(Rightist) Leninism Today: On the January 6th Capitol Riot and Bannon - by Slavoj Žižek
Part three of Living and Dying in a Mad World - originally published in Underground Theory: Coming To A City Near You
It makes me infinitely proud that I was invited to publish in Underground Theory—the idea of workers reading a text of mine is a dream come true. Many of today's “radical” theorists enjoy writing unreadable texts in which they explain why “ordinary” people are so ideologically brainwashed that they cannot understand our society—and my suspicion is that it is themselves who mask their ignorance in complex academic jargon. So it is my duty to take a risk: if you, actual workers, cannot relate to my texts, it means it is something wrong with my theory. If we, philosophers, are not ready to take this risk, we resign to the role of servants of the existing social order which is now turning from liberal capitalism to something much darker, techno-feudalism with the new mega-rich as our feudal lords. I am grateful to the effort you are ready to put into reading my work. In some deeply true sense, my fate is in your hands. -
Even The Financial Times declared in an editorial that neoliberalism has to descend from the global scene since its time has passed: capitalist dynamic more and more looks like a hamster running in the circle of its cage…So what is needed? The first thing to do is to learn to cross the red lines imposed by neoliberal ideology: today’s capitalism can survive much more radical interventions than it may appear. Mariana Mazzucato pointed out that the same system which constantly repeated the mantra that we cannot raise the taxes to fight global warming was able to spend trillions to combat the omicron epidemic. So we should begin by courageously strengthening what Peter Sloterdijk called “objective Social Democracy:” the true triumph of Social Democracy occurred when its basic demands (free education and healthcare, etc.) became part of the program accepted by all main parties and were inscribed into the functioning of the state institutions themselves. But this will not be enough.
The second thing to do is to become aware that the existing multi-party parliamentary system is not effective enough to cope with the crises that beset us. We shouldn’t fetishize multi-party parliamentary democracy—what Friedrich Engels wrote in a letter to August Bebel from 1884 still holds. Engels warned that “pure democracy” often becomes a slogan for counter-revolutionary reaction:
At the moment of revolution, the entire reactionary mass will act as though they were democrats /…/ At all events, on the crucial day and the day after, they will act as though they were democrats.
Does exactly this not happen when an emancipatory movement in power gets too radical? Was not—among many others—the coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia done on behalf of democracy?
Lenin observed (from the balcony above the hall) the last session of the Russian Constituent Assembly on January 5, 1918 (afterwards, the Assembly was the de facto disbanded, never convoked again)—democracy (in the usual sense of the word, at least) was over in Russia, since this Assembly was the last multiparty elected body. Here is Lenin’s reaction which is worth a longer quote:
‘Friends, I have lost a day’, says an old Latin tag. One cannot help but recall it when one remembers how the fifth of January was lost. / After real, lively, Soviet work among workers and peasants engaged on real tasks, clearing the forest and uprooting the stumps of landowner and capitalist exploitation, we were suddenly transported to ‘another world’, to arrivals from another world, from the camp of the bourgeoisie with its willing or unwilling, conscious or unconscious champions, with its hangers-on, servants and advocates. Out of the world in which the working people and their Soviet organization were conducting the struggle against the exploiters we were transported to the world of saccharine phrases, of slick, empty declamations, of promises and more promises based, as before, on conciliation with the capitalists. / It is as though history had accidentally, or by mistake, turned its clock back, and January 1918 for a single day became May or June 1917! / It was terrible! To be transported from the world of living people into the company of corpses, to breathe the odor of the dead, to hear those mummies with their empty ‘social’ Louis Blanc phrases, was simply intolerable. /…/ It was a hard, boring and irksome day in the elegant rooms of the Taurida Palace, whose very aspect differs from that of Smolny approximately in the same way as elegant, but moribund bourgeois parliamentarism differs from the plain, proletarian Soviet apparatus that is in many ways still disorderly and imperfect but is living and vital. There, in that old world of bourgeois parliamentarism, the leaders of hostile classes and hostile groups of the bourgeoisie did their fencing. Here, in the new world of the proletarian and peasant, socialist state, the oppressed classes are making clumsy, inefficient…[manuscript breaks off at this point][i]
It is, of course, easy to mock the quoted passage, seeing in it just the first step towards the Stalinist dictatorship, and to strike back: what about the meetings and debates within the Bolshevik party itself? Did they not in a couple of years also turn into “the world of saccharine phrases, of slick, empty declamations,” a world of empty rituals in which members also acted like zombies, and in which one could also “breathe the odor of the dead”? But, on the other hand, does Lenin’s brutally-icy description not fit perfectly big meetings about global warming like the Glasgow conference which also transports us “to the world of saccharine phrases, of slick, empty declamations, of promises and more promises based, as before, on conciliation with the capitalists”?
How, then, to act today as a Leninist? The most brutal and depressive fact of recent history is that the only recent case of a violent revolutionary crowd invading the seat of power happened on January 6, 2021, in Washington when the crowd of Trump supporters broke into the Capitol in an attempt to deny the result of democratic elections as an illegitimate theft organized by corporate elites (in which they were up to a point right!). No wonder that there was a mix of fascination and horror present in the Left-liberal reaction to the protesters breaking into the Capitol—“ordinary” people breaking into the sacred seat of power, a carnival that momentarily suspended our rules of public life... there was a little bit of envy in their condemnation…We are now getting Elon Musk, a rightist establishment version of Assange, releasing “Twitter Files” …In a way similar to the popular protests in the past transforming themselves into the Trumpian attack on the Congress on January 6, 2021, we move from Assange to Musk. Here is how one of Musk’s supporters comments on his work: “Statues torn down. Humiliating renunciations of thought crimes real and fake. Marxism is being pushed on kids to bring back Pol Pot. And why your work in buying twitter may be the last way to avoid genocide and civil war.”[ii] So does this mean that the populist Right stole from the Left the last resort of their resistance to the existing system, the popular attack on the seat of power? Is our only choice the one between parliamentary elections controlled by corrupted elites and uprisings controlled by populist Right? No wonder Steve Bannon, the ideologist of the new populist Right, openly declares himself to be the Rightist “Leninist for the XXIst century”:
Bannon’s White House adventure was only one stage of a long journey—the migration of revolutionary-populist language, tactics, and strategies from the left to the right. Bannon has reportedly said: ‘I’m a Leninist. Lenin …wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.[iii]
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