Really Existing Socialism and council democracy shared was a belief in the possibility of a self-transparent organisation of society that would preclude political ‘alienation’ (state apparatuses, institutionalised rules of political life, a legal order, police, etc.). Is not the basic experience of the end of Really Existing Socialism precisely the rejection of this shared feature, the resigned ‘postmodern’ acceptance of the fact that society is a complex network of ‘sub-systems’, which is why a certain level of ‘alienation’ is constitutive of social life, so that a totally self-transparent society is a utopia replete with totalitarian potential?42 No wonder, then, that the same holds for contemporary practices of ‘direct democracy’, from the favelas to the ‘postindustrial’ digital culture (do not the descriptions of the new ‘tribal’ communities of computer hackers often evoke the logic of council democracy?): they all have to rely on a state apparatus since, for structural reasons, they cannot take over the entire field.
According to the ideologists of postmodern capitalism, Marxist theory (and practice) remains caught within the constraints of the hierarchical centralised state-control logic, and thus cannot cope with the social effects of the new information revolution. There are good empirical reasons for this claim: again, it is a supreme irony of history that the disintegration of communism is the most convincing example of the validity of the traditional Marxist dialectic of forces of production and relations of production, on which Marxism counted in its endeavour to overcome capitalism. What effectively ruined the communist regimes was their inability to adjust to the new social logic ushered in by the ‘information revolution’: they tried to steer this revolution into another large-scale centralised state-planning project. Today, however, there are increasingly signs that capitalism itself cannot cope with the informational revolution (problems with ‘intellectual property’ and the rise of ‘cooperative commons’, etc.).
What happened, then, when in his last years Lenin became fully aware of the limitations of Bolshevik power? It is here that once again we should oppose Lenin and Stalin: in Lenin’s very last writings, long after he had renounced the utopia of State and Revolution, we can discern the contours of a modest ‘realistic’ project for what Bolshevik power should do. Because of the economic underdevelopment and cultural backwardness of the Russian masses, there was no way for the country to ‘pass directly to socialism’; all the Soviet power could do was combine the moderate politics of ‘state capitalism’ with an intense cultural education of the inert peasant masses – not ‘communist propaganda’ brainwashing, but simply the patient, gradual imposition of developed standards of civilisation. Facts and figures revealed ‘what a vast amount of urgent spadework we still have to do to reach the standard of an ordinary Western European civilised country … We must bear in mind the semi-Asiatic ignorance from which we have not yet extricated ourselves.’43 So Lenin repeatedly warns against any kind of direct ‘implantation of communism’: ‘Under no circumstances must this be understood to mean that we should immediately propagate purely and strictly communist ideas in the countryside. As long as our countryside lacks the material basis for communism, it will be, I should say, harmful, in fact, I should say, fatal, for communism to do so.’44 His recurrent motif is thus: ‘The most harmful thing here would be haste.’45 Against this stance of ‘cultural revolution’, Stalin opted for the thoroughly anti-Leninist notion of ‘building socialism in one state’.
Does this mean that Lenin silently accepted the standard Menshevik criticism of Bolshevik utopianism, embracing their idea that revolution must follow necessary preordained stages? It is here that we can observe Lenin’s refined dialectical sense at work: he was fully aware that, in the early 1920s, the main tasks for the Bolsheviks were those of a progressive bourgeois regime (general education of the population, etc.); however, the very fact that it was a proletarian revolutionary power undertaking these tasks changed the situation fundamentally – there was a unique chance that these ‘civilising’ measures could be implemented in such a way as to break with their limited bourgeois ideological framework (general education would be really in the service of the people, rather than an ideological mask for propagating narrow bourgeois class interests, etc.). The properly dialectical paradox is thus that it was the very hopelessness of the Russian situation (the backwardness compelling the proletarian power to initiate a bourgeois civilising process) that could be turned into a unique advantage.
We have here two models, two incompatible logics, of revolution: either to wait for the teleological moment of the final crisis when the revolution will explode ‘at the proper time’ by necessity of historical evolution; or to recognise that the revolution has no ‘proper time’, and see the revolutionary chance as something that emerges and has to be seized upon in the detours of ‘normal’ historical development. Lenin was not a voluntarist ‘subjectivist’ – what he insisted on was that the exception (an extraordinary set of circumstances, like those in Russia in 1917) offered a way to undermine the norm itself. And is not this line of argumentation, this fundamental stance, more relevant than ever today? Do we not also live in an era when the state and its apparatuses, inclusive of its political agents, are simply less and less able to articulate the key issues? The illusion of 1917 that the pressing problems facing Russia (peace, land distribution, etc.) could be solved through ‘legal’ parliamentary means is the same as the contemporary illusion that, say, the ecological threat can avoided by expanding the logic of the market to ecology (making the polluters pay the price for the damage they cause, etc.).
The Miracle of a New Master
This, however, is not all that we can learn from Lenin today. Towards the end of his life, he played with another idea which, marginal as it may appear, has tremendous consequences and opens up new horizons. It concerns the basic discursive status of the Soviet regime (we understand ‘discourse’ here in Lacan’s sense of ‘social link’). In terms of Lacan’s formalisation of the four discourses, what type of discourse was Bolshevik power?46 Let us begin with capitalism, which remains a master discourse but one in which the structure of domination is repressed, pushed beneath the bar (individuals are formally free and equal, domination is displaced onto relations between things/commodities). In other words, the underlying structure is that of a capitalist Master pushing his other (the worker) to produce surplus-value that he (the capitalist) appropriates. But since this structure of domination is repressed, its appearance cannot be a(nother) single discourse: it can only appear split into two discourses. Both university discourse and hysterical discourse are products of the failure of the Master’s discourse: when the Master loses his authority and becomes hystericised (after his authority is questioned, experienced as fake), that authority reappears but is now displaced, de-subjectivised, in the guise of the authority of neutral expert-knowledge (‘it’s not me who exerts power, I just state objective facts and/or knowledge’).
Now we come to an interesting conclusion: if capitalism is characterised by the parallax of hysterical and university discourses, is the resistance to capitalism, then, characterised by the opposite axis of master and analyst? The recourse to the Master does not designate the conservative attempt to counteract capitalist dynamism with a resuscitated figure of traditional authority; rather, it points towards the new type of communist master or leader emphasised by Badiou, who is not afraid to oppose the necessary role of the Master to our ‘democratic’ sensitivity: ‘I am convinced that one has to reestablish the capital function of leaders in the communist process, whichever its stage.’47 A true Master is not an agent of discipline and prohibition, his message is not ‘You cannot!’ or ‘You have to …!’, but a releasing ‘You can!’ – what? Do the impossible – in other words, what appears impossible within the coordinates of the existing constellation. And today, this means something very precise: you can think beyond capitalism and liberal democracy as the ultimate framework of our lives. A Master is a vanishing mediator who gives you back to yourself, who delivers you to the abyss of your freedom: when we listen to a true leader, we discover what we want (or, rather, what we always already wanted without knowing it). A Master is needed because we cannot accede to our freedom directly – to gain this access we have to be pushed from outside, since our ‘natural state’ is one of inert hedonism,
