean that the consequences of this victory are to be underestimated. Hegel said that all historical events have to happen twice: Napoleon had to lose twice, etc. And it seems that Berlusconi also had to win the election twice for us to become aware of the full consequences of this event.

So what did Berlusconi achieve? His victory provides a sad lesson about the role of morality in politics: the ultimate outcome of the great moral-political catharsis--the anti-corruption campaign of 'clean hands' which, a decade ago, ruined Christian Democracy and with it the ideological polarity of Christian Democrats and Communists which dominated post-war Italian politics--is Berlusconi in power. It is something like Rupert Murdoch winning the British elections--a political movement run as a business-publicity enterprise. Berlusconi's Forza Italia is no longer a political party, but--as its name indicates--rather a sports fan club. If, in the good old Socialist countries, sport was directly politicised (recall the enormous investments that the GDR put into its top athletes), now politics itself is turned into a sports contest. And the parallel goes even further: if the Communist regimes were nationalising the industry, Berlusconi is in a way privatising the state itself. For this reason, all the worry of the leftists and liberal democrats about the danger of neo-fascism lurking beneath Berlusconi's victory is misplaced and in a way much too optimistic: fascism is still a determinate political project, while, in the case of Berlusconi, there is ultimately nothing lurking beneath, no secret ideological project, just the sheer assurance that things will function, that we shall do it better. In short, Berlusconi is post-politics at its purest. The ultimate sign of 'post-politics' in all Western countries is the growth of a managerial approach to government. Government is reconceived as a managerial function, deprived of its properly political dimension.

The true stake of today's political struggles is, which of the old two main parties, conservatives or the 'moderate left', will succeed in presenting itself as truly embodying the post-ideological spirit, against the other party dismissed as 'still caught in the old ideological spectres'? If the 1980s belonged to the conservatives, the lesson of the 1990s seemed to be that, in our late capitalist societies, Third Way social democracy (or, even more pointedly, post-Communists in the ex-Socialist countries) effectively functions as the representative of capital as such, in general, against its particular factions represented by the different 'conservative' parties which, in order to present themselves as addressing the entire population, also try to satisfy the particular demands of the anti-capitalist strata (say, of the domestic 'patriotic' middle class workers threatened by the cheap labour of immigrants. Recall the CDU, which, against the Social Democratic proposal that Germany should import 50,000 Indian computer programmers, launched the infamous motto 'Kinder statt Inder!'--'Children instead of Indians!') This economic constellation explains to a good degree how and why the Third Way social democrats can simultaneously stand for the interests of big capital and for multiculturalist tolerance which aims at protecting the interests of the foreign minorities.

The Third Way dream of the left was that the pact with the devil may work out: okay, no revolution, we accept capitalism as the only game in town, but at least we will be able to save some of the achievements of the welfare state, plus build a society tolerant towards sexual, religious, and ethnic minorities. If the trend announced by Berlusconi's victory persists, a much darker prospect is discernible on the horizon: a world in which the unlimited rule of capital is not supplemented by left-liberal tolerance, but by the typical post-political mixture of pure publicity-seeking spectacle and Moral Majority concerns (remember that the Vatican gave its tacit support to Berlusconi). If there is a hidden ideological agenda of Berlusconi's 'post-politics', it is, to put it bluntly, the disintegration of the fundamental post Second World War democratic pact. In recent years, there were already numerous signs of the post Second World War anti-fascist pact slowly cracking--from 'revisionist' historians to the New Right populists, so called 'taboos' are falling down. Paradoxically, those who undermine this pact refer to the very liberal universalised logic of victimisation: sure, there were victims of fascism, but what about other victims of the post Second World War expulsions? What about the Germans evicted from their homes in Czechoslovakia? Do they not also have some right to (financial) compensation?

