Jodi Dean: "Lenin was never as current as now" |

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Alla Ivanchikova – Observatoriocrisis.com

Declared adherent of the Leninist party model. Dean chatted with Professor Alla Ivanchikova about why we should dust off our copy of What To Do? to meet the challenges of the 21st century, and why the mass party remains our best bet for radical political change.

Some sections of the left warn against a return to Lenin. Do you think that Leninist thought has something to offer the contemporary left? What is "Leninism" today?

I am skeptical of anyone who warns against the return of Lenin. Without Lenin we have no way to address the most pressing problems of our time: climate change, extreme economic inequality, imperialism and globalization. Today, more than ever, the only political line that makes sense is the one drawn by the name of Lenin: for or against the organization, the revolution and the proletarian dictatorship, that is, the party, the seizure of the State and the use that the people make of the State to abolish the conditions of oppression.

In the late 1980s, Marxism fell out of fashion among so-called left-wing intellectuals. This was no accident either: it was the way the defeat of the Soviet Union and the struggles of the working class in the global north played out in academia. Fredric Jameson was right when he associated postmodernity with late capitalism.

The extreme inequality that has taken hold in the US, UK, Russia and parts of the EU (not to mention the global South) has breathed new life into Marxism. His analysis of the inequality that capitalism necessarily produces is now widely recognized, even in leading newspapers and magazines, as common sense. And some "progressives" have always been drawn to Marx's critique of alienation. But this new acceptable Marx is often a dispirited and liberal Marxism, a Marxism without a state and without a revolution. For this we need Lenin.

Leninist thought has a dimension of principles and tactics. The principle is the need for working class control over society, production and reproduction. What is interesting about this principle is how Lenin realizes that it is always a question of organization. This connects, then, to tactics: finding the best ways to reach or achieve the principle in a specific context. Lenin is always concerned with details, "an objective analysis of the situation" or the concrete balance of forces.

Lenin's thought can be periodized around the formation of the party, the advance of the revolution and the construction of the State. In each phase, Lenin focuses on organization: how to organize the party, the organizational steps involved in the revolutionary struggle, the organizational structures that will differentiate the workers' state from the bourgeois state.

Lenin lived and wrote in times of unprecedented crisis: the first Russian revolution of 1905-07, which nearly overthrew the monarchy, the First World War… Does Lenin help us think more clearly about times of crisis?

In a short article from 1914, Lenin writes that every political crisis, whatever its outcome, is useful because it brings to light things that remained hidden, highlights the forces at work in politics, unmasks deceit and self-deception, the phrases and fictions, and provides a brilliant demonstration of "how things are" by putting them, as it were, in one's head.

We can use this as a method for crisis thinking: what appears more clearly than before? What does this new clarity tell us about the structures that produced it? How is the new truth driven home? A crisis is a crisis for the system or structure from which it arises; it exposes its weakness, breaking the ideological illusion that shapes the sense of what is possible and what is not.

And, once again, the organization: a well-structured organization, flexible enough to adapt to changing circumstances and disciplined enough to maintain consistency of purpose, is necessary to turn a crisis into an opportunity.

To many readers, Lenin is best known as the theoretician behind Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). Therein lies his famous formulation that imperialism was the final or "higher" stage of capitalism, the era of capitalism as a world system. Now that commentators suggest that capitalism may be transitioning to "something worse," how should we read Imperialism in 2021? Has imperialism mutated in a consonant or dissonant way with Leninist "orthodoxy"? Do we need new conceptual tools?

“Monopoly” and “bank capital” still rule the world, but even daily injections of trillion-dollar liquidity cannot sustain growth right now. Are we still in the upper stage of capitalism, advancing little by little? Has capitalism entered – or is it about to enter – a new stage?

The language of the "higher stage" makes it sound as if Lenin had a rather linear conception of history, one in which socialism necessarily follows from capitalism, as if it were a given historical trajectory. However, Lenin's approach to the revolution in Russia did not follow this trajectory. He did not agree with the Mensheviks that Russia needed to develop capitalism under a bourgeois parliamentary democracy and only after capitalism was fully developed would the time be ripe for proletarian revolution. In other words, he was not dogmatic about the stages. I also believe that we should not be dogmatic about the stages. The story is not linear. Worse forms succeed "better" forms, as the neoliberal counterrevolution of the 1990s makes clear.

So today we need to read imperialism paying attention to the interconnected inequalities of the global economy. There are past dynamics –such as the looting of the natural resources of peripheral countries– that before were oriented "outwards" and are now pointing inwards: contemporary imperialism is based, for example, on producing indebtedness both in the country and in the foreign. In the same way, the exploitation of raw materials is accompanied by the datafication of life and “big data”.

As you point out, Lenin theorized imperialism as an intensification of the concentration of capital, monopolies and financial oligarchy. Today's complex networks – digital, communication and information – amplify these tendencies towards inequality, as they result in even more extreme distributions of power (for example, think about the number of followers on Twitter: those who are in the top have over a hundred million followers; most people have around two hundred). What I mean by this is that the current "neo-feudal" trends are a continuation and a "reflexivization" of imperialism under the conditions of what I have called "communicative capitalism."

