Zizek's Lenin and Ours
Posted to www.marxmail.org on
An "In These Times" article by cultural theorist Slavoj Zizek titled "What Is To Be Done (With Lenin)?" has been circulating on the Internet (http://www.inthesetimes.com/print.php?id=568_0_4_0). 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
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/27.htm
If you do, you will discover nothing in Lenin's speech to
support such 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
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
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
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
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.