Leninade

Leninade. A Lenin statue in Seattle. Amazing. Even Laura Bush thinks so (note: the real Laura Bush may not think so). Nice diversions, now business...

Kiwi sociologist Chamsy el-Ojeili has penned a very considered and measured review for the most recent issue of Thesis Elven. Its title is wonderfully obstinate and pissy: "'No, We Have Not Finished Reflecting on Communism': Beyond Post-Socialism." The quoted part of the title is pulled from Lefort's new (in English, at least) Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2007). It is one of the books under consideration, alongside: Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis and Slavoj Žižek (eds), Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth (Duke University Press, 2007); Cornelius Castoriadis, The Rising Tide of Insignificancy (The Big Sleep, 2003); Cornelius Castoriadis, Figures of the Thinkable (The Big Sleep, 2005); Filip Kovacevic, Liberating Oedipus? Psychoanalysis as Critical Theory (Lexington Books, 2007). And many others besides; the bibliography runs to five pages. El-Ojeili handles the various tasks well, managing to be both critical and able to give an evenhanded overview of those works with which he disagrees. There's a lot that could be pulled out of this. For one, I think Castoriadis is a much more interesting thinker than most acknowledge -- which certainly emerges from this review. His latter work absolutely cannot escape the tag of pessimism and "impossibilist," as el-Ojeili puts it, but it still carries that same core concern with the politically productive capacity of the radical imaginary.

What I want to focus on here, though, is el-Ojeili's most stinging comments. They're directed toward Lenin Reloaded, a book I too am deeply suspicious of -- if not wearied by. I'll quote his comments at length, because I think they're worth following, rather than picking over. I think his comments are relevant to my work on nostalgia, as I see two motivations at work in the entire Reloaded book: petulant political iconoclasm and high-toned nostalgia. (Oh, 1917! Oh, revolution!) Like all nostalgic reveries, it's not as easy to write off as that. There's some wonderful thinkers involved, and they're not all wilfully misguided. There are glimmers. But the entire project seems like a waste of critical energies. At the present conjuncture, is a resuscitation of Lenin -- a "Weekend at Vladie's" -- truly what we need?

Without a doubt, this more assertive, reconstructive mood is in evidence in the Budgen et al. volume, which is brimming with intelligence, decisiveness, and energy, despite being wrong-headed in just about every imaginable way. In the introduction, Budgen, Kouvelakis and Žižek insist that the name ‘Lenin’ is urgent today, given his determination to intervene in the situation, to adopt ‘the unequivocal radical position’ (p. 3), and thus to offer the possibility of changing the co-ordinates of our situation. The Lenin to be retrieved, they argue, ‘is the Lenin-in-becoming, the Lenin whose fundamental experience was that of being thrown into a catastrophic new constellation in which old reference points proved useless, and who was compelled to reinvent Marxism’ (p. 3) – ‘What Lenin did for 1914, we should do for our times’ (p. 4). On this score, war, globalization, ‘the human face of market tyranny’ (Bensaid, 2007: 148) are, throughout the collection, the connecting, mobilizing points – Labica, for instance, emphasizing this link in reading contemporary globalization as a higher stage of capitalism, as imperialism with some new twists: ‘the predominance of speculative finance capital, the technological revolutions . . . and the collapse of the so-called socialist countries’ (2007: 228–9). Lenin as philosopher, then, is read in the context of this earlier ‘dramatic turning point of history’, which pushed him towards Hegel (the Philosophical Notebooks) and towards strategic reformulations (the ‘April Theses’, The State and Revolution) (Michael-Matsas, 2007: 102). Similarly, Etienne Balibar argues that these circumstances moved Lenin away from laws of history, unfolding capitalist dynamics, etc., towards the discovery of the ‘field of the overdetermination intrinsic to class antagonisms’, to the ‘analysis of concrete situations’ (2007: 211), to the ‘non-predetermined constitution’ p. 212) of theory and practice.

