Part of the problem is that these debates fundamentally fail to acknowledge that the market socialist position, no matter how disrespected, is a valid one within the Communist political spectrum going back to the NEP. Tito, Khrushchev, Deng, Gorbachev, and successors in Vietnam and other Communist countries all derived their ideas from Bukharin and the Right Opposition. Stephen Cohen’s book was translated into Russian and Chinese and was read by their respective national parties. Now, do I necessarily like or endorse these developments? Do I love that these politics maintain or even exacerbate class stratification and exploitation? Not really. But the circular “No True Scotsman” discourse is really just so repetitive and it is more interesting to move beyond those polarities.
I appreciate the point raised by Žižek in 2017 about Lenin’s final writings. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 33, p. 479. ‘What if the complete hopelessness of the situation, by stimulating the efforts of the workers and peasants tenfold, offered us the opportunity to create the fundamental requisites of civilisation in a different way from that of the Western European countries? -Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 33, p. 479. But, although it is clear how Stalinism emerged from the initial conditions of the October Revolution and its immediate aftermath, one should not discount a priori the possibility that, had Lenin remained in good health and deposed Stalin, something different would have emerged – not, of course, the utopia of ‘democratic socialism’, but nonetheless something substantially different from the Stalinist ‘socialism in one country’, something resulting from a much more ‘pragmatic’ and improvisatory series of political and economic decisions, fully aware of its own limitations. Lenin’s desperate last struggle against a reawakened Russian nationalism, his support of Georgian ‘nationalists’, his vision of a decentralised federation, etc., were not just tactical compromises: they implied a vision of state and society incompatible in their entirety with Stalin’s. Two years before his death, when it became clear that there would be no immediate pan-European revolution, and given that the idea of building socialism in one country was nonsense, Lenin wrote: ‘What if the complete hopelessness of the situation, by stimulating the efforts of the workers and peasants tenfold, offered us the opportunity to create the fundamental requisites of civilisation in a different way from that of the Western European countries?’ Note here how Lenin uses a class-neutral term, ‘the fundamental requisites of civilisation’, and how, precisely when emphasising Russia’s distance from the Western European countries, he clearly refers to them as the model. Communism is a European event, if ever there was one. When Marxists celebrate the power of capitalism to disintegrate old communal ties, when they detect in this disintegration an opening up of the space of radical emancipation, they speak on behalf of the emancipatory European legacy. Walter Mignolo and other postcolonial anti-Eurocentrists dismiss the idea of communism as being too European, and instead propose Asian, Latin American or African traditions as sources of resistance to global capitalism. There is a crucial choice to be made here: do we resist global capitalism on behalf of the local traditions it undermines, or do we endorse this power of disintegration and oppose global capitalism on behalf of a universal emancipatory project? The reason anti-Eurocentrism is so popular today is precisely because global capitalism functions much better when its excesses are regulated by some ancient tradition: when global capitalism and local traditions are no longer opposites, but are on the same side. To put it in Deleuzian terms, Lenin’s moment is that of the ‘dark precursor’, the vanishing mediator, the displaced object never to be found at its own place, operating between the two series: the initial ‘orthodox’ Marxist series of revolution in the most developed countries, and the new ‘orthodox’ series of Stalinist ‘socialism in one country’ followed by the Maoist identification of Third World nations with the new world proletariat. The shift from Lenin to Stalinism here is clear and easy to determine: Lenin perceived the situation as desperate, unexpected, but for that reason as one that had to be creatively exploited for new political choices. With the notion of ‘socialism in one country’, Stalin re-normalised the situation, drafting it into a new narrative of linear development in ‘stages’. In other words, while Lenin was fully aware that what had happened was an ‘anomaly’ (a revolution in a country lacking the preconditions for developing a socialist society), he rejected the vulgar evolutionist conclusion that the revolution had taken place ‘prematurely’, so that one had to take a step back and develop a modern democratic capitalist society, which would then slowly create the conditions for socialist revolution. It was precisely against this vulgar conclusion that Lenin insisted the ‘complete hopelessness of the situation’ offered ‘the opportunity to create the fundamental requisites of civilisation in a different way from that of the Western European countries’. What he was proposing here was effectively an implicit theory of ‘alternate history’: under the ‘premature’ domination of the force of the future, the same ‘necessary’ historical process (that of modern civilisation) can be (re)run in a different way. Even Badiou was perhaps too hasty here in ultimately locating the betrayal of the Event in the immediate aftermath of the October Revolution, indeed, in the revolutionary takeover of the state power itself – in that fateful moment when the Bolsheviks abandoned their focus on the revolutionary self-organisation of the proletarian masses. Badiou is fully justified in emphasising that only by reference to what happens after the revolution, to the ‘morning after’, to the hard work of fidelity to the Event, can we distinguish between pathetic libertarian outbursts and true revolutionary events: these upheavals lose their energy when one has to take up the prosaic work of social reconstruction – at this point, lethargy sets in. In contrast to this, recall the immense creativity of the Jacobins just prior to their fall: the numerous proposals for a new civic religion, for how to preserve the dignity of old people, and so on. Therein also resides the interest of reports about daily life in the Soviet Union in the early 1920s, with its enthusiastic urge to invent new rules for quotidian existence: how does one get married? What are the new rules of courting? How does one celebrate a birthday? How should one be buried? -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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