Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917

348 Pages·2011·2.87 MB·English

by  V. I. Lenin

SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 1949, and is a professor at the
European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the
Humanities, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of
Sociology, University of Ljubljana. He has been a visiting professor at Columbia
University and the University of Paris VIII, as well as at a number of other
prestigious institutions on both sides of the Atlantic.
In his native Slovenia, he was a prominent political figure in the 1980s. He wrote
a regular column for the newspaper Mladina and, in 1990, finished fifth in the
election for the nation’s four-person presidency. His international reputation as a
writer and philosopher was secured in 1989 with the publication of The Sublime
Object of Ideology, a book that applied the author’s original distillation of Lacan and
Marx to an analysis of agency and modern ideology. A string of much lauded works
has followed, including Repeating Lenin (1997), The Ticklish Subject (1999), Iraq:
The Borrowed Kettle (2004) and Living in the End Times (2010).
As well as providing original insights into psychoanalysis, philosophy and radical
political theory, he has, through employing his extraordinary scholarship to the
examination of popular entertainment, established himself as a witty and deeply
moral cultural critic. He has been the subject of two feature-length documentaries,
Slavoj Žižek: The Reality of the Virtual (2004) and Žižek! (2005). He also presented
and wrote the three-part British TV documentary A Pervert’s Guide to Cinema
(2006).
His compelling, charismatic presence and puckish sense of the absurd have
prompted the press to dub him “the Elvis of cultural theory” and an “intellectual
rock star.” However, these jocular monikers belie a seriousness of purpose that has
been nothing short of startling in an era marked by despondency and disengagement
on the Left. More than an academic or theorist, Žižek has the gravitas and drive of a
breed once thought extinct: the revolutionary. He has made philosophy relevant
again for a whole generation of politically committed readers.
THE ESSENTIAL ŽIŽEK
A series of classic philosophical texts from Verso
Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the
(Mis) Use of a Notion
The Fragile Absolute
The Plague of Fantasies
Revolution at the Gates, Žižek on Lenin: The 1917 Writings
The Sublime Object of Ideology
The Ticklish Subject
Also available from Verso by the same author:
In Defense of Lost Causes
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce
Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle
Lacan: The Silent Partners
Living in the End Times
Welcome to the Desert of the Real

First published by Verso 2002
Introduction and afterword © Slavoj Žižek 2002
Original Lenin texts: see p. vii
Paperback edition first published by Verso 2004
Reprinted by Verso 2011 as part of the Essential Žižek series All rights reserved
The moral rights of the author have been asserted Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-714-6
eBook ISBN: 978-1-84467818-1
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
v3.1
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Also By This Author
Title Page
Copyright
A Note on Bibliographical Sources
Introduction: Between the Two Revolutions
Slavoj Žižek
Revolution at the Gates
1 Letters from Afar
2 The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution (“April Theses”)
3 On Slogans
4 The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It
5 One of the Fundamental Questions of the Revolution
6 The Bolsheviks Must Assume Power
7 Marxism and Insurrection
8 The Tasks of the Revolution
9 The Crisis Has Matured
10 Advice of an Onlooker
11 Letter to Comrades
12 Meeting of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies
Afterword: Lenin’s Choice
Slavoj Žižek
The Right to Truth – Materialism Revisited – The Inner Greatness of Stalinism –
Lenin as a Listener of Schubert – Did Lenin Love His Neighbour? – From passage à
l’acte to the Act Itself – Welcome to the Desert of the Real! – Redemptive Violence –
Against Pure Politics – For They Know Not What They Believe – “Cultural
Capitalism” – A Cyberspace Lenin? – Against Post-politics – Return versus Repetition
Index
A Note on Bibliographical Sources
Lenin’s texts are reprinted from: V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, 4th English edition, 42
volumes, Moscow: Progress Publishers 1964.
1 “Letters from Afar”, vol. 23, pp. 295–342. Written March 7–26 1917. Translated
from the Russian by M. S. Levin, Joe Fineberg and others. Edited by M. S. Levin.
2 “The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution (April Theses)”, vol. 24,
pp. 21–9. First published in Pravda no. 26, 7 April 1917. Translated from the
Russian and edited by Bernard Isaacs.
3 “On Slogans”, vol. 25, pp. 185–92. Written in mid-July 1917. First published in
pamphlet form in 1917. Translated from the Russian and edited by Stephan
Apresyan and Jim Riordan.
4 “The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It”, vol. 25, pp. 323–69. First
published at the end of October 1917 in pamphlet form. Translated from the
Russian and edited by Stephan Apresyan and Jim Riordan.
5 “One of the Fundamental Questions of the Revolution”, vol. 25, pp. 370–77. First
published on 27 September 1917. Translated from the Russian and edited by
Stephan Apresyan and Jim Riordan.
6 “The Bolsheviks Must Assume Power”, vol. 26, pp. 19–21. Written 25–27
September 1917, first published in 1921. Translated from the Russian by Yuri
Sodobnikov and George Hanna. Edited by George Hanna.
7 “Marxism and Insurrection”, vol. 26, pp. 22–7. Written 26–27 September 1917,
first published in 1921. Translated from the Russian by Yuri Sodobnikov and
George Hanna. Edited by George Hanna.
8 “The Tasks of the Revolution”, vol. 26, pp. 59–68. First published in Rabochy
Put nos 20 and 21, 9 and 10 October 1917. Translated from the Russian by Yuri
Sodobnikov and George Hanna. Edited by George Hanna.
9 “The Crisis Has Matured”, vol. 26, pp. 74–85. Sections I—III and V first
published on 9 October 1917 in Rabochy Put no. 20, sections IV and VI first
published in 1924. Translated from the Russian by Yuri Sodobnikov and George
Hanna. Edited by George Hanna.
10 “Advice of an Onlooker”, vol. 26, pp. 179–81. Written 21 October 1917, first
published in Pravda on 7 November 1920, signed An Onlooker. Translated from
the Russian by Yuri Sodobnikov and George Hanna. Edited by George Hanna.
11 “Letter to Comrades”, vol. 26, pp. 195–215. First published in Rabochy Put nos
40, 41, and 42, 1, 2 and 3 November 1917. Translated from the Russian by Yuri
Sodobnikov and George Hanna. Edited by George Hanna.
12 “Meeting of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies”, vol. 26,
pp. 239–41. First published in Izvestia no. 207, 26 October 1917. Translated from
the Russian by Yuri Sodobnikov and George Hanna. Edited by George Hanna.
The arabic-numbered footnotes are editorial; the Roman-numeral footnotes are
Lenin’s own.
Introduction
Introduction: Between the Two Revolutions
Slavoj Žižek
The first public reaction to the idea of reactualizing Lenin is, of course, an outburst
of sarcastic laughter. Marx is OK—today, even on Wall Street, there are people who
still love him: Marx the poet of commodities, who provided perfect descriptions of
the capitalist dynamic; Marx of Cultural Studies, who portrayed the alienation and
reification of our daily lives. But Lenin—no, you can’t be serious! Doesn’t Lenin
stand precisely for the failure to put Marxism into practice, for the big catastrophe
which left its mark on the whole of twentieth-century world politics, for the Real
Socialist experiment which culminated in an economically inefficient dictatorship?
So, if there is a consensus among (whatever remains of) today’s radical Left, it is that,
in order to resuscitate the radical political project, we should leave the Leninist
legacy behind: the ruthless focusing on the class struggle, the Party as the privileged
form of organization, 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?, simply ruthlessly pursued them thereafter. What if there is another story to
be told about Lenin? It is true that today’s Left is undergoing the shattering
experience of the end of an entire epoch for the progressive movement, an