NOT ONLY JUSTICE, EVIL ALSO HAS TO BE SEEN TO BE DONE

The living fabric of life is being transformed into the theatrical.

Comrades,

As I did last week, I am posting an old speech of mine. I say "old," but I have adapted it with new material—some borrowed—and reinterpreted it in light of recent horrors, particularly those continuing to unfold in Gaza.

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(Picture: Hermann Nitsch, 20th painting action, 18-21.2.1987 at Secession, Vienna. ©Hermann Nitsch; Photo: Heinz Cibulka)

Recall the staged performance of "Storming the Winter Palace" in Petrograd, on the third anniversary of the October Revolution, on 7 November 1920.¹ Tens of thousands of workers, soldiers, students, and artists worked round the clock, living on kasha (the tasteless wheat porridge), tea, and frozen apples, and preparing the performance at the very place where the event "really took place" three years earlier. Their work was coordinated by army officers as well as by avant-garde artists, musicians, and directors, from Malevich to Meyerhold. Although this was acting and not "reality," the soldiers and sailors were playing themselves—many of them had not only actually participated in the events of 1917, but were also simultaneously involved in the real battles of the Civil War that were raging in the near vicinity of Petrograd, a city under siege and suffering from severe shortages of food. A contemporary commented on the performance: "The future historian will record how, throughout one of the bloodiest and most brutal revolutions, all of Russia was acting."² The formalist theoretician Viktor Shklovsky noted that "some kind of elemental process is taking place where the living fabric of life is being transformed into the theatrical."³

But we should nonetheless submit this idea of “living fabric transformed into the theatrical” to a closer critical analysis: what exactly was staged in 1920? Theatrical repetitions are never an innocent affair; they always subtly transform the reality they re-stage, especially if it is a reality as politically charged as that of the October Revolution: “This reenactment, watched by 100,000 spectators, provided the model for official films made later, which showed fierce fighting during the storming of the Winter Palace, although, in reality, the Bolshevik insurgents had faced little opposition.”⁴ The Provisional Government had dwindled to a meeting of ministers in the Winter Palace. A few Red Guards climbed in through the servants’ entrance and arrested them. (Prior to this attack, Kerensky himself left the Palace by simply driving a car.) One sailor was killed when his rifle went off in his hand. Four Red Guards and one sailor were killed by stray bullets. That was the total death toll on this historic day. Most people in Petrograd did not even know that a revolution was taking place. Lenin took a streetcar the day before to a Bolshevik meeting to declare a revolution and almost got lost, although streetcars functioned smoothly. One can imagine him telling the driver: “Sorry, I am in a hurry, I have to make a revolution.” A streetcar named revolution.

But it wasn’t just this chaos that had to be erased. When popular dissatisfaction in Russia grew and Lenin’s idea that there was a chance for revolution was accepted, the majority of the Bolshevik party leaders tried to organize a mass popular uprising. Trotsky, however, advocated a view which, to traditional Marxists, could not but appear as “Blanquist”: a narrow, well-trained elite should take power. After a short oscillation, Lenin defended Trotsky.⁵ Against the latter “Trotskyite” defenders of an (almost) “democratic” Trotsky who advocates authentic mass mobilization and grassroots democracy, one should emphasize that Trotsky was all too well aware of the inertia of the masses—the most one can expect of the “masses” is chaotic dissatisfaction. A narrow, well-trained revolutionary striking force should use this chaos to strike at power and thereby open up the space where the masses can really organize themselves. Here, however, the crucial question arises: what does this narrow elite do? In what sense does it “take power”? The true novelty of Trotsky becomes visible here: the striking force does not “take power” in the traditional sense of a palace coup d’état, occupying government offices and army headquarters; it does not focus on confronting police or army on the barricades. Let us quote some passages from Curzio Malaparte’s unique The Technique of Coup d’Etat (1931) to get the taste of it:

“Kerensky's police and the military authorities were especially concerned with the defense of the State's official and political organizations: the Government offices, the Maria Palace where the Republican council sat, the Tauride Palace, seat of the Duma, the Winter Palace, and General Headquarters. When Trotsky discovered this mistake, he decided to attack only the technical branches of the national and municipal Government. Insurrection for him was only a question of technique. ‘In order to overthrow the modern State,’ he said, ‘you need a storming party, technical experts and gangs of armed men led by engineers.’

