Lenin created a mystique of the party as the ultimate repository of strategic wisdom, a “community of saints” dedicated to bringing about the cataclysmic millenium: it was the historical agent, for it encompassed the professional revolutionaries, those who, by reuniting their acting and thinking faculties, regained “the grace of the harmonious original being.”126 One statement speaks volumes about the totemic entity he wished to create: “We believe in the party, we see in her the reason, the honor and the conscience of our epoch … the only guarantee for the liberation movement of the working class.”127 For the Bolsheviks, “like Christ, the party was, at one and the same time, a real institution and an incarnated idea. The formation of the Party was the First Coming; not fully appreciated by an immature working class, it heralded a Second Coming and the apotheosis of workers' consciousness at which point all workers would join the Party, thereby rendering it superfluous. The eschatological significance of the Party explained the zeal with which the Marxists guarded its purity.”128 Lenin developed an exclusivist vision of party unity founded on unflinching adherence to the established doctrinal line and not on a consensual agreement about the main ideological tenets. For him, it was “the unity of Marxists, not the unity of Marxists with the enemies and distorters of Marxism.”129 As I have shown, this unwillingness to compromise over the interpretation of history is one of the fundamental features of the sacralization of politics.
Leninism was a form of modern messianism intolerant of realities escaping its ideological panorama. It was a production recipe for The Communist Manifesto's “scenario for the drama of millenarian redemption.”130 The professional revolutionaries who made up “the party of a new type” were, according to Yury Piatakov, “men of miracles” bringing into life “that which is considered impossible, not realizable and inadmissible…. [W]e are people of special temper, without any equivalents in history precisely because we make impossible possible.”131 Therefore, the party was the embodiment of historical reason and militants were expected to carry out its orders without hesitation or reservation. Discipline, secrecy, and rigid hierarchy were essential to such a party, especially during clandestine activities (like those in Russia). The main role of the party was to awaken proletarian self-consciousness and instill revolutionary doctrine (faith) into the dormant proletariat. This was the party's salvific mission, and because of it the party was the embodiment of freedom. Instead of relying on the spontaneous development of consciousness among the industrial working class, Leninism saw the party as a catalytic agent bringing revolutionary knowledge, will, and organization to the exploited masses.132 Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was right when he said:
When we say Lenin
We mean the Party
And when we say Party
We mean Lenin.133
First Leninism, then Stalinism, codified the total commitment to an apocalyptic scenario dedicated to bringing about not only a new type of society but also a new type of human being.134 With its ambition to initiate an anthropological revolution, Marxism can be regarded as a form of utopian radicalism—utopian because it is basically future oriented and overlooks the perennial features of the human condition, radical inasmuch as it aims to transform the body politic and establish a form of social organization totally different form all previous ones. Moreover, in its Bolshevik application, this utopian radicalism turned into “a set of values and beliefs, a culture, a language, new forms of speech, more modern customs and new ways of behaving in public and in private.” And the name under which all this came together was Stalinism—a self-identified separate and superior civilization.135 Marxism-Leninism as mythology therefore relied on two mutually conditioning myths: a sustaining one (the first workers' state with its corollary the Great October Revolution) and an eschatological one (the realization of Communism).136 According to these myths, Marx's collectivity of self-determined, quasi-divine beings undergoing “perpetual becoming that knows no limits and continually striving forwards anew” entered its kairos, accomplishing the ultimate destiny prefigured by history. This triumphant tale of humanity's renewal was provisioned only by surrender and self-sacrifice to the will of the leader (unqualified yet).137 It was the “scientific” answer to the paradox of theodicy intrinsic to Marxism: the eschatological subject was identified, but its coming of age needed leadership—the Kautskyan intervention from without, Lenin's party of a new type and, why not, ultimately Stalin's revolution from above. Marxism-Leninism was the formula used to reconcile the ever-expanding rational mastery of the world with the aspiration for individual liberation.
The Leninist party is dead (it is quite ironic that the Gennady Zyuganov-style epigones of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation combine Slavophile orthodoxy, xenophobia, imperialism, and Bolshevik nostalgia in a baroque nationalist-cum-egalitarian collectivistic blending).138But the cult of the party as a sacred institution, the sectarian vision of a community of virtuous, ascetic, righteous individuals selflessly committed to improving the life of humanity and erecting Nikolai Chernyshevky's “Crystal Palace” here and now is not extinct.139 It explains the nature of the post-Communist transitions where initiatives from below are still marginal and the center of power remains, in many cases, as conspiratorial, secretive, and nondemocratic as it was in pre-Leninist and Leninist times. Is this bound to stay the same? My answer is tentatively negative; after all, the monolith is broken, the dream of Communism as the secular kingdom of God has failed. The challenge remains, however, of coming to terms with Lenin's legacies and admitting that Sovietism was not imposed by extraterrestrial aliens on an innocent intelligentsia but rather found its causes, origins, and most propitious ground in the radical segments of Russian political culture.140 To put it simply, the Third International and the major schism within the world Marxist movement were the consequences of Lenin's defiant gesture, his seizure of power in the fall of 1917. His determination to force socialist revolution upon the czarist empire, and implicitly upon the world, triggered the beginning of the epoch of totalitarian politics. And his single-mindedness would be emulated by others. Rosa Luxemburg again anticipated the significance of the Bolshevik push for state power: “Their October uprising was not only the actual salvation of the Russian Revolution: it was also the salvation of the honor of international socialism.”141 Indeed, until 1989, the October Revolution remained the central symbolic pillar of the world Communist movement.