The immediate future does not belong to outright rightist provocateurs like Le Pen or Pat Buchanan, but to people like Berlusconi and Haider, these advocates of global capital in the wolves' clothes of populist nationalism. The struggle between them and the Third Way left is the struggle about who will be more effective in counteracting the excesses of global capitalism--Third Way multiculturalist tolerance or populist homophobia. Will this boring alternative be Europe's answer to globalisation? Berlusconi is thus post-politics at its worst; even The Economist, the staunch voice of anti-left liberalism, was accused by Berlusconi of being part of a 'communist plot', when it asked some critical questions about how a person convicted of crimes could become the prime minister! What this means is that, for Berlusconi, all opposition to his post-politics is rooted in a 'communist plot'. And in a way he is right-this is the only true opposition. All others--liberals or Third Way leftists--are basically playing the same game as him, only with different coating. And the hope must be that Berlusconi will also be right with regard to the second aspect of his paranoiac cognitive mapping--that his victory will give an impetus to the real radical left.

Notes


Quoted from N Harding, Leninism (Durham, 1996), p168.

Ibid, p146.

I owe this point to Alan Shandro's contribution, 'Lenin and the Logic of Hegemony', at the symposium 'The Retrieval of Lenin', Essen, 2-4 February 2001.

John le Carré, 'My Vote? I Would Like to Punish Blair', interview with David Hare in The Daily Telegraph, 17 May 2001, p23.

Ibid.



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Leninism in the 21st Century

Interview with Daniel Bensaïd

[from International Viewpoint. Daniel Bensaïd a leader of the Ligue Communiste Revolutionnaire (LCR - French section of the Fourth International), spoke on 'Leninism in the 21st century' at the 'Marxism 2001' event organised by the British Socialist Workers Party.]

Q. Lenin made important contributions to Marxist thinking about imperialism, the national question, revolutionary strategy and socialist democracy. But when organisations call themselves 'Leninist' they are generally referring to organisational forms. Yet the modern experience of such organisations has shown they have quite diverse organisational practices. What is special about 'Leninism' as an organisational form?

A. We have to start by remembering that the very term Leninism only appeared after the death of Lenin, notably in the speech by Zinoviev to the Fifth Congress of the Communist International (1924). It corresponds to the codification of an organisational model then associated with the 'Bolshevisation' of the Comintern, which allowed the Kremlin to brutally subjugate the young Communist parties to its own tutelage, in the name of combating social democracy - which had been corrupted by parliamtentarism. The invention of 'Leninism' as a religiously mummified orthodoxy, was part of the process of bureaucratisation of the Comintern and the Soviet Union. That's why, as far as possible, I personally avoid utilising this 'ism'. However, if you attempt to summarise what appears essential in Lenin's own organisational ideas, I would highlight two ideas which seem to me essential revolutionary conceptions for this epoch, and which retain their validity today. The first, which was at the centre of the polemic in What is to Be Done, and in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, is the distinction between the (revolutionary) party and the (working) class, which rejects all confusionist attempts to conflate or identify the two. This distinction, elementary from the point of view of the Marxism of the Second International, implies thinking through the specificity of the political field, its relationship of forces, and its own concepts. This terrain is not simply a reflection or an extension of the social relationship of forces. It expresses the transformation of the social relations (and class struggle) into political terms, with its own - as the psychoanalysts say - displacements and condensations. I would above all highlight that this distinction between the social and the political, between parties and classes, paradoxically opens up the possibility of thinking through the idea of pluralism; if the party is not simply the incarnation of the class, not simply a one-to-one expression of its social substance, then it becomes thinkable that the class can be represented by a plurality of parties. As a corollary the class can build instruments of resistance independent of parties. Thus it doesn't seem to me accidental that Lenin had the most correct position during the early 1920s debate in Russia on the role of the trade unions. The second essential idea is in relation to what appears to be one of the most debatable characteristics of Leninism, democratic centralism. To the extent that this idea became associated with the bureaucratic centralism of the Stalinist period, what one remembers above all is centralism and the image of a semi-military discipline. Thus, for us the democratic aspect is fundamental. If, after free discussion, there doesn't exist a collective effort and a mutual involvement in putting all the decisions to the test of practice, the democracy of an organisation remains purely formal and 'parliamentary'. It becomes reduced to an exchange of opinions without real consequences, everyone can participate in the debate with their own convictions, without a common practice to test the validity of a political orientation.