On the eve of the coup d’état, Trotsky told Dzerzhinsky that Kerensky's government must be completely ignored by the Red Guards; that the chief thing was to capture the State and not to fight the Government with machine guns; that the Republican Council, the Ministries and the Duma played an unimportant part in the tactics of insurrection and should not be the objectives of an armed rebellion; that the key to the State lay not in it’s political and secretarial organizations, nor yet in the Tauride, Maria, or Winter Palaces, but in its technical services, such as the electric stations, the telephone and telegraph offices, the port, gasworks, and water mains.”⁶

Trotsky thus targeted the material (technical) grid of power (railways, electricity, water supply, post, etc.), the grid without which state power hangs in the void and becomes inoperative. Legend says that in the early morning, after Trotsky’s men did all this, Trotsky said to the Bolshevik leadership: “Ok, the revolution is won, I am tired and I’ll catch some sleep now!” Lenin and others then went to lead the mobilized masses to fight the police and storm the Winter Palace (an act without any real relevance)...

Instead of indulging in a miserable moralist-democratic rejection of such a procedure, one should rather analyze it coldly and think about how to apply it today, since Trotsky’s insight has gained new relevance with the progressive digitalization of our lives in what could be characterized as the new era of post-human power. Most of our activities (and passivities) are now registered in some digital cloud which also permanently evaluates us, tracing not only our acts but also our emotional states; when we experience ourselves as free to the utmost (surfing the web where everything is available), we are totally “externalized” and subtly manipulated. Everything today is regulated by some digital network, from transport to health, from electricity to water. That’s why the web is our most important commons today, and the struggle for its control is THE struggle today. The enemy is the combination of privatized and state-controlled commons: corporations (Google, Facebook) and state security agencies (NSA).

But we know all this, so where does Trotsky enter here? The digital network that sustains the functioning of our societies, as well as their control mechanisms, is the ultimate figure of the technical grid that sustains power – and does this not confer new relevance to Trotsky’s idea that the key to the State lies not in its political and secretarial organizations, but in its technical services?

Consequently, in the same way that, for Trotsky, taking control of the post, electricity, railways, etc., was the key moment of the revolutionary seizure of power, is it not the case that today, the “occupation” of the digital grid is absolutely crucial if we are to break the power of the state and capital? And, in the same way as Trotsky required the mobilization of a narrow, well-trained “storming party, technical experts, and gangs of armed men led by engineers” to resolve this “question of technique,” the lesson of the last decades is that neither massive grassroots protests nor well-organized political movements with elaborate political visions are enough – we also need a narrow striking force of dedicated “engineers” (hackers, whistle-blowers, etc.) organized as a disciplined conspiratorial group. Its task will be to “take over” the digital grid, to wrest it from the hands of corporations and state agencies which now de facto control it.

This brings us back to our starting point: an event is restaged as a theatrical performance in order to obfuscate the reality of this event, to make it fit the ideological image of this event, or – more precisely – in order to construct this image. Through its restaging, the October Revolution retroactively becomes what it should have been as the founding event of a new socio-political order. There is a strange parallel between this restaging and the status of justice – recall the well-known aphorism: “Justice must not only be done, but must also be seen to be done.” This dictum was laid down by Lord Hewart, the then Lord Chief Justice of England, in 1924. He went on to observe that the question was not whether the presence of the deputy clerk had influenced the decision or whether his firm, being involved in the civil case, had any role to play in the conviction. Lord Hewart went on to observe that what was important was not what was actually done, but what might appear to have been done, and held: “Nothing is to be done which creates even a suspicion that there has been an improper interference with the course of justice.”⁷ The motif for restaging the October Revolution was homologous: “Nothing is to be done which creates even a suspicion that there has been an improper interference with the proper course of the revolution” – like a narrow circle of elite specialists doing it before the act.

