Zizek's Lenin and ours

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

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 March 27, 1922. It can be read in its 
entirety at:

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 January 17, 1920 decree 
of the Soviet government stated that since the counter-revolution had been 
defeated, there was no need for executions. Since this occurred more than 
two years before Lenin's speech, it is a little difficult to figure out 
what Lenin was talking about.

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 Moscow, that "everything before 
was bright and beautiful, but now trade and profiteering abound". We have 
had quite a number of poetic effusions of this sort.

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 USSR to brandish 
such threats against by 1922. They were no longer part of the political 
equation inside Russia and were left to issuing condemnations of the 
revolution from afar. Of course, the question would certainly arise as to 
why they were no longer inside the country. Had the Bolsheviks exiled their 
political adversaries in the same fashion that Lincoln arrested and 
deported a sitting Congressman to Canada who opposed the Civil War? Or in 
the fashion that FDR had imprisoned the leaders of the Trotskyist movement 
for criticizing the motives of the war with Germany and Japan?

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 Moscow. But, according to Reilly, one part of his plan was prematurely 
put into effect in August 1918: Socialist Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan shot 
Lenin twice at point blank range, bringing him close to death. Earlier 
Reilly had managed to establish himself as a Soviet official with access to 
documents from Trotsky's Foreign Ministry. And another British agent, 
George Hill, became a military adviser to Trotsky."

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 being heard by 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, 
just as was the case in the early 1920s as is the case today, such 
defensive measures are interpreted by liberals as exercises in thought 
control and social repression. 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.


Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org