Zizek’s Lenin and Ours

For reasons I don’t quite understand, anytime I write anything about Zizek, it generates exceptional traffic here. This may be because there is a lot of interest in Zizek or because he brings out the best (worst?) in me. I confess that Binh was probably right when he described Zizek as a troll not worth feeding, but I do look forward to increased traffic on my blog in the hope that new readers will find other articles useful as well. The one below was written before I began blogging. You can find all my articles, both from that period and afterwards, at http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mypage.htm.

Zizek’s Lenin and Ours

Posted to http://www.marxmail.org on January 31, 2004

An “In These Times” article by cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek titled “What Is To Be Done (With Lenin)?” has been circulating on the Internet. Today, a link to it popped up on neoconservative Denis Dutton’s “Arts and Letters” website, obviously a sign that Zizek was doing the left no favors when he wrote this article. Dutton is like a vacuum cleaner sweeping up every hostile reference to Marxism that can be found in the major media and academic journals. Despite his obligatory genuflection to Lenin, Zizek’s Lenin serves more as a token of ‘epater le bourgeois’ rebelliousness rather than a serious attempt to make him relevant in the year 2004.

Zizek’s article is a discourse on freedom, having more to do with Philosophy 101 than historical materialism. In defending the idea of relative freedom versus absolute freedom, he cites some remarks by Lenin 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 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.’

These rather blood-curdling words are interpreted by Zizek as a willingness on the part of the Soviet government to suppress criticisms that would undermine the workers’ and peasants’ government on behalf of the counterrevolution. In other words, Zizek’s Lenin favors shooting people who have ideological differences over how to build socialism, or so it would seem.

Without skipping a beat, Zizek amalgamates the execution of Mensheviks and SR’s found guilty of thought-crimes with the tendency in liberal societies to be offered meaningless choices between Coke and Pepsi or “Close Door” buttons in elevators that are not connected to anything. He concludes by saying:

This is why we tend to avoid Lenin today: not because he was an “enemy of freedom,” but because he reminds us of the fatal limitation of our freedoms; not because he offers us no choice, but because he reminds us that our “society of choices” precludes any true choice.

Although it seems implausible at best that Soviet firing squads in 1922 have anything remotely to do with choosing soft drinks, it might be useful to review exactly what Lenin was talking about in his speech–even though it might subvert the postmodernist exercise that Zizek is engaged in.

To begin with, it took a little bit of digging to find out where Lenin said these words. In poking around in Google (the MIA archives used a different translation so an exact match could not be found), I discovered that Zizek was not the only one lending credence to this version of Lenin as the High Executioner. The super-Stalinist Progressive Labor Party dotes on these words as well. In a book on their website titled “Another view of Stalin” by Ludo Martens, we discover that Lenin’s threats against his opponents demonstrate that he “vehemently dealt with counter-revolutionaries attacking the so-called `bureaucracy’ to overthrow the socialist régime.” In other words, Zizek’s Lenin and that of the PLP is a precursor to Stalin, implicitly and explicitly respectively.

At least I did learn from the PLP article the source of Lenin’s words, which was a Political Report of The Central Committee of the Communist Party at the Eleventh Congress on March 27, 1922. It can be read in its entirety at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/27.htm

If you do, you will discover nothing in Lenin’s speech to support the interpretation of Zizek or the Progressive Labor Party. To begin with, the report is a defense of the turn away from War Communism toward the New Economic Policy, which most historians view as an end to economic, political and legal regimentation–including the use of the death penalty. Immediately upon taking power in 1917, the Bolsheviks did away with the death penalty. It was only restored during the civil war when White terror was unleashed on the civilian population. As soon as the White armies were defeated, there was no use for the firing squad. A January 17, 1920 decree of the Soviet government stated that since the counter-revolution had been defeated, there was no need for executions. Since this occurred more than two years before Lenin’s speech, it is a little difficult to figure out what Lenin was talking about.

As it turns out, Lenin was referring not to an actual firing-squad, but a figurative one as should be obvious from the paragraphs that immediately precede Zizek’s citation:

When a whole army (I speak in the figurative sense)  [emphasis added] is in retreat, it cannot have the same morale as when it is advancing. At every step you find a certain mood of depression. We even had poets who wrote that people were cold and starving in Moscow, that “everything before was bright and beautiful, but now trade and profiteering abound”. We have had quite a number of poetic effusions of this sort.

Of course, retreat breeds all this. That is where the serious danger lies; it is terribly difficult to retreat after a great victorious advance, for the relations are entirely different. During a victorious advance, even if discipline is relaxed, everybody presses forward on his own accord. During a retreat, however, discipline must be more conscious and is a hundred times more necessary, because, when the entire army is in retreat, it does not know or see where it should halt. It sees only retreat; under such circumstances a few panic-stricken voices are, at times, enough to cause a stampede. The danger here is enormous. When a real army is in retreat, machine-guns are kept ready, and when an orderly retreat degenerates into a disorderly one, the command to fire is given, and quite rightly, too.

