Idea of the Cultural Revolution survives its defeat in sociohistorical reality; it continues to lead a spectral life as the ghost of a failed utopia which returns to haunt future generations, patiently awaiting its next resurrection. This brings us back to Robespierre and his simple faith in the eternal Idea of freedom which persists through all defeats, and without which a revolution ‘is just a noisy crime that destroys another crime’, a faith most poignantly expressed in Robespierre’s very last speech on 8 Thermidor 1794, the day before his arrest and execution:
But there do exist, I can assure you, souls that are feeling and pure; it exists, that tender, imperious and irresistible passion, the torment and delight of magnanimous hearts; that deep horror of tyranny, that compassionate zeal for the oppressed, that sacred love for the homeland, that even more sublime and holy love for humanity, without which a great revolution is just a noisy crime that destroys another crime; it does exist, that generous ambition to establish here on earth the world’s first Republic.38
Does not the same hold even more for the last big instalment in the life of this Idea, the Maoist Cultural Revolution – without this Idea which sustained revolutionary enthusiasm, the Cultural Revolution was to an even greater degree ‘just a noisy crime that destroyed another crime’. We 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 centres 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 being 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.39
This, of course, did not prevent Hegel from coldly analysing the inner necessity of this explosion of abstract freedom turning into its opposite: self-destructive revolutionary terror. But we should never forget that Hegel’s critique is immanent, accepting the basic principle of the French Revolution (and its key supplement, the Haiti Revolution). And one should do exactly the same apropos the October Revolution (and, later, the Chinese Revolution), which was, as Badiou has pointed out, the first case in the entire history of humanity of a successful revolt of the exploited poor – they were the zero-level members of the new society; they set the standards. The revolution stabilised itself into a new social order; a new world was created and miraculously survived for decades, 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.’ Against all hierarchical orders, egalitarian universality came directly to power.
There is a basic philosophical dilemma underlying this alternative: it may seem that the only consistent Hegelian standpoint is one which measures the notion by the success or failure of its actualisation, so that, from the perspective of the total mediation of the essence by its appearance, any transcendence of the idea over its actualisation is discredited. The consequence of this is that, if we insist on the eternal Idea which survives its historical defeat, this necessarily entails – in Hegelese – a regression from the level of the Notion as the fully actualised unity of essence and appearance to the level of the Essence supposed to transcend its appearing. Is this true, however? One can also claim that the excess of the utopian Idea that survives its historical defeat does not contradict the total mediation of Idea and its appearing: the basic Hegelian insight, according to which the failure of reality to fully actualise an Idea is simultaneously the failure (limitation) of this Idea itself, continues to hold. What one should add is simply that the gap separating the Idea from its actualisation signals a gap within the Idea itself. This is why the spectral Idea that continues to haunt historical reality signals the falsity of the new historical reality itself, its inadequacy in relation to its own Notion – the failure of the Jacobin utopia, for example, its actualisation in utilitarian bourgeois reality, is simultaneously the limitation of this utilitarian reality itself. Its failure was precisely the failure to create a new form of everyday life: it remained a carnivalesque excess, with the state apparatus guaranteeing the continuation of daily life, of production.
The lesson of this failure is that we should shift the focus from the utopian goal of the full reign of productive expressivity that no longer needs representation, a state order, capital, and so on, to the problem of what kind of representation should replace the existing liberal-democratic representative state. This problem exploded soon after 1917 when the revolutionary state of exception gradually gave way to the task of organising everyday life. Trotsky pleaded for an interplay between class self-organisation and political leadership of the revolutionary vanguard party.40 Lenin’s solution was an almost Kantian one: freely debate at public meetings during the weekends, but obey and work while at work:
Before the October Revolution [a worker] did not see a single instance of the propertied, exploiting classes making any real sacrifice for him, giving up anything for his benefit. He did not see them giving him the land and liberty that had been repeatedly promised him, giving him peace, sacrificing ‘Great Power’ interests and the interests of Great Power secret treaties, sacrificing capital and profits. He saw this only after October 25, 1917, when he took it himself by force, and had to defend by force what he had taken … Naturally, for a certain time, all his attention, all his thoughts, all his spiritual strength, were concentrated on taking a breath, on unbending his back, on straightening his shoulders, on taking the blessings of life that were there for the taking, and that had always been denied him by the now overthrown exploiters. Of course, a certain amount of time is required to enable the ordinary working man not only to see for himself, not only to become convinced, but also to feel that he cannot simply ‘take’, snatch, grab things, that this leads to increased disruption, to ruin, to the return of the Kornilovs. The corresponding change in the conditions of life (and consequently in the psychology) of the ordinary working men is only just beginning. And our whole task, the task of the Communist Party (Bolsheviks), which is the class-conscious spokesman for the strivings of the exploited for emancipation, is to appreciate this change, to understand that it is necessary, to stand at the head of the exhausted people who are wearily seeking a way out and lead them along the true path, along the path of labour discipline, along the path of co-ordinating the task of arguing at mass meetings about the conditions of work with the task of unquestioningly obeying the will of the Soviet leader, of the dictator, during the work … We must learn to combine the ‘public meeting’ democracy of the working people – turbulent, surging, overflowing its banks like a spring flood – with iron discipline while at work, with unquestioning obedience to the will of a single person, the Soviet leader, while at work.41
It is easy to make fun of Lenin here (or to be horrified by what he is saying), easy to accuse him of being caught up in the industrialist paradigm, and so on – but the problem remains. The main form of direct democracy of the ‘expressive’ multitude in the twentieth century was the so-called workers’ councils (‘soviets’) – (almost) everybody in the West loved them, including liberals like Hannah Arendt, who perceived in them an echo of the ancient Greek polis. Throughout the era of Really Existing Socialism, the secret hope of ‘democratic socialists’ lay in the direct democracy of the ‘soviets’, as the form of self-organisation of the people; it is deeply symptomatic how, with the decline of Really Existing Socialism, this emancipatory shadow which continually haunted it also disappeared. Is this not ultimate confirmation of the fact that the conciliar version of ‘democratic socialism’ was no more than a spectral double of the ‘bureaucratic’ Really Existing
