LENIN AT HIS WORST... OR AT HIS BEST

One-hundred years after Lenin's death

Speech of Lenin on the Red Square Viktor Shatalin, 1959

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On 5 January, 1918, from the balcony overlooking the hall, Lenin observed the last session of the Russian Constituent Assembly. Afterwards, the Assembly was de facto disbanded, never convoked again – democracy (in the usual sense of the word, at least) was over in Russia, since this Assembly was the last multiparty elected body. Here is Lenin’s reaction, which is worth a longer quote:

“Friends, I have lost a day,’ says an old Latin tag. One cannot help but recall it when one remembers how the fifth of January was lost.

After real, lively, Soviet work among workers and peasants engaged on real tasks, clearing the forest and uprooting the stumps of landowner and capitalist exploitation, we were suddenly transported to ‘another world’, to arrivals from another world, from the camp of the bourgeoisie with its willing or unwilling, conscious or unconscious champions, with its hangers-on, servants and advocates. Out of the world in which the working people and their Soviet organization were conducting the struggle against the exploiters we were transported to the world of saccharine phrases, of slick, empty declamations, of promises and more promises based, as before, on conciliation with the capitalists.

It is as though history had accidentally, or by mistake, turned its clock back, and January 1918 for a single day became May or June 1917!

It was terrible! To be transported from the world of living people into the company of corpses, to breathe the odor of the dead, to hear those mummies with their empty ‘social’ Louis Blanc phrases, was simply intolerable …

It was a hard, boring and irksome day in the elegant rooms of the Taurida Palace, whose very aspect differs from that of Smolny approximately in the same way as elegant, but moribund bourgeois parliamentarism differs from the plain, proletarian Soviet apparatus that is in many ways still disorderly and imperfect but is living and vital. There, in that old world of bourgeois parliamentarism, the leaders of hostile classes and hostile groups of the bourgeoisie did their fencing. Here, in the new world of the proletarian and peasant, socialist state, the oppressed classes are making clumsy, inefficient … [manuscript breaks off at this point]”^[1]

It is, of course, easy to mock the quoted passage, seeing in it just the first step towards the Stalinist dictatorship, and to strike back: what about the meetings and debates within the Bolshevik party itself? Did they not, in a couple of years, turn also into ‘the world of saccharine phrases, of slick, empty declamations,’ a world of empty rituals in which members also acted like zombies, and in which one could also ‘breathe the odour of the dead’? But, on the other hand, does Lenin’s brutally icy description not fit perfectly with the big meetings about global warming like the Glasgow Conference, which also transport us ‘to the world of saccharine phrases … of promises and more promises based, as before, on conciliation with the capitalists’? If we are to seriously confront our challenges, from ecological crises to immigration, we will have to change our entire political system along the lines suggested by Lenin?

         So what would have been a Leninist gesture today? Without false modesty, I think I accomplished it with my speech at the opening ceremony of the Frankfurt Book Fair on October 17, 10 days after the October 7 Hamas attack when IDF was already indiscriminately bombing Gaza. While I fully condemned the attack and gave Israel the right to strike back, I also drew attention to the suffering of the Palestinians and to what goes on in the West Bank. For this, my speech was brutally interrupted by Uwe Becker, responsible for anti-Semitism at the Hessen local government, who accused me of relativizing the Hamas crime and thereby displaying anti-Semitism. The reproach was that, instead of just clearly condemning the Hamas attack, I went on with “aber” (but), describing the Palestinian predicament (incidentally, I didn’t use this word); plus I was accused of politicizing a cultural event. For weeks, I was attacked in German media as anti-Semitic madman…

         The story is well-known –I myself wrote about it a couple of times. The context is that I was asked by the leadership of the book fair to also deal with the topic of the Hamas attack – but I didn’t deliver what was expected from me. Before me, five official speakers (also highly ranked politicians) dealt with the attack, all of them repeating the same line: unconditional support for Israel. Since I introduced a discordant voice, I was brutally interrupted and barely allowed to finish my speech. However, in the reactions to my speech, I was accused on bringing politics into the fair, as if asserting full solidarity with Israel was a purely apolitical gesture of compassion and solidarity. Plus the brutal intervention by Becker was celebrated as a welcome outburst of democratic sensibility against my advocacy of fundamentalist terror which is an act of pure Evil that shouldn’t be contextualized since contextualization means relativization – no place for “aber” here…

         The first thing to notice is that a politician approaching me and brutally shouting at me (with a couple of policemen in the background getting ready to drag me from the stage, as I learned afterwards) was celebrated as a spontaneous democratic reaction to saying something that perturbs the imposed “democratic” consensus. For a brief moment I thought I was back in the harsh Communist society of my youth where such a defence of democracy regularly happened. It is like the famous statement by Rosa Luxembourg turned around: “Freedom is always freedom for those who think like us.” This is how “democracy” functions in our “advanced” liberal countries – it is Robespierre’s “no freedom to the enemies of freedom” brought to extreme, with people being “cancelled,” losing their job even, for publicly expressing a sympathy for the terrible fate of the millions of Palestinians. Only in such a “freedom” can Israel do something unheard of, in modern times at least: performing genocidal acts publicly, in front of all the world’s cameras.

         Even more sad was what followed: at the concluding appearance on stage of some members of the political and cultural nomenklatura, an elder lady said that what she hates most is the word “aber” (but), an obvious stab at me.[2]  I couldn’t believe my ears: I thought that “aber” is the basic word of civilized dialogue: when I disagree with someone in a civilized way, I don’t simply brutally attack him or her, I rather say politely something like: “But is there not another side to be attentive to here? Didn’t you neglect something?” And since the incident I am talking about took place in Germany, one should recall a specific feature of the late poetry of one of the greatest German poets, Hoelderlin. Instead of first describing a state of things and then mentioning the exception (“but”), he often begins a sentence or even a poem directly by “aber,” without indicating which is the “normal” state disturbed by the exception, as in the famous lines from his hymn Andenken: "Was bleibet aber, stiften die Dichter" / "But poets establish what remains." The standard reading, of course, is that, after the events, poets are able to perceive the situation from the mature standpoint, i.e. from the safe distance when the historical meaning of the events become clear. What if, however, there is nothing before the “but,” just a nameless chaos, and a world (concocted by a poet) emerges as a “but,” as an act of disturbing a chaotic void? What if at the beginning there is a “but,” the first gesture of introducing some normative order in this chaos?

         So why was my short Frankfurt speech a Leninist gesture? Because, I succeeded in doing the right thing at the right moment (at the moment when my gesture had a strong effect). I unmasked the “democratic” consensus and brought out what this consensus has to exclude, in a way similar to how Lenin denounces the fake “democratic” character of the last session of the Russian constituent assembly. To quote Christoph Kuffner’s words for Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy: “Was sich drängte rauh und feindlich, ordnet sich zu Hochgefühl. (All harsh and hostile elements fall into place in bliss.).” From a Leninist standpoint, of course, these words should be turned around: every Whole in which the apparently hostile elements fall into place in bliss is based upon the exclusion of a radically hostile element – the fate of the Palestinians, in my case.

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[1] V.I. Lenin, ‘People From Another World,’ quoted from Declaration Of The R.S.D.L.P. (Bolsheviks) Group At The Constituent Assembly Meeting January 5 (18), 1918 (marxists.org).

[2] See Opening Ceremony of Frankfurter Buchmesse 2023 - YouTube. The concluding appearance is not included in this recording.