Q. How has the LCR's conception of Leninism evolved since its founding conference in 1969?

A. Because of the strong spontaneist illusions that the May 1968 movement in France engendered among the youth, the foundation of the Ligue Communiste as a section of the Fourth International in 1969 was the result of a lively debate, notably on the question of organisation. With more than 30 years of hindsight, this founding debate seems to me decisive. It permitted us to create an organisation that resisted the retreat after 1968, and survived the test of subsequent defeats. However, a critical review of that period is necessary. In the context of the period, we had a tendency to fetishise the party as the direct and immediate adversary of the state (inspired by a questionable reading of Poulantzas), and gave our 'Leninism' a slightly 'militarist' twist ('ultra-left' if you prefer). In this you can see the influence of Guevara, his voluntarism and the role attributed to 'exemplary' actions. In that sense, our interpretation partially created a sort of 'Leninism in a hurry', criticised by Regis Debray in his book A Critique of Arms.

Q. For more than a decade we have seen groups which refer to Leninism operating inside quite broad formations like the PT in Brazil, the PRC in Italy and now we have the experience of the Scottish Socialist Party. Isn't there a danger that prolonged immersion in these parties will atrophy the political independence of such Leninist groups, and adversely affect there ability to operate as a coherent striking force in times of political crisis?

A. The examples mentioned in the question represent different experiences of party construction, each one different in its context, each one specific - from the birth of a mass workers party (Brazil), to the conflicts within the old Communist parties (Italy), to regroupments of radical currents. Beyond that, despite this diversity, these experiences are embedded in a situation of redefinition and political recomposition, opened by the end of the 'short 20th century' since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. This is only the beginning of a long period of mutation and redefinition of the forces within the progressive social movements. The idea of a 'prolonged immersion' doesn't seem to me appropriate for talking about these experiences, to the extent that it seems to evoke the experiences of 'entrism' in the mass workers parties, in the 1930s or after the second world war. There's nothing 'entrist' about the presence of revolutionary currents in the Brazilian Workers Party (PT). They participate in a process of pluralist party construction, rather similar to the mass workers parties before the first world war (where the notion of entrism also had no sense). Within these experiences there are contradictions that we must recognise and engage. A party like the Brazilian PT is subject to strong pressures, because of its presence in parliament and role in local and regional governments. At the same time, this enables the accumulation of social experiences on a grand scale. Does this mean that a revolutionary current risks blunting its cutting edge and losing its revolutionary spirit? Without doubt. But on the other hand, if a revolutionary current remains separate it also risks losing its revolutionary soul, and becoming simply a sect which denounces, without getting its hands dirty. Between the two risks it is necessary to choose, looking for the best solutions to the dangers (like the education of militants) knowing there are no absolute guarantees. In any case, every organisation creates conservative tendencies (including the Bolshevik party in 1917) and nobody can be sure of being up to the job if there is a revolutionary crisis; the crisis itself is a test of the validity of a construction project, and the verdict is not known in advance.

Q. Why, in principle, should capitalism not be overthrown by an alliance of mass social movements, each of which is organised around partial emancipatory projects - especially if they all see capitalism as the enemy?

