Vladimir Tismaneanu - The Devil in History

In an important book, Claude Lefort, the distinguished French political philosopher, 148proposes a deliberatively controversial thesis. Engaging in a polemic with François Furet and Martin Malia, Lefort maintains that Bolshevism (or, in general, twentieth-century Communism) was not simply an ideological mirage. 149Ideology mattered enormously, as demonstrated by Solzhenitsyn, about whom Lefort wrote extensively. But ideological passion alone or the will to impose a utopian blueprint cannot explain the longevity and intensity of the Communist phenomenon. In the spirit of French sociology (Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss), Lefort contended that it would be fruitful to regard Communism as a “total social fact.” The totalitarian system can be seen not only as an emotional-intellectual superstructure but also as an institutional ensemble inspired by these passions. In other words, it is not the original Marxism constituted in the Western revolutionary tradition that explains the Soviet tragedy but rather the mutation introduced by Lenin.

There is, undoubtedly, an authoritarian temptation at the heart of the Marxian project, but the idea of the ultracentralized, sectarian, extremely militarized party, composed of a minority of knowledgeable “chosen ones” who possess the gnosis while preaching egalitarian rhetoric to the masses, is directly linked to Lenin’s intervention in the evolution of Russian and European social democracy. Lenin’s revolutionary novelty consists in the cult of the dogma and the elevation of the party as the uniquely legitimate interpreter of the revealed truth (a trait of right-wing revolutionary totalitarian movements): “Even when it was still neither a monolithic party nor a single party, it potentially combined these two characteristics because it represented the Party-as-One, not one party among others (the strongest, most daring among them), but that party whose aim was to act under the impulse of a single will and to leave nothing outside its orbit, in other words, to merge with the state and society.” 150Moreover, Lefort emphasized the prescriptive role of the supposedly revealed Word as a defining characteristic of left totalitarianism: “The Text [Écrit] was supposed to answer all questions emerging in the course of things. Presenting itself at once as the origin and the end of knowledge, the Text required a certain kind of reader: the Communist Party member.” 151Indeed, Lenin carried to an extreme the idea of a privileged relation between “revolutionary theory” and “practice.” The latter constitutes (substantiates) itself in the figure of the presumably infallible party, custodian of an omniscience (“epistemic infallibility,” to use Giuseppe di Palma’s term) that defines and exorcises any doubt as a form of treason. The party was invested with demiurgic characteristics practically substituting for the revolutionary class—an elite invested by history with the mission of the salvation of humanity via revolution. Robert C. Tucker correctly diagnosed Lenin’s invention: “Revolutions do not simply come, he was contending, they have to be made, and the making requires a properly constituted and functioning organization of revolutionaries. Marx proclaimed the inevitable and imminent coming of the world proletarian socialist revolution. Lenin saw that the coming was neither inevitable nor necessarily imminent. For him—and this was a basic idea underlying the charter document of his Bolshevism, although nowhere did he formulate it in just these words—there was no revolution outside the party. Nulla salus extra ecclesiam. ” 152

In opposition to those authors who are still ready to grant Marxism and even Leninism a certain legitimacy in their claims to liberal-democratic pedigrees, it is essential to recognize (together with Lefort) 153that Bolshevism was inherently inimical to political liberties. It is not an accidental deviation from the democratic project but its logical, direct and unequivocal antithesis. Thus Lefort quotes Alexis de Tocqueville: “To grant the epithet of democratic to a government that denies political freedom to its citizens is a blatant absurdity.” The annihilation of democracy within Leninist practice is determined by the nature of the party as a secular substitute for the unifying totalizing mystique in the political body of the absolute sovereign (the medieval king). In other words, the Leninist model breaks with the Enlightenment tradition and reasserts the integral homogenization of the social space as a political and pragmatic ideal. According to Lefort, the fundamental organizational principle of Communism was “the People-as-One”—the golden rule of unity of the new society: “It is denied that division is constitutive of society. In the so-called socialist world, there can be no other division than that between the people and its enemies: a division between inside and outside, no internal division. After the revolution, socialism is not only supposed to prepare the way for the emergence of a classless society, it must already manifest that society which bears within itself the principle of homogeneity and self-transparency.” 154Under the circumstances, it is difficult to see a way to democratize Leninist regimes, precisely because the doctrine’s original intention was to organize total domination. Communism was indeed a deviant, though very real, version of modernity, an attempt to realize a new world-space (espace-monde) where the difference between I and Thou dissipated into the party, “the only concretion of the social” (to quote Lefort).

Here lies the essence of the Leninist (or Communist) question: the institution of the monolithic, unique party that emerges as a “besieged fortress” after 1903 (the great schism between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks) acquired planetary dimensions after 1917. Marxism, converted and adjusted by Lenin, ceased to be a revolutionary doctrine intended to grasp or conceive (begreifen) reality and became an ideological body that requires from militants a discipline of action that makes them “members of a collective body.” Thus Bolshevism added to nineteenth-century revolutionary mythologies something new: the inclusion of power in a type of representation that defines the party as a magical entity. It is thus important to keep in mind the significance of the political and symbolic structures of Leninism, the underpinnings that ensured its success as an ideological state (Weltanschauungstaat). No matter how we look at it, Lenin’s celebration of the party’s predestined status, together with his obsessive insistence on conspiratorial forms of organization (revolutionary “cells”) and the cult of fanatic regimentation, have initiated a new form of political radicalism, irrevocably opposed to the Western individualistic liberal tradition or, for that matter, to antiauthoritarian, democratic (liberal) socialism. Leninism’s Weltanschauung was as intolerant and exclusivist as that of Fascism: it demanded “complete recognition as well as the complete adaptation of public life to its ideas.” 155In the twentieth century, Leninism and Fascism brought about an unprecedented “enlargement, intensification, and dynamicization of political power” 156with the purpose of radically transforming the world.

With this in mind, I would conclude that Slavoj Žižek’s proposed “return to Lenin” means simply a return to a politics of irresponsibility, the resurrection of a political ghost whose main legacies are related to the limitation, rather than the expansion, of democratic experimentation. After all, it was Lenin who suppressed direct democracy in the form of councils, disbanded the embryonic Russian parliament, and transformed terror into a privileged instrument for preserving power. Žižek seems to adopt, and truly enjoy, the role of Thomas Mann’s character, the Jesuit dialectician Leo Naphta: an oracle of the resurrection of what one might call le désir de révolution. In his defense of Leninism, Žižek actually advocates the rehabilitation of chiliastic experiences, secular soteriologies, and visionary messianism, all for the sake of regaining the “authentically apocalyptical Paulinian atmosphere.” Simultaneously, though, he (and others who imitate his plea) does not seem to mind the mass graves that people keep discovering wherever the Leninist ideal, in one form or the other, has been implemented. When Hitler destroyed the Weimar constitutional system and abolished all “bourgeois freedoms,” he imitated the Bolshevik precedent of the permanent emergency as a justification for legitimizing the destruction of legality and eliminating (including physical annihilation) all those regarded as “objective” obstacles to building a perfect, organic community. Despite their pretense of rationality, the Bolsheviks, “unconstrained by concerns of legality or any usual checks on executive power, were particularly prone to resort to naked force.” 157