All past revolutions reshaped their image even without their actual restaging: in the case of the French Revolution, the fall of the Bastille, a ridiculously unimportant event in which seven marginal prisoners were freed, was afterwards elevated into one of the founding images of the revolution… Today, however, something new and weird is gradually emerging: when those in power enact a horrifying crime, they no longer even pretend to obfuscate it through a restaging (or reinterpretation) that presents it as a noble act. In Gaza and on the West Bank, in Ukraine, etc., crime is boastfully presented as what it is, as an enormous crime – media were right to call the destruction of Gaza the first TV-transmitted genocide. The slogan “justice not only has to be done, it has to be done in a visible way” is thus turned around: evil (ethnic cleansing, genocidal violence...) not only has to be done: it should appear as what it is—pure evil, no longer masked by some honest cause.

How are we to fight this fully cynical obscenity, which seems to preclude any effective critique since it admits our reproach in advance? Our description simplified the situation, since there is a gap that persists in this obscenity. State powers do not simply identify directly with the evil they commit; in their public declarations, they still talk about peace and humanity (the IDF, for example, continues to claim to be the most humane army in the world, etc.). In short, the two levels co-exist: in a dispassionate way, the state continues to talk about peace and humanity without any subjective commitment behind it, while public opinion and parts of state propaganda simultaneously abound with openly displayed enjoyment in committing terrible crimes. This gap opens up a way to counterattack through simple public ethical acts.

Recall that recently, more than 1,200 Israeli academics issued an open letter calling on the heads of Israeli academic institutions to “speak out” and act to stop the war on Gaza. “As academics, we recognize our own role in these crimes,” the letter states. “It is human societies, not governments alone, that commit crimes against humanity. Some do so by means of direct violence. Others do so by sanctioning the crimes and justifying them, before and after the fact, and by keeping quiet and silencing voices in the halls of learning. It is this bond of silence that allows clearly evident crimes to continue unabated, without penetrating the barriers of recognition.” “We cannot claim that we did not know,” the letter adds. “We have been silent for too long. For the sake of the lives of innocents and the safety of all the people of this land … if we do not call to halt the war immediately, history will not forgive us.”⁸

The mystery is: how can this strategy be effective (as our experience shows it—see the effort to marginalize the above-mentioned public letter)? If (most, though not all) of the content is already publicly known and proudly assumed by those in power, the difference that makes the difference is the subjective position of enunciation. On November 7, 2024, clashes between Maccabi Tel Aviv fans from Israel and pro-Palestinian protesters erupted in Amsterdam after the football match between Ajax and Maccabi. Even before the match, hundreds of Maccabi Tel Aviv fans circulated in the center of Amsterdam, tearing down Palestinian flags from apartment windows and shouting obscene slogans like, “There are no schools open in Gaza because we killed all the children!” All we need to do is repeat these same words—with shame. While the Maccabi fans enjoyed their obscenity without any restraint, we redeem our human desire by displaying our shame at such acts.

1. I resume here my own description from Slavoj Žižek, Like a Thief in Broad Daylight, London: Allen Lane 2018.

2. Quoted from Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, Boston: MIT Press 2022, p. 144.

3. Quoted from Susan Buck-Morss, op.cit., p. 144.

4. See a quite correct description in October Revolution - Wikipedia.

5. Again, I resume here my own description from Slavoj Žižek, Like a Thief in Broad Daylight.

6. Quoted from https://archive.org/stream/CurzioMalaparteTechniqueCoupDEtatTheTechniqueOfRevolution_djvu.txt.

7. The origins of “Justice must be seen to be done” (Wikipedia).

8. ‘We can’t say we didn’t know’: Israeli academics demand end to war on Gaza (Al Jazeera).