11.22.09
What is the only revolution in world history to have succeeded?
Commonwealth, By Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, By Slavoj Zizek
In the Bolshevik cabaret
Reviewed by John Gray
I will leave John Gray, a bit of conservative ‘reactionary’, to sink Zizek.
Lost on everyone, it seems, is that the only revolution in history to have succeeded was the plain garden variety yankee doodle liberalism of the American Revolution.
This is a refutation of Gray and Zizek both.
Could the ghosts in the Marx/Lenin graveyard learn something here?
Socialism is as realizable as democratic republicanism, because the two are both liberal entities, at least until Marx came along and confused everyone.
A Slovenian philosopher, psychoanalytical theorist and film critic, Zizek has become a gadfly of the left establishment, a prolific provocateur whose principal aim seems to be to confound his tender-minded readers. His target throughout this book is not the right but the soft, democratic, meliorist left, which imagines that the egalitarian goals of communism can be realised by non-repressive, liberal means.
Zizek is savagely scornful of this view, writing sharply that “One of the mantras of the postmodern left has been that we should finally leave behind the ‘Jacobin-Leninist paradigm’ of centralised dictatorial power. But perhaps the time has now come to turn this mantra around… Now, more than ever, one should insist on the ‘eternal Idea of Communism’ – strict egalitarian justice, disciplinary terror, political voluntarism, and trust in the people.”
In other words, dictatorship is indispensable to the communist project. Mass coercion and terror are not departures from a humane vision, brought about by tyrannical leaders acting in backward conditions. Lenin and Stalin were genuine masters of revolutionary strategy, who knew that without organised terror their goals would never be achieved.
In this if in nothing else, Zizek is unquestionably right. In the real world, communist revolutions are not achieved by rhetoric; they require firing squads, secret police and gulags. This is as near as Zizek ever gets to the realities of revolution, however. He passes over the fact that systematic terror has nowhere realised the utopian goals of communism, but instead created new and worse forms of tyranny while killing millions of people.
When applied to contemporary conditions, his much-vaunted Leninism is comical. First As Tragedy, Then As Farce differs from the pap dispensed by the authors of Commonwealth chiefly in virtue of the gleeful enthusiasm with which Zizek defends the necessity of terror. But no more than Hardt and Negri can Zizek identify any social force that actually wants communism. For all his insistent tough-mindedness – “If you can get power, grab it”, he declared in an interview the other day – he is at the furthest possible remove from anything that could be described as serious politics.
The essential frivolity of this latter-day Leninism is a pointer to the true reasons for the revival of radical leftist thinking at the present time. The global financial crisis has left many people frightened and confused. Faced with the failures of capitalism, they look around for alternatives – and here capitalism itself comes to the rescue.
A feature of the hyper-capitalism of recent years is that it abolishes historical memory. The squalor and misery of communism are now as remote to most people as life under feudalism. When Zizek and others like him defend communism – “the communist hypothesis”, as they call it – they can pass over the fact that the hypothesis has been falsified again and again, in dozens of different countries, because their audience knows nothing of the past. Hence the appeal of Zizek’s works, which are being avidly consumed by young people across much of Europe and beyond.
Whether as Hardt and Negri’s embarrassing rhetoric or Zizek’s parodic Leninism, the intellectual revival of communism is best understood in terms of capitalism’s ability to produce compensatory spectacles.
The media-confected communism of the present time has as little connection with everyday life as does reality television – possibly even less. But precisely because of its unreality, the neo-Bolshevik spectacle has a definite function in contemporary society. The clowning cabaret of 21st-century communism does what entertainment has always been meant to do. It distracts those who watch it from thinking about their problems, which secretly they suspect may be insoluble.