Revolution at the Gates: Zizek on Lenin, the 1917 Writings

Rating:
Summary: Why Lenin Why Now?
Review: It's always fascinating why an intellectual might be drawn toward a persona, well here one of the greatest political strategists of the century, the last one. Lenin is not one one can warm up to with the vagaries of history for his succession the monstrous detour from Trotsky to Stalin.
Marx yes with his early philosophical searchings of humanism, creating a new science of historical man/woman, and then his work on capital exposing the whys and wherefors for greed, profit,work, distribution and circulation, even Wall Street Sharks find Marx interesting if detestable. But Lenin (so we are told) failed to ignite a revolution that sustained itself, and won, like it is a game of soccer!, the deep complexities of Mother Russia transforming itself after centuries of barbarism was more than formidable.

Lenin for Zizek represents a way out of the impasse of the present, the current digitalization and virtualization of reality of the consumer of the culture of un-change,(to have a revolution, you need a revolution) The neo-liberal order it is clear still requires escape valves the World Bank and the IMF, wars famines,death squads,corruption, massacres, poverty and environmental rape to sustain itself. For there is a man at the end still waiting for surplus value. Lenin's work represents a way out of the impasse of subjectivity of change. Now that deconstruction, and structuralisms, postmodernities vigours haven't produced tangible change we have returned to the Badiou-ian "truth-event" for which Lenin is a guide to action of sorts.

Lenin for Zizek was one who worked his way out of the impasse he always found himself in as best he could, where he bewildered many of this comrades adopting positions few could see the immediate results. Lenin as well had to fall backwards,while in power making compromises with the Western democracies who simply wanted a reversion to the Czar for starts,then as a pretext to steal Mother Russia for natural and strategic purposes, something a perennial pattern we find now within the Middle East. Also for the burgeoning years of the 20th Century how can we have a functioning communist state,that confiscated the property of the former ruling classes, this revolution stuff might spill over into other industrial powers as it almost did in Germany.
The tour de force here is Zizek's essay "Repeating Lenin", a turgid yet focused theoretical romp into Left iconic history, shibboleths with Hegel and Lacan by his side. Zizek for instance finds affinity with Adorno's "Negative Dialectics", as another impasse similar to Lenin's "Philosophical Notebooks" of 1915. Both found themselves working their way through a reality. With Lenin though he assumed completion, the seizure of power, whereas with Adorno he found no way out toward change; cultural political or otherwise.

Lenin's primary texts are here reproduced, ones Zizek found useful.

Rating:
Summary: Lenin today
Review: Now that Progress Publishers, Dietz Verlag, and the Foreign Languages Press no longer supply the dusty, onionskinned volumes that nominally legitimated the counter-revolution called Actually Existing Socialism, readers are at the mercy of...Verso. The publishers of the New Left Review have a sterling Trotskyite pedigree, of course - let us not forget - so they're dodgy enough to publish this eagerly-awaited, high-concept, red-and-black themed Lenin-Zizek collaboration. But what sclerotic bureaucracies can they be said to legitimate?...wait, there's that corrupt left-academic milieu that's definitely counter-revolutionary...including Zizek, who may not be a Fredric Jameson academic, but is surely a reactionary, and who ruins this readable selection of Lenin's 1917 writings with an essay that stretches the bounds of credulity. I admit my longstanding suspicion of the Lacanian Paulite, but thought that this book might turn out well, that an actual textual encounter with Lenin and proletarian internationalism might occasion something interesting and worthwhile. I was wrong. He's still a gadfly who talks alot about radical social change but has nothing to say about the organizational question, the history of the class struggle, or anything else of pertinence to contemporary militancy.

What is most worrying, however, about this whole fiasco is that since now even the Maoists on 19th St. are running dry of 70's era texts by the Chairman, maybe they'll have to activate their Badiou-back-channel for some of comrade's written works, triggering another Verso truth-event.