[PEN-L:28416] "Seize the day": Zizek on Lenin

["Grant Lee" <grantlee@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Seize the day: Lenin's legacy"

"In 1917, fighting against the tide of Bolshevik opinion, Lenin claimed that
there is no 'proper time' for revolution, simply emerging opportunities
which must be seized. In the latest exclusive essay from the London Review
of Books, Slavoj Zizek argues that the left today needs Lenin's lessons more
than ever."

Tuesday July 23, 2002

Lenin by Hélène Carrère d'Encausse, translated by George Holoch. Holmes &
Meier, 371 pp, £35, 2001, 0 8419 1412 5

The left is undergoing a shattering experience: the progressive movement is
being compelled to reinvent its whole project. What tends to be forgotten,
however, is that a similar experience gave birth to Leninism. Consider
Lenin's shock when, in the autumn of 1914, every European social democratic
party except the Serbs' followed the 'patriotic line'. How difficult it must
have been, at a time when military conflict had cut the European continent
in half, not to take sides. Think how many supposedly independent-minded
intellectuals, Freud included, succumbed, if only briefly, to the
nationalist temptation.
2
In 1914, an entire world disappeared, taking with it not only the bourgeois
faith in progress, but the socialist movement that accompanied it. Lenin
(the Lenin of What Is to Be Done?) felt the ground fall away from beneath
his feet - there was, in his desperate reaction, no sense of satisfaction,
no desire to say "I told you so." At the same time, the catastrophe made
possible the key Leninist Event: the overcoming of the evolutionary
historicism of the Second International. The kernel of the Leninist
'utopia' - the radical imperative to smash the bourgeois state and invent a
new communal social form without a standing army, police force or
bureaucracy, in which all could take part in the administration of social
matters - arises directly from the ashes of 1914..."

The rest is at:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/lrb/articles/0,6109,761903,00.html