If, during an incredibly difficult retreat, when everything depends on preserving proper order, anyone spreads panic-even from the best of motives-the slightest breach of discipline must be punished severely, sternly, ruthlessly; and this applies not only to certain of our internal Party affairs, but also, and to a greater extent, to such gentry as the Mensheviks, and to all the gentry of the Two-and-a-Half International.

So Lenin’s words, taken literally by Zizek and the PLP, were specifically regarded by him as a figurative exercise. Lenin was talking about figurative armies, figurative retreats, figurative machine guns and figurative firing squads.

More to the point, there were no SR’s or Mensheviks in the USSR to brandish such threats against by 1922. They were no longer part of the political equation inside Russia and were left to issuing condemnations of the revolution from afar. Of course, the question would certainly arise as to why they were no longer inside the country. Had the Bolsheviks exiled their political adversaries in the same fashion that Lincoln arrested and deported a sitting Congressman to Canada who opposed the Civil War? Or in the fashion that FDR had imprisoned the leaders of the Trotskyist movement for criticizing the motives of the war with Germany and Japan?

In reality, repression of the SR’s and the Mensheviks had little to do with ideas about building socialism. In John Rees’s valuable “In Defense of October”, we learn that the infant Soviet republic faced the same kinds of threats as Cuba has faced since 1959. At the very time the White Army was slaughtering Soviet citizens and torching villages, foreign diplomats were organizing the nominally socialist opposition. R H Bruce Lockhart, the British diplomatic representative in Moscow, was instrumental in ensuring that Kerensky escaped from Russia after his unsuccessful military attempt to unseat the Bolsheviks. Rees writes:

Sidney Reilly, a British intelligence agent, was trying, unsuccessfully, to convince Lockhart that he ‘might be able to stage a counter-revolution in Moscow. But, according to Reilly, one part of his plan was prematurely put into effect in August 1918: Socialist Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan shot Lenin twice at point blank range, bringing him close to death. Earlier Reilly had managed to establish himself as a Soviet official with access to documents from Trotsky’s Foreign Ministry. And another British agent, George Hill, became a military adviser to Trotsky.

So the concrete application of the death penalty during the civil war has more to do with preventing assassination attempts by people like Fanny Kaplan rather than preventing alternative ideas about constructing socialism from reaching the Soviet people, just as the execution of hijackers in Cuba recently had more to do with preventing innocent lives being taken by desperate criminals than enforcing monolithism. Of course, in the early 1920s such defensive measures were interpreted by liberals as exercises in thought control and social repression just as they are today in the case of Cuba. It is singularly depressing, however, to see Zizek–a self-proclaimed fan of Lenin (in the same sense really as a fan of David Lynch movies)–giving credence to such an interpretation while nominally defending Lenin.

Marxist contrarians on the British riots

Joel Kotkin is a contributor to Forbes Magazine, the “capitalist tool” publication founded by the late Malcolm Forbes and now run by his glassy-eyed libertarian son Steve. On his blog there, Kotkin advises in an article titled The U.K. Riots And The Coming Global Class War that both right and left “ideologues” get the British riots wrong:

What’s the lesson to be drawn?  The ideologues don’t seem to have the answers. A crackdown on criminals — the favored response of the British right — is necessary but does not address the fundamental problems of joblessness and devalued work. Similarly the left’s favorite panacea, a revival of the welfare state, fails to address the central problem of shrinking opportunities for social advancement.

You could struggle in vain to find any ideas in Kotkin’s article about how to expand “opportunities for social advancement” even though it concludes with the warning that “If capitalism cannot do that [expand opportunities] expect more outbreaks of violence and greater levels of political alienation — not only in Britain but across most of the world’s leading countries, including the U.S.”

The article exudes a sense that a return to the “good old days” when the bourgeoisie was more ambitious and entrepreneurial could solve the problem. Back in the earlier decades of the 20^th century, “working class youths could look forward to jobs in Britain’s vibrant industrial economy and, later, in the growing public sector largely financed by both the earnings of the City of London and credit.” Of course, Britain has about the same prospects in becoming a “vibrant industrial economy” as I do in getting into a pair of trousers with a 31-inch waistband. We have both seen our better days. (I am working on a 33-inch size.)

Kotkin cites an erstwhile Marxmail subscriber as a guide to what might be needed:

As British historian James Heartfield has suggested, the rioters reflected a broader breakdown in “the British social system,” particularly in “the system of work and reward.”

My guess is that this probably the first time this year and maybe the decade that a self-described Marxist has gotten a tip of the hat in Steve Forbes’s magazine. Given the placement of the ad for Wells Fargo (“Learn more about how The Private Bank can help you”) just to the right of the link to Heartfield’s article that appears on Kotkin’s New Geography website, you get a sense of the cognitive dissonance at work.