A. The question doesn't seem to me to be the best way to approach it. From a certain point of view, capitalism will indeed be overthrown by an alliance, or a convergence, of mass social movements. But even if these movements, because of their liberatory projects, perceive capitalism to be their enemy (which perhaps is the case for the women's movement or the environmental movement, not just the workers movement), I don't think these movements all play an equivalent role. And all are traversed by differences and contradictions that reflect their position, in the face of capital as a global mode of domination. There is a 'naturalist' feminism and a revolutionary feminism, a profoundly anti-humanist environmentalism and a humanist and social evironmentalism. In discussing this, one could perhaps integrate the sociological contributions of Max Weber and Pierre Bourdieu on the growing social differentiation of modern society and the diversity of its social arenas. If you consider these arenas are not structured in a hierarchy, but simply juxtaposed, then perhaps you could devise a tactic of putting together changing coalitions ('rainbow coalitions' on immediate questions). But there would be no solid strategic convergence in such an approach. I think, on the contrary, that within a particular mode of production (capitalism), relations of exploitation and class conflict constitute an overarching framework that cuts across and unifies the other contradictions. Capital itself is the great unifier that subordinates every aspect of social production and reproduction, remodelling the function of the family, determining the social division of labour and submitting humanity's conditions of social reproduction to the law of value. If that is indeed the case, a party, and not simply the sum of social movements, is the best agent of conscious unification,.

Q. The foundation of Lenin's post-1914 strategy was that imperialism was in its 'death agony', and was by definition a period of capitalist decline. How does this stand up after nine decades?

A. I don't interpret that characterisation of the epoch, an epoch of wars and revolutions, as a conjunctural judgement, or a mechanical judgement about the inevitable collapse of the system. Retrospectively, the 20th century does indeed appear to have been the century of wars and revolutions. And the 21st century, alas, won't be any different from that point of view. The forms of imperialist domination change but they don't disappear. The relevance of the heritage of Lenin and Trotsky, understood in a critical and non-dogmatic way, resides in the contemporary reality of capital and imperialism itself.

Q. Several revolutionary organisations outside the Fourth International (for example LO, the SWP and the Democratic Socialist Party of Australia) tend to argue that the French LCR is badly organised and lacks political centralisation. Do you agree that the LCR's deep and permanent involvement in diverse mass movements and united fronts has reduced its capacity for rapid mobilisation around central campaigns. And if so, is this an inevitable choice in modern conditions?

A. There's an element of truth in that. The LCR was able to resist the defeats of the 1980s and 90s essentially thanks to its activity in the mass movement - in the trade unions and in the mass social movements (unemployed, women and anti-racist). Everyone recognises in France that the renewal of fighting trade unionism, or that of AC! and Ras le Front,1 couldn't have seen the same level of development without the militants of the LCR. But the framework of a weakening in workers' resistance, the usefulness of the mass social movements seemed more obvious than that of a political organisation like ours, which could appear at a certain point just as a network and a forum for discussing ideas. This certainly led to an organisational loosening, which we regret and have been trying to correct for several years, say since 1995-7. But we prefer that problem to being a 'besieged citadel'. Lutte Ouvriere has certainly maintained a higher level of party patriotism, but the price has been exorbitant; a sectarian petrification and an incomprehension of the social movements. Then again, there is always a tension between the building of a political party and intervention in united fronts, between the risk of a sectarian response and that of dilution of your political profile. One can't resist that double temptation by a magic formula, you have to work your way though it concretely in each case. In a demonstration LO (if it participates) can have a contingent numerically bigger than the Ligue's, but the militants of the Ligue are also present in the contingents of their trade unions, Attac, Ras L'Front etc. I think we do more to develop the 'real movement for the abolition of the existing order', which is the very definition of communism.

Q. The recent well-attended SWP school 'Marxism 2001' showed again that the age profile of far left organisations in Europe is not so good (the majority more than 30, with a high proportion more than 40). Why? What can be done about it?

A. What strikes me and seems most important, more than the age profile than summer schools and meetings like the Marx conferences in France, is the renewal of interest in the Marxist critique of modern society and capitalist globalisation. Certainly, we would prefer a younger attendance, but the fact that a part of the 1960s generation has politically survived the 'Thatcher years' or the 'Mitterrand years' is something of a bonus for the future; there's the possibility of a continuity and a transmission of experiences. Basing ourselves on that we have to make an effort to find the way to access the present forms of politicisation of young people. For these certainly exist. In the present mobilisations against globalisations we can see parallels with the struggles that generated the radicalisation before 1968 - like over Vietnam or the Algerian war. We shouldn't mythologise or exaggerate that pre-1968 radicalisation, by the way. We can also see the present radicalisation in musical or cultural phenomena. On the other hand, if organisations like the SWP and LCR are a bit 'hollowed out' as regards the 1980s generation, they seem to understand the beginning of a new perspective among the youth.