The two letters Lenin sent to the Bolshevik Central Committee on September 15, 1917 (The Bolsheviks Must Assume Power and Marxism and Insurrection), sum up the voluntaristic pathology of the political that was to plague the rest of the century: “History will never forgive us if we do not assume power now…. We shall win absolutely and unquestionably…. Our victory is assured for the people are close to desperation and we are showing the entire people a way out…. The majority of the people are on our side…. It would be naive to wait for a ‘formal’ majority; no revolution ever waits for that.”142 Hitler shared this self-entitlement, for he too was convinced that mundane politics were to be sacrificed on the altar of the total revolution: “We are avid for power, and we take it wherever we can get it…. Wherever we see a possibility to move in, we go! … Whoever has us clinging to his coattails can never get rid of us again.”143 To paraphrase Claude Lefort, both Leninism and Fascism identified with the revolution as an irreversible moment breaking with the past and creating a totally new world. In this sense they are cosmic mutations of symbolic structure.
The Bolshevik takeover of power in October 1917 inaugurated a period of global ideological warfare that may have come to an end only with the collapse of the USSR in 1991 (the “age of extremes,” as Eric Hobsbawm calls this epoch or, to use George Lichtheim's term, later adopted by Ernst Nolte, “the European civil war”). Because of Lenin, a new type of politics was born in the twentieth century, one founded upon fanaticism, elitism, unflinching commitment to a sacred cause, and total submission of critical reason by means of faith to a self-appointed “vanguard” of militant illuminati.144 Clara Zetkin's exalted proclamation at the Third Party Congress of the KPD (the German Communist Party) in 1923 reflected the ethos of a new political religion being born: “Take off your shoes! The ground on which you stand is holy ground. It is ground sanctified through the revolutionary struggle [and] the revolutionary sacrifices of the Russian proletarian.”145 With Lenin, the activist turned into a professional revolutionary (regardless of background, intellectual or proletarian—Heinz Neumann or Ernst Thälmann in the KPD; Gheorghiu-Dej, Ana Pauker, David Fabian, or Lucrețiu Pătrășcanu in the RCP). Henceforth, the revolutionary fanatic sought deliverance in the elevation of mass movements.146 S/he was a soldier acting out a newly acquired, virtuous identity validated by the righteousness of the world mission.147
In an important book, Claude Lefort, the distinguished French political philosopher,148 proposes 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.149 Ideology 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.”150 Moreover, 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.”151 Indeed, 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)153 that 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.”154 Under 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.”155 In the twentieth century, Leninism and Fascism brought about an unprecedented “enlargement, intensification, and dynamicization of political power”156 with 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
In the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy, and Nazi Germany, the abolition of the prerevolutionary state created “the institutional precondition for cumulative radicalization. Flexible, extra-legal; and extra-bureaucratic agencies institutionalized the terror against fictitious enemies; the fiction of a future civilization and a new moral sense that legitimized it.”158 The new order of the utopia in power opened the door to a sort of “institutional Darwinism” defined by “political activism occurring on its own, or at least without immediate direction” from the power center (the leader or party).159 This process can account for both the escalation of terror and the organizational corruption and ultimate demise of these totalitarian political movements. The fundamental difference with National Socialism (but not so much with Mussolini's Fascism, considering that it did survive for at least two decades) was that Lenin and Stalin “achieved not only a social revolution but the conditions of a stable political order.”160 Bertrand Russell in The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, written upon his return from the Soviet Union in 1920, diagnosed the murderous reality lying at the heart of Lenin's political invention, the specter that contemporary prophets of irresponsibility such as Žižek choose to ignore: “I felt that everything I valued in human life was being destroyed in the interests of a glib and narrow philosophy, and that in the process untold misery was being inflicted upon many millions of people.”161 Once victorious in 1917, Lenin opened a Pandora's box. By the end of the twentieth century, all we found was tyranny and bloodshed anywhere his world-historical exploit was emulated, from Shanghai to Rostock.