Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Lenin Reloaded

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Zizek, Introduction: Repeating Lenin..............................................................11 Alain Badiou, One Divides Itself into Two.......................................................................................................72 Alex Callinicos, Leninism in the Twenty-first Century?: Lenin, Weber, and the Politics of Responsibility........................................183 Terry Eagleton, Lenin in the Postmodern Age.....................................................................................................424 Fredric Jameson, Lenin and Revisionism..........................................................................................................595 Slavoj Zizek, A Leninist Gesture Today: Against the Populist Temptation.........................................................................746 Savas Michael-Matsas, Lenin and the Path of Dialectics..........................................................................................1017 Kevin B. Anderson, The Rediscovery and Persistence of the Dialectic in Philosophy and in World Politics.........................................1208 Daniel Bensad, "Leaps! Leaps! Leaps!"..........................................................................................................1489 Stathis Kouvelakis, Lenin as Reader of Hegel: Hypotheses for a Reading of Lenin's Notebooks on Hegel's The Science of Logic.....................16410 Etienne Balibar, The Philosophical Moment in Politics Determined by War: Lenin 1914-16.........................................................20711 Georges Labica, From Imperialism to Globalization..............................................................................................22212 Domenico Losurdo, Lenin and Herrenvolk Democracy...............................................................................................23913 Sylvain Lazarus, Lenin and the Party, 1902-November 1917.......................................................................................25514 Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Lenin the Just, or Marxism Unrecycled...................................................................................26915 Lars T. Lih, Lenin and the Great Awakening.....................................................................................................28316 Antonio Negri, What to Do Today with What Is to Be Done?, or Rather: The Body of the General Intellect.........................................29717 Alan Shandro, Lenin and Hegemony: The Soviets, the Working Class, and the Party in the Revolution of 1905......................................308Contributors.......................................................................................................................................333Index..............................................................................................................................................335

Chapter One

One Divides Itself into Two

Today the political oeuvre of Lenin is entirely dominated by the canonical opposition between democracy and totalitarian dictatorship. But actually this discussion has already taken place. For it is precisely through the category of democracy that, from 1918 onward, the "western" Social Democrats led by Kautsky have tried to discredit not only the Bolshevik revolution in its historical becoming but also Lenin's political thought.

What particularly deserves our interest is the theoretical response by Lenin to this attack, contained above all in the pamphlet that Kautsky published in Vienna in 1918 under the title "The Dictatorship of the Proletariat" and to which Lenin responded in the famous text "The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky."

Kautsky, in a way that is natural for a declared partisan of a representative and parliamentary political regime, stresses almost exclusively the right to vote. The interesting thing is that Lenin sees in this procedure the very essence of Kautsky's theoretical deviation. This is not at all because Lenin would think that it is a mistake to support the right to vote. No, Lenin thinks that it can be very useful, even necessary, to participate in the elections. He will vehemently repeat this against the absolute opponents of participation in parliamentary elections in his pamphlet on leftism. Lenin's criticism of Kautsky is much more subtle and interesting. If Kautsky had said, "I am opposed to the decision by Russian Bolsheviks to disenfranchise the reactionaries and the exploiters," he would have taken position on what Lenin calls "an essentially Russian question, and not the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat in general." He could have, and should have, called his booklet "Against the Bolsheviks." Things would have been politically clear. But this is not what Kautsky did. Kautsky wants to intervene in the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat in general and of democracy in general. The essence of his deviation is to have done this on the basis of a tactical and local decision in Russia. The essence of the deviation is always to argue on the basis of some tactical circumstances in order to deny the principles, to take the starting point in a secondary contradiction in order to make a revisionist statement on the principal conception of politics.

Let us have a closer look at the way Lenin proceeds. I quote:

In speaking about the franchise, Kautsky betrayed himself as an opponent of the Bolsheviks, who does not care a brass farthing for theory. For theory, i.e., the reasoning about the general (and not the nationally specific) class foundations of democracy and dictatorship, ought to deal not with a special question, such as the franchise, but with the general question of whether democracy can be preserved for the rich, for the exploiters in the historical period of the overthrow of the exploiters and the replacement of their state by the state of the exploited.

So theory is precisely what integrates in thought the moment of a question. The moment of the question of democracy is in no way defined by a tactical and localized decision, such as the disenfranchisement for the rich and the exploiters, a decision linked to the particularities of the Russian Revolution. That moment is defined by the general principle of victory: we find ourselves, Lenin says, in the moment of victorious revolutions, in the moment of the real collapse of the exploiters. This is no longer the moment of the Paris Commune, the moment of courage and of cruel defeat. A theoretician is someone who addresses the questions, for example, the question of democracy, from the inside of the determined moment. A renegade is someone who doesn't take the moment into account, someone who uses a particular vicissitude as an occasion for what is purely and simply his political resentment.

Here we can see clearly why Lenin is the political thinker who inaugurates the century. He turns victory, the real of the revolutionary politics, into an internal condition of the theory. Lenin thus determines the major political subjectivity of the century, at least until its last quarter.

The century, between 1917 and the end of the 1970s, is not at all a century of ideologies, of the imaginary or of utopias, as the liberals would have it today. Its subjective determination...