Q. It was an axiom for Trotskyist organisations in the 60s, 70s and 80s that Leninism means a permanently high level of activity from all members. Often this involved moralistic and even quasi-religious overtones. Is it realistic to expect large number of activists to sustain high levels of activity for decades? Irrespective of the political situation?

A. A (voluntary) involvement in revolutionary struggle certainly isn't a hobby for the weekend. It seems normal that it implies a commitment to activity, career sacrifices and financial effort. That does not mean it's necessary to have a self-sacrificing mystique or the religious spirit of missionaries. Moreover the organisations that practice such ideological doping are often revealed as the most vulnerable to demoralisation; the disillusionment and discouragement are then proportional to the euphoric exaggeration of its motivation. Without doubt the kind of activism often used in the 1970s was often linked to an exaggerated appreciation of the chances for socialists, but also linked to the availability of members who in were in their overwhelming majority young, and did not yet have stable work or family situations. We say that we have matured and that our militancy has been 'normalised' in its pace and needs. The risk could be from now on the reverse: to fall into routinism.

Q. Is democratic centralism a realisable objective on an international level? Are we ever going to see a new mass International organised like the Comintern? In the light of modern experience, is it really true that revolutionary organisations inevitably suffer 'national communist' deviations from being outside an International?

A. We saw earlier that the notion of democratic centralism is difficult to define. This is all the more so at an international level. The Fourth International was defined at its inception as a world party. This engendered confusion in allowing the view that it was possible to operate with the degree of centralisation of a national party. That permitted misadventures like that of 1952, when the elected leadership of the French section was suspended by the International Secretariat. Such a thing is unimaginable today. The Statutes adopted in 1974 recognised the sovereignty of national leaderships. The 1985 Congress made explicit that the International is composed of sections and not individual adherents, and that implies a very federal structure. It is necessary to continue the reflection about the type of democracy possible at an international level. If it is possible to adopt common positions about great international events, it is however absurd for European delegates to vote on electoral tactics in Peru or trade union tactics in Brazil. Rather than discuss a formula (world party, democratic centralism), it would perhaps be better now to discuss a calm and objective balance sheet of experiences and practices, to look for the right balance between a destructive over-centralisation and a simple network for discussion, without any common commitment or involvement. It is necessary also to follow attentively the experiences of internationalist renewal, notably in the movement against capitalist globalisation, taking up the discussion of past experiences. I remain personally very attached to the necessity of an International, and I don't think that it is necessary solely during periods of impetuous revolutionary advance. However I don't think the Comintern any longer is a model for this.

Q. The tiny groups fighting to build Leninist parties made their first breakthroughs in the mid-late 1960s. After more than 30 years effort it could be argued that the results are quite modest. Doubtless much of the reason for this is rooted in deep objective factors - defeats of the working class, neoliberalism, the collapse of 'communism' etc. In retrospect, were major mistakes made? Could the results have been better?

A. The results could no doubt have been better. One could review the history of the 1930s and make an inventory of the mistakes. In fact it's not a useless thing to do at all, because these experiences, these treasures of intelligence, of devotion and of sacrifice were not at all pointless. But if you consider that the results were limited, with so many avenues explored, so many theoretical interpretations attempted, then without doubt the circumstances were very hard. I say the circumstances and not the objective conditions because there is a problem in the counterposition between objective and subjective conditions. The two are obviously linked. If you completely dissociate them, you fall into paradoxes which have often has disastrous consequences in the Trotskyist movement. If the objective circumstances were as excellent as one thinks, and if the revolutionary movement couldn't capitalise on them, then it was the organisations, their leaderships, their militants who failed; or else there were internal traitors. That type of paranoia does nobody any good.



NOTES

1. Respectively, an anti-unemployment network and an anti-fascist group