While my reservations about this sort of line are legion, there’s obviously a great weight of intelligence in play here, some of the best stuff coming from the French thinkers – Badiou, Balibar, Lazarus, Lecercle. The boldness of assertion and declarative style is often bracing and provocative: Badiou on the ‘short twentieth century’ as ‘a century of the act’, whose ‘subjective determination is Leninist’ (p. 9); Lazarus on the 20th-century’s ‘new figure of politics’ (p. 255), politics as ‘party-like’, and on the contemporary need for ‘an intellectuality of politics without party or revolution’ (p. 265) – ‘The end of the nation-state, which must be dated from 1968, is basically the end of the state as object of an “inherited” conflictuality’ (p. 266); Lecercle’s reading of Lenin’s qualities – firmness, hardness, and subtlety – as forces towards a much needed new direction for the philosophy of language. It is also interesting to see Callinicos contesting Žižekian decisionism, in favour of ‘an ethics of political action’ (p. 35) – improbably constructed by way of Trotsky.

A central issue, casting a shadow across the entire collection, is the question of the party – foregrounded, in a very different way, in Lefort’s Complications. In noting the necessary encounter with the Real for any genuine change, Žižek has previously pointed to the crucial facilitating role of three figures – God, Analyst, Party. In line with this emphasis, Kovacevic endows the discourse of the analyst with special significance, in ‘making desire emerge, stimulat[ing] the creation of new frameworks for the life of the analysand’ (2007: 205), arguing that, in the world of politics, this role is played by leaders, a ‘responsible, emancipatory, analyst-type leadership’ (p. 207). In the Budgen et al. collection, Jameson puts forward something similar – Lenin in the position of the discourse of the analyst, ‘who listens for collective desire and crystallizes its presence in his political manifestos and “slogans”’ (p. 71).

Again, there are some good points made here on issues of organization, intellectuals, strategy: for instance, Eagleton arguing that ‘intellectual’ ‘designates a social or political location . . . not a social rank or origin’ (2007: 46), distinguishing between elite and vanguard, and making some sound arguments against the easy, thoughtless rejection of authority per se. But, on the whole, for anyone influenced by the efforts of Castoriadis and the ultra-Left more widely, the whole endeavour will smack of a magnificent regression. For all its sparkle, we might want to read the volume as a sort of Sorelian myth around Lenin and Red October, bearing very little connection to the realities of Bolshevism or to any political realities and possibilities currently in play or ahead of us. For instance, Shandro considers the relationship between the Bolsheviks and the workers’ movement, arguing against the image of Lenin as Machiavellian opportunist formulating conflictual positions solely in the interests of power, contending instead that, in Lenin, ‘vanguard and masses play different, potentially complementary but sometimes essentially contradictory parts in the class struggle’ (2007: 329–30). Lenin, then, is seen as steering an intelligent path beyond both naïve spontaneism and substitutionism, delicately, dialectically thinking the relation between different actors in social change. At times, there seems an implicit ‘bid’ at work, here, in relation to the present and future course of the alternative globalization movement with Bensaid, for instance, arguing that:

A politics without parties (whatever name – movement, organization, league, party – that they are given) ends up in most cases as a politics without politics: either an aimless tailism toward the spontaneity of social movements, or the worst form of elitist individualist vanguardism, or finally a repression of thepolitical in favour of the aesthetic or the ethical. (2007: 162)

This connection – globalization-socialist organization – is interestingly in play in the most uncomfortably out-of-place piece in the collection, the contribution of Antonio Negri, who makes some effort to begin with Lenin but is clearly of another tradition – ‘Lenin beyond Lenin’ (2007: 300), ‘Everything has changed’ (p. 300), ‘the limitations . . . of the Leninist point of view’ (p. 305). And I would suggest that, for all the problems with Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004), we have, here, an instance of second phase post-Marxism, alive with a bold return to ‘logic of the social’ theoretical synthesis, and reconstructive ultra-Left/anarchistic utopianism. In this ‘post-Marxism II’, I think we can see movement past demobilizing, onesided cultural criticism, really existing liberal democracy, post-modern deconstruction, and Leninist retrievals – some decent attempts to offer replacements for Marxism’s broken triangle and chart paths beyond the post-socialist condition.

Emphasis mine. Thoughts, yours? More Leninade?