Well, maybe not so dissonant after all. To start with, Heartfield’s article is titled “Britain Needs a Better Way to Get Rich Than Looting”. Maybe I am old-fashioned or something but the notion that “Britain” needs to get rich seems awfully devoid of class distinctions.  It is no accident that Kotkin has an affinity with one of Spiked online’s few remaining Marxists since he shares Heartfield’s love affair with suburbia. The Wiki on Kotkin states that he “believes in a ‘back to basics’ approach which stresses nurturing the middle class and families with traditional suburban development. “ For his part, Heartfield is as enamored of suburbia as Robert Moses. Just look at what he says on the website for his book “Let’s Build!”:

This book explains why Britain stopped building homes for its citizens to live in. For too long government policy has been in the grip of officials who want to stop new building.

Let’s Build! explains why all the reasons for not building new homes – the scare stories about the environment, about suburbia, about social cohesion – are just excuses.

Turning to the article itself, Heartfield took good care not to say anything that might offend Joel Kotkin. Writing for an editor who works for Forbes is obviously a lot different than writing for Jacobin or Metamute. Of course, if it were up to me I’d never bother dealing with the Joel Kotkins of the world.

Turning to the question of police brutality, Heartfield has a rather unique perspective on the cops: “Nobody would want to see the return of the old authoritarian policing, but the cadre that replaced them have lacked a guiding esprit de corps.” I confess that words escape me on this one. One cannot imagine Lenin ever fretting over the Czarist constabulary’s loss of a “guiding esprit de corps” but then again Lenin is just so passé.

Heartfield also mourns the disappearance of a respect for authority:

Lower down the scale teachers, parents and youth leaders have seen their authority undermined by a culture that disparages discipline, and sees “abuse” everywhere. Teachers’ unions have pointed out that changes in the law mean that a substantial minority are being investigated for allegations of abuse made by students at any time, meaning that they are reluctant to uphold discipline in the classroom. At the same time, teachers and social workers challenge parental discipline at every opportunity.

One does have to wonder how Frank Furedi maintains discipline in his own Spiked online ranks. If a member ever decided to write an article about the dangers of DDT, would they get a caning? Now we do know how that practice did have a certain frisson among private school boys…

When it comes to returning to the good old days, when happy workers went off to the coal mines or steel mills each day with a lunch bucket filled with ham sandwiches and a thermos bottle of steaming hot tea, Heartfield feels that recent methods such as these of getting rich have to be abandoned.

• Susan Boyle grabbed the public’s affection on a TV talent show and made £10 million.
• Geordie singer turned X-factor judge Cheryl Cole became Britain’s highest paid TV star.
• City chiefs like Barclays Bob Diamond and HSBC’s Bob Duggan were awarded bonuses of £6.5 and £9 million last year, from funds boosted by the government’s £200 billion quantitative easing policy.

Ah, we should have realized all along. The collapse of the British coal, auto, steel and shipbuilding industries had nothing to do with global competition but rather the waywardness of those who preferred to make their millions singing show tunes and the like. Time to sell your Marxist literature on amazon.com, I’d gather.

Turning from the ridiculous to the ridiculouser, there’s Slavoj Zizek’s (who were you expecting, Mike Davis?) latest think piece on the London Review titled “Shoplifters of the World Unite”.  It provides stiff competition with Heartfield’s “Britain Needs a Better Way to Get Rich Than Looting” as contrarian title of the year. When Marxists harp on rioters shoplifting or why Britain needs to work on “getting rich”, one wonders whether they are interested in changing peoples’ minds or rather getting them to say things like “Can you believe what Zizek just wrote in the London Review?” In the U.S. we call such people shock jocks. Whether Marxism has any need of their talents is an open question.

Zizek’s article is filled with philosophical babble like this:

This is why it is difficult to conceive of the UK rioters in Marxist terms, as an instance of the emergence of the revolutionary subject; they fit much better the Hegelian notion of the ‘rabble’, those outside organised social space, who can express their discontent only through ‘irrational’ outbursts of destructive violence – what Hegel called ‘abstract negativity’.

Is this the same Hegel who believed that the Prussian state was the culmination of the historical dialectic? No wonder.

When you read Zizek’s analysis, you have to wonder if he hasn’t been listening to Rush Limbaugh:

The protesters, though underprivileged and de facto socially excluded, weren’t living on the edge of starvation. People in much worse material straits, let alone conditions of physical and ideological oppression, have been able to organise themselves into political forces with clear agendas. The fact that the rioters have no programme is therefore itself a fact to be interpreted: it tells us a great deal about our ideological-political predicament and about the kind of society we inhabit, a society which celebrates choice but in which the only available alternative to enforced democratic consensus is a blind acting out.

Well, clearly these rioters have to stop stealing clothing or television sets and carve out the time to read Zizek’s latest article on communism. That will resolve their “ideological-political predicament” once they figure out what he is trying to say.

Like Kotkin and Heartfield, Zizek blames the welfare state on the erosion of the public morale that would lead to such wanton acts of destruction:

Meanwhile leftist liberals, no less predictably, stuck to their mantra about social programmes and integration initiatives, the neglect of which has deprived second and third-generation immigrants of their economic and social prospects: violent outbursts are the only means they have to articulate their dissatisfaction.

The rest of the article continues in this flatulent direction and is not worth commenting on, especially since I am anxious to take a run in Central Park and work on getting that 34 inch waist down to a 33.

Bye for now,

The Unrepentant Marxist