To continue with our example: the structure of social networks demonstrates why contemporary capitalism tends towards neo-feudalism. The networks result in distributions of power that undermine equality and intensify the hierarchy – worth the paradox – through inclusion and democratic participation. Hierarchy is an immanent feature of networks characterized by free choice, growth, and preferential attachment (which explains why markets produce monopolies). It is not an external imposition. It is an emergent property of networks.

At the same time, the practices of communicative capitalism associated with democracy, such as freedom of expression and debate, are concentrated and separated in affective networks where politics is reduced to daily indignation. Freed from democratic shackles but claiming democratic legitimacy, the state refines itself as an instrument of coercive force, surveillance, and control, a means of maintaining order amid ongoing expropriation, dispossession, and fragmentation.

Badiou's criticism of Lenin and the Leninist party form is that the latter failed to orchestrate the extinction of the proletarian state. The popular democracy that Lenin had dreamed of never came, and the idea of ​​centralization failed when the party effectively became the state apparatus. In other words, Lenin is recognized as a mere theoretician of the seizure of the state.

This type of criticism is very rare. It is like blaming people who aspire to victory for not having prevented a future defeat. Lenin's task before he died was to build the proletarian state, not to orchestrate its demise. His initial goal was not socialist democracy but the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is the form of proletarian democracy. This democracy was always going to imply the forced exclusion of the oppressors and exploiters of the people. Politics is a field without guarantees. There will always be potential unforeseen events. So overall, I don't think these are bona fide reviews.

However, Lenin was overly concerned with the details of building a working-class government. And this in a context of trying to get the country out of the imperialist war, fighting the ongoing civil war with invasions from various other countries and rebuilding the economy after the wars completely devastated it. His approach highlighted the need for control, accounting, and reporting for production, distribution, and planning. This is a huge operation by which people learn to produce and manage and therefore take over the functions of the state. In my opinion, these remain the central issues of revolutionary self-government: how exactly are we going to do things?

Pasta cooked al dente is a psyop and no one actually likes it

— yc Sat Jul 24 15:39:59 +0000 2021

Lars Lih once said that the most foreign Bolshevik cultural value to Americans was the unparalleled importance of unity in the face of enemies. The Americans lacked, according to Lih, the instinctive ability to close ranks against a known enemy. Are there "cultural" impediments to the rebuilding of the powerful communist parties in the US (or in the British and "imperialist" world in general)?

For a long time, the US has been dominated by various types of individualisms: the Protestant individual of religious faith as a matter of the soul of the individual; the liberal legalism of basic rights attributed to individuals; frontier individualism (which must be recognized as a premise of genocide); the individualism of the self-made capitalist and self-made entrepreneur; the individualism of the artist with his own unique creative voice… I must add that my choice of masculine pronouns here is deliberate. American individualism has been, shall we say, stupidly and deeply macho in that it erases the fact that every woman knows that people bond with other people.

So, the first problem is the cult of the individual. And you know, some who consider themselves leftists haven't actually abandoned this cult: they emphasize that everyone should speak for themselves; that no one should represent another person. These individuals, then, are primary cultural impediments to a disciplined political collectivity of the constitutive type of communist parties.

There are, of course, crucial exceptions: some immigrant communities, some communities of racialized minorities, some religious communities. And there has also been a wide range of civic and patriotic organizations in the US. For the most part they have been presented as non-political. Recognizing that, in fact, they claim that the power of the collectivity can help dismantle the cult of individualism.

In the 1980s, faced with the rise of neoliberalism and the defeat of the working class, several European left-wing parties thought it would be a good idea to give more space to individual values. One of the theoretical resources for this change was 'Hegemony and socialist strategy' by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. His central idea was to move away from the centrality of class and emphasize the need to build hegemonic formations linking various identity struggles. They represented in theory what neoliberalism was promulgating in practice. In fact, the slogan was the same: society does not exist.

What the left should have done was double down on the need for solidarity at a time when the working class was under attack. Particularly in the US, it has been difficult to reconstruct the feeling that political struggle requires solidarity. People have been reluctant to acknowledge how communicative capitalism pushes us toward ineffective individual expression. Identity is presumed to be the basis of politics, not part of the field of contestation. And among some portions of the left online and in some activist circles, there is skepticism toward the discipline offered by an organized party, as if individual self-expression is more important to political effectiveness than strong, united organizations. Of course, there are and have been important exceptions. The Black Panthers are admired by all for their discipline.

In order not to sound pessimistic, we should note that this sad picture has changed since the Occupy movement. Even with the defeats of Corbyn and Sanders, socialist politics in the UK and US have been reinvigorated. And this revitalization has brought with it a new appreciation for the fact that the working class is multinational, multigenerational, gendered, and that the fight for economic justice, that is, against capitalism and for socialism, is all the more necessary now in an era of climate change and global pandemic than ever before.

