Table Of ContentLenin 2017
Lenin 2017
Remembering, Repeating,
and Working Through
V. I . LENI N
Edited and Introduced
by Slavoj Žižek
First published by Verso 2017
Introduction and Afterword © Slavoj Žižek 2017
The works of V. I. Lenin collected here derive
from the Marxists Internet Archive
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
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Contents
Introduction: Remembering, Repeating and Working Through by Slavoj
Žižek
Note on the Texts
To M. F. Sokolov
To G. Myasnikov
New Times and Old Mistakes in a New Guise
Notes of a Publicist: On Ascending a High Mountain; the Harm of
Despondency; the Utility of Trade; Attitude towards the Mensheviks, Etc.
Eleventh Congress of the RCP(B)
Memo Combating Dominant-Nation Chauvinism
Last Testament: Letters to Congress
On Education (Pages from a Diary)
On Cooperation (Apropos of N. Sukhanov’s Notes)
Our Revolution (Apropos of N. Sukhanov’s Notes)
How We Should Reorganise the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection
Better Fewer, but Better
To Comrade Stalin
To P.G. Mdivani, F.Y. Makharadze and Others
Afterword: Lenin Navigating in Uncharted Territories by Slavoj Žižek
Notes
Sources
Introduction: Remembering,
Repeating and Working Through
Slavoj Žižek
Remembering and Repeating
The title of Freud’s short text from 1914, ‘Remembering, Repeating and
Working Through’, provides the best formula for the way we should relate –
today, 100 years later – to the event called the October Revolution. The three
concepts Freud mentions form a dialectical triad: they designate the three
phases of the analytical process, and resistance intervenes in every passage
from one phase to the next. The first step consists in remembering the
repressed past traumatic events, in bringing them out, which can also be done
by hypnosis. This phase immediately runs into a deadlock: the content brought
out lacks its proper symbolic context and thus remains ineffective; it fails to
transform the subject and resistance remains active, limiting the amount of
content revealed. The problem with this approach is that it stays focused on the
past and ignores the subject’s present constellation which keeps this past alive,
symbolically active. Resistance expresses itself in the form of transference:
what the subject cannot properly remember, she repeats, transferring the past
constellation onto a present (e.g., she treats the analyst as if he were her
father). What the subject cannot properly remember, she acts out, reenacts –
and when the analyst points this out, her intervention is met with resistance.
Working through is working through the resistance, turning it from the obstacle
into the very resort of analysis, and this turn is self-reflexive in a properly
Hegelian sense: resistance is a link between object and subject, between past
and present, proof that we are not only fixated on the past but that this fixation
is an effect of the present deadlock in the subject’s libidinal economy.
With regard to 1917, we also begin by remembering, by recalling, the true
history of the October Revolution and, of course, its reversal into Stalinism.
The great ethico-political problem of the communist regimes can best be
captured under the title ‘founding fathers, founding crimes’. Can a communist
regime survive the act of openly confronting its violent past in which millions
were imprisoned and killed? If so, in what form and to what degree? The first
paradigmatic case of such a confrontation was, of course, Nikita Khrushchev’s
‘secret’ report on Stalin’s crimes to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist
Party in 1956. The first thing that strikes one in this report is the focus on
Stalin’s personality as being the key factor in the crimes, and the concomitant
lack of any systematic analysis of what made those crimes possible. The
second feature is its strenuous effort to keep the Origins clear: not only is the
condemnation of Stalin limited to his arrest and killing of high-ranking Party
members and military officers in the 1930s (where rehabilitations were very
selective: Bukharin, Zinoviev, etc., continued to be non-persons, not to mention
Trotsky), ignoring the great famine of the late 1920s; but the report is also
presented as announcing the return of the Party to its ‘Leninist roots’, so that
Lenin emerges as the pure Origin spoiled or betrayed by Stalin. In his belated
but perspicuous analysis of the report, written in 1970, Sartre noted that
it was true that Stalin had ordered massacres, transformed the land of the revolution into a police
state; he was truly convinced that the USSR would not reach communism without passing
through the socialism of concentration camps. But as one of the witnesses very rightly points out,
when the authorities find it useful to tell the truth, it’s because they can’t find any better lie.
Immediately this truth, coming from official mouths, becomes a lie corroborated by the facts.
Stalin was a wicked man? Fine. But how had Soviet society perched him on the throne and kept
him there for a quarter of a century.1
Indeed, is not Khrushchev’s later fate (he was deposed in 1964) proof of Oscar
Wilde’s quip that if one tells the truth, one will sooner or later be caught out?
Sartre’s analysis nonetheless falls short on one crucial point: even if
Khrushchev was ‘speaking in the name of the system’ – ‘the machine was
sound, but its chief operator was not; this saboteur had relieved the world of
his presence, and everything was going to run smoothly again’2 – his report did
have a traumatic impact, and his intervention set in motion a process that
ultimately brought down the system itself – a lesson worth remembering today.
In this precise sense, Khrushchev’s 1956 speech denouncing Stalin’s crimes
was a true political act – after which, as William Taubman put it, ‘the Soviet
regime never fully recovered, and neither did he’.3 Although the opportunist
motives for this daring move are plain enough, there was clearly more than
mere calculation to it, a kind of reckless excess which cannot be accounted for
by strategic reasoning. After the speech, things were never the same again, the
fundamental dogma of infallible leadership had been fatally undermined; no
wonder then, that, in reaction to the speech, the entire nomenklatura sank into
temporary paralysis. During the speech itself, a dozen or so delegates suffered
nervous breakdowns and had to be carried out and given medical help; a few
days later, Boleslaw Bierut, the hard-line general secretary of the Polish
Communist Party, died of a heart attack, and the model Stalinist writer
Alexander Fadeyev shot himself. The point is not that they were ‘honest
communists’ – most of them were brutal manipulators who harboured no
subjective illusions about the nature of the Soviet regime. What broke down
was their ‘objective’ illusion: the figure of the ‘big Other’ that had provided
the background against which they were able to pursue their ruthless drive for
power. The Other onto which they had transposed their belief, which as it were
believed on their behalf, their subject-supposed-to-believe, disintegrated.
Khrushchev’s wager was that his (limited) confession would strengthen the
communist movement – and in the short term he was right. One should always
remember that the Khrushchev era was the last period of authentic communist
enthusiasm, of belief in the communist project. When, during his visit to the
United States in 1959, Khrushchev made his famous defiant statement to the
American public that ‘your grandchildren will be communists’, he effectively
spelled out the conviction of the entire Soviet nomenklatura. After his fall in
1964, a resigned cynicism prevailed, up until Gorbachev’s attempt at a more
radical confrontation with the past (the rehabilitations then included Bukharin,
but – for Gorbachev at least – Lenin remained the untouchable point of
reference, and Trotsky continued to be a non-person).
With Deng Xiaoping’s ‘reforms’, the Chinese proceeded in a radically
different, almost opposite, way. While at the level of the economy (and, up to a
point, culture) what is usually understood as ‘communism’ was abandoned, and
the gates were opened wide to Western-style ‘liberalisation’ (private property,
profit-making, hedonist individualism, etc.), the Party nevertheless maintained
its ideologico-political hegemony – not in the sense of doctrinal orthodoxy (in
the official discourse, the Confucian reference to the ‘Harmonious Society’
practically replaced any reference to communism), but in the sense of
maintaining the unconditional political hegemony of the Communist Party as the
only guarantee of China’s stability and prosperity. This required a close
