Lenin 2017: Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through PDF
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Lenin 2017 Lenin 2017 Remembering, Repeating, and Working Through V. I . LENI N Edited and Introduced by Slavoj Žižek First published by Verso 2017 Introduction and Afterword © Slavoj Žižek 2017 The works of V. I. Lenin collected here derive from the Marxists Internet Archive All rights reserved The moral rights of the authors have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201 versobooks.com Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-188-6 ISBN-13: 978-1-78663-189-3 (US EBK) eISBN-13: 978-1-78663-187-9 (UK EBK) British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Typeset in Sabon by MJ&N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall Printed in the UK by CPI Mackays Ltd Contents Introduction: Remembering, Repeating and Working Through by Slavoj Žižek Note on the Texts To M. F. Sokolov To G. Myasnikov New Times and Old Mistakes in a New Guise Notes of a Publicist: On Ascending a High Mountain; the Harm of Despondency; the Utility of Trade; Attitude towards the Mensheviks, Etc. Eleventh Congress of the RCP(B) Memo Combating Dominant-Nation Chauvinism Last Testament: Letters to Congress On Education (Pages from a Diary) On Cooperation (Apropos of N. Sukhanov’s Notes) Our Revolution (Apropos of N. Sukhanov’s Notes) How We Should Reorganise the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection Better Fewer, but Better To Comrade Stalin To P.G. Mdivani, F.Y. Makharadze and Others Afterword: Lenin Navigating in Uncharted Territories by Slavoj Žižek Notes Sources Introduction: Remembering, Repeating and Working Through Slavoj Žižek Remembering and Repeating The title of Freud’s short text from 1914, ‘Remembering, Repeating and Working Through’, provides the best formula for the way we should relate – today, 100 years later – to the event called the October Revolution. The three concepts Freud mentions form a dialectical triad: they designate the three phases of the analytical process, and resistance intervenes in every passage from one phase to the next. The first step consists in remembering the repressed past traumatic events, in bringing them out, which can also be done by hypnosis. This phase immediately runs into a deadlock: the content brought out lacks its proper symbolic context and thus remains ineffective; it fails to transform the subject and resistance remains active, limiting the amount of content revealed. The problem with this approach is that it stays focused on the past and ignores the subject’s present constellation which keeps this past alive, symbolically active. Resistance expresses itself in the form of transference: what the subject cannot properly remember, she repeats, transferring the past constellation onto a present (e.g., she treats the analyst as if he were her father). What the subject cannot properly remember, she acts out, reenacts – and when the analyst points this out, her intervention is met with resistance. Working through is working through the resistance, turning it from the obstacle into the very resort of analysis, and this turn is self-reflexive in a properly Hegelian sense: resistance is a link between object and subject, between past and present, proof that we are not only fixated on the past but that this fixation is an effect of the present deadlock in the subject’s libidinal economy. With regard to 1917, we also begin by remembering, by recalling, the true history of the October Revolution and, of course, its reversal into Stalinism. The great ethico-political problem of the communist regimes can best be captured under the title ‘founding fathers, founding crimes’. Can a communist regime survive the act of openly confronting its violent past in which millions were imprisoned and killed? If so, in what form and to what degree? The first paradigmatic case of such a confrontation was, of course, Nikita Khrushchev’s ‘secret’ report on Stalin’s crimes to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in 1956. The first thing that strikes one in this report is the focus on Stalin’s personality as being the key factor in the crimes, and the concomitant lack of any systematic analysis of what made those crimes possible. The second feature is its strenuous effort to keep the Origins clear: not only is the condemnation of Stalin limited to his arrest and killing of high-ranking Party members and military officers in the 1930s (where rehabilitations were very selective: Bukharin, Zinoviev, etc., continued to be non-persons, not to mention Trotsky), ignoring the great famine of the late 1920s; but the report is also presented as announcing the return of the Party to its ‘Leninist roots’, so that Lenin emerges as the pure Origin spoiled or betrayed by Stalin. In his belated but perspicuous analysis of the report, written in 1970, Sartre noted that it was true that Stalin had ordered massacres, transformed the land of the revolution into a police state; he was truly convinced that the USSR would not reach communism without passing through the socialism of concentration camps. But as one of the witnesses very rightly points out, when the authorities find it useful to tell the truth, it’s because they can’t find any better lie. Immediately this truth, coming from official mouths, becomes a lie corroborated by the facts. Stalin was a wicked man? Fine. But how had Soviet society perched him on the throne and kept him there for a quarter of a century.1 Indeed, is not Khrushchev’s later fate (he was deposed in 1964) proof of Oscar Wilde’s quip that if one tells the truth, one will sooner or later be caught out? Sartre’s analysis nonetheless falls short on one crucial point: even if Khrushchev was ‘speaking in the name of the system’ – ‘the machine was sound, but its chief operator was not; this saboteur had relieved the world of his presence, and everything was going to run smoothly again’2 – his report did have a traumatic impact, and his intervention set in motion a process that ultimately brought down the system itself – a lesson worth remembering today. In this precise sense, Khrushchev’s 1956 speech denouncing Stalin’s crimes was a true political act – after which, as William Taubman put it, ‘the Soviet regime never fully recovered, and neither did he’.3 Although the opportunist motives for this daring move are plain enough, there was clearly more than mere calculation to it, a kind of reckless excess which cannot be accounted for by strategic reasoning. After the speech, things were never the same again, the fundamental dogma of infallible leadership had been fatally undermined; no wonder then, that, in reaction to the speech, the entire nomenklatura sank into temporary paralysis. During the speech itself, a dozen or so delegates suffered nervous breakdowns and had to be carried out and given medical help; a few days later, Boleslaw Bierut, the hard-line general secretary of the Polish Communist Party, died of a heart attack, and the model Stalinist writer Alexander Fadeyev shot himself. The point is not that they were ‘honest communists’ – most of them were brutal manipulators who harboured no subjective illusions about the nature of the Soviet regime. What broke down was their ‘objective’ illusion: the figure of the ‘big Other’ that had provided the background against which they were able to pursue their ruthless drive for power. The Other onto which they had transposed their belief, which as it were believed on their behalf, their subject-supposed-to-believe, disintegrated. Khrushchev’s wager was that his (limited) confession would strengthen the communist movement – and in the short term he was right. One should always remember that the Khrushchev era was the last period of authentic communist enthusiasm, of belief in the communist project. When, during his visit to the United States in 1959, Khrushchev made his famous defiant statement to the American public that ‘your grandchildren will be communists’, he effectively spelled out the conviction of the entire Soviet nomenklatura. After his fall in 1964, a resigned cynicism prevailed, up until Gorbachev’s attempt at a more radical confrontation with the past (the rehabilitations then included Bukharin, but – for Gorbachev at least – Lenin remained the untouchable point of reference, and Trotsky continued to be a non-person). With Deng Xiaoping’s ‘reforms’, the Chinese proceeded in a radically different, almost opposite, way. While at the level of the economy (and, up to a point, culture) what is usually understood as ‘communism’ was abandoned, and the gates were opened wide to Western-style ‘liberalisation’ (private property, profit-making, hedonist individualism, etc.), the Party nevertheless maintained its ideologico-political hegemony – not in the sense of doctrinal orthodoxy (in the official discourse, the Confucian reference to the ‘Harmonious Society’ practically replaced any reference to communism), but in the sense of maintaining the unconditional political hegemony of the Communist Party as the only guarantee of China’s stability and prosperity. This required a close
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