LENIN: 101 YEARS LATER

Who controls the controllers?

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Lenin died 101 years ago, on January 21, 2024. Considering the fate of his legacy in recent decades, it seems appropriate to remember this anniversary with a one-year delay. So where are we today, not only with regard to Lenin but also with regard to the radical revolutionary project associated with his name?

In 1922, when the Bolsheviks had to retreat into the "New Economic Policy" of allowing a much wider scope of market economy and private property, Lenin wrote a short text "On Ascending a High Mountain." He uses the simile of a climber who has to retreat back to the zero-point, to the ground from his first attempt to reach a new mountain peak, to describe how one retreats without opportunistically betraying one's fidelity to the Cause: Communists "who do not give way to despondency, and who preserve their strength and flexibility 'to begin from the beginning' over and over again in approaching an extremely difficult task, are not doomed." This is Lenin at his Beckettian best, echoing the line from Worstward Ho: "Try again. Fail again. Fail better."

Such a Leninist approach is needed more than ever today when Communism, the only way to confront the challenges we face (ecology, war, AI...), is politically more and more inoperative - whatever remains of the Left is less and less able to mobilize people around a viable alternative to the existing global order. But does "Lenin" not stand for the very dimension which deserves to be obliterated if the Left is to have any chance to become a mobilizing force again?

Perhaps the way to break out of this deadlock of endlessly pondering the weakness of the Left, complaining how it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, is to change the terrain and focus on capitalism: capitalism itself not just successfully imagined post-capitalism but is in its reality transforming itself into a new post-capitalist order. The stakes are here extremely high – nobody was more aware of them than Trotsky himself, as is clear from his dream about dead Lenin from the night of June 25, 1935:

"Last night, or rather early this morning, I dreamed I had a conversation with Lenin. Judging by the surroundings, it was on a ship, on the third-class deck. Lenin was lying in a bunk; I was either standing or sitting near him, I am not sure which. He was questioning me anxiously about my illness. 'You seem to have accumulated nervous fatigue, you must rest...' I answered that I had always recovered from fatigue quickly, thanks to my native Schwungkraft, but that this time the trouble seemed to lie in some deeper processes... 'Then you should seriously (he emphasized the word) consult the doctors (several names)...' I answered that I already had many consultations and began to tell him about my trip to Berlin; but looking at Lenin I recalled that he was dead. I immediately tried to drive away this thought, so as to finish the conversation. When I had finished telling him about my therapeutic trip to Berlin in 1926, I wanted to add, 'This was after your death'; but I checked myself and said, 'After you fell ill...'"

In his interpretation of this dream, Lacan focuses on the obvious link with Freud's dream in which his father appears to him, a father who doesn't know that he is dead. So what does it mean that Lenin doesn't know he is dead? There are two radically opposed ways to read Trotsky's dream. According to the first reading, the terrifyingly ridiculous figure of the undead Lenin "doesn't know that the immense social experiment he single-handedly brought into being (and which we call Soviet communism) has come to an end. He remains full of energy, although dead, and the vituperation expended on him by the living – that he was the originator of the Stalinist terror, that he was an aggressive personality full of hatred, an authoritarian in love with power and totalitarianism, even (worst of all) the rediscoverer of the market in his NEP – none of those insults manage to confer a death, or even a second death, upon him. How is it, how can it be, that he still thinks he is alive? And what is our own position here – which would be that of Trotsky in the dream, no doubt – what is our own non-knowledge, what is the death from which Lenin shields us?"

The dead Lenin who doesn't know that he is dead thus stands for our own obstinate refusal to renounce the grandiose utopian projects and accept the limitations of our situation: there is no big Other, Lenin was mortal and made errors like all others, so it is time for us to let him die, to put to rest this obscene ghost which haunts our political imaginary, and to approach our problems in a non-ideological pragmatic way... But there is another sense in which Lenin is still alive: he is alive insofar as he embodies what Badiou calls the "eternal Idea" of universal emancipation, the immortal striving for justice that no insults and catastrophes manage to kill. One should recall here Hegel's sublime words on the French Revolution from his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History:

“It has been said that the French Revolution resulted from philosophy, and it is not without reason that philosophy has been called Weltweisheit (world wisdom); for it is not only truth in and for itself, as the pure essence of things, but also truth in its living form as exhibited in the affairs of the world. We should not, therefore, contradict the assertion that the Revolution received its first impulse from philosophy. [...] Never since the sun had stood in the firmament and the planets revolved around him had it been perceived that man's existence centers in his head, i.e., in thought, inspired by which he builds up the world of reality. [...] Not until now had man advanced to the recognition of the principle that thought ought to govern spiritual reality. This was accordingly a glorious mental dawn. All thinking beings shared in the jubilation of this epoch. Emotions of a lofty character stirred men's minds at that time; a spiritual enthusiasm thrilled through the world, as if the reconciliation between the divine and the secular was now first accomplished.”

This, of course, did not prevent Hegel from coldly analyzing the inner necessity of this explosion of abstract freedom to turn into its opposite: the self-destructive revolutionary terror. However, one should never forget that Hegel’s critique is immanent, accepting the basic principle of the French Revolution (and its key supplement, the Haitian Revolution). And it is exactly the same approach one should take with regard to the October Revolution (and, later, the Chinese Revolution): it was, as Badiou pointed out, the first case in the entire history of humanity of a successful revolt by the exploited poor. They were the zero-level members of the new society; they set the standards. Against all hierarchical orders, egalitarian universality directly came to power. The revolution stabilized itself into a new social order: a new world was created and miraculously survived amid unthinkable economic and military pressure and isolation. This was effectively “a glorious mental dawn. All thinking beings shared in the jubilation of this epoch.”