Lenin's writing has a sense or tone of urgency that is unusual, perhaps unique. That urgency could designate something like a "revolutionary temporality," perhaps similar to Walter Benjamin's concept of now-time (Jetzteit) in the revolutionary present. How does temporality work in Lenin's texts? If we assume that the texts are urgent interventions, what reading methods allow us to distill practical political applications for our current situation?

I think Lenin offers what I call the "temporality of the party." He combines a break in the present, the response to the past and the projected future. The party anticipates the revolution, materializing the belief that the revolution is possible not as an overflow of current possibilities, but as an effect of the denial of some trajectories and the forcing of others. My point here is based on Jean-Pierre Dupuy's notion of "projected time" and Georg Lukács's emphasis on the "actuality of the revolution."

Dupuy introduces «projected time» as a name for «coordination by means of the future», that is, as a term for a temporal metaphysics in which «the future counterfactually determines the past, which in turn determines it causally. The future is fixed, but its necessity exists only in hindsight." From the perspective of the future, which led to it being necessary. It couldn't have been any other way because everything that happened led to it. Before an event occurs, there are possibilities, options. After something happens, it seems inevitable, destined. The projected time assumes a future inevitability, establishing this inevitability as the fixed point from which to decide on present actions. Anticipation has practical effects.

When we turn to revolution, the immediate question arises: whose anticipation? What does the projected future entail? In order for the projected future to have coordination effects, to generate the processes that will lead it, it must be carried out by a community, some type of institution or organization. In politics, particularly left-wing revolutionary politics, this organism has been the party, a political organization mobilized through the future.

Consider the Bolsheviks. In the party, historical materialism is not an account of the past. It is a relationship with a specific future, one where "revolution is already on your agenda." As Georg Lukács insists in a classic study, Lenin made the reality of the revolution the point from which all questions were assessed and all actions considered. The fact of the approach of the revolution crossed multiple trends, the multiple conflicts of groups and individuals within the masses and the economic fatalism that contributes to capitalism's own response to crises.

The secure future of the revolution allowed Lenin's party to choose, to decide. The Bolsheviks were not alone in anticipating the revolution. Various leftist parties and tendencies throughout Europe and Russia believed that the revolution was imminent. Lenin's contribution was to understand the coordinating effects of the revolution, the way in which its anticipation set out the tasks to be done. For the Bolsheviks, the fact of the revolution operates as a force of negation in the present that drives the practices necessary for the revolution. Through the party, the revolution produces its revolutionaries.

In the game (and now I mean the game in its broadest and most formal sense), the anticipation of a certain future accompanies two other temporalities: the momentary and the retroactive. I designate "momentary" those interruptions to which the party responds as if they were the actions of the persons as its subject.

In the history of Marxism, we see such responses to the Paris Commune, to mass strikes and demonstrations, to rioting crowds of women. Crowds do the unexpected, even the impossible, interrupting the given and creating a gap in the present. The party responds to the crowds, reading the disorder they cause as the effect of the subject, the revolutionary people, the proletarianized, the oppressed (in The Theory of the Subject, Badiou describes this as subjectivation). The breaking of the crowd is determined retroactively as an effect of the people as its cause. The divided revolutionary people were the subject of the disruptive event. The event was not just something here and now; it was part of the subjective process of people (to use Badiou's terms).

In 1920, one hundred years ago, Lenin met with Clara Zetkin; In her famous essay, he recalls her conversation about women's empowerment and socialism. That same year, addressing women on International Women's Day, Lenin said that the fight for women's equality will be "a long fight" that will end with the triumph of communism. Do you think that Leninist thought can offer something today to those who fight for women's rights around the world? Could there be such a thing as a "Leninist feminism"? Or has feminism evolved beyond Leninism?

Leninism provides the imperative reminder that housework is drudgery and that socialism requires the socialization of reproductive and productive labor. The early Soviet years were absolutely right to prioritize childcare, day care, communal kitchens and laundries, the right to abortion, and sexual freedom. These were not described in terms of individual rights. They were social conditions for liberation and equality. So "Leninist feminism" emphasizes the need to fight to secure conditions of liberation and equality, and to organize for that fight, to analyze the tactics that will be necessary to win it, and to do the work it requires.

If you were to recommend between three and five Lenin texts to a young comrade today, which ones would you recommend and why?

Can we talk about the discussion with Clara Zetkin or is that already understood as important? It's crucial, partly because there are some weird and funny moments where Lenin says things like "and now I'm the woman" or something like that and partly because it disproves the myth that communists only talk about class and not about, say, " women's issues' (as if women's issues were not class issues).

So, for a young compañero or compañero… Well, I'll assume that you've already read the classics: 'What to do?', 'The State and the Revolution' and 'Imperialism: Superior Phase of Capitalism'. These are indispensable for understanding the importance of organizing the party and the state and for understanding the international dimensions of the struggle for communism.

I would also recommend "A Letter to a Comrade About Our Organizational Tasks": this is a shorter and more pointed version of the 'What to Do?' themes recommended by Lenin's wife Nadezhda Krupskaya in her 'Reminiscences of Lenin' because of the insight it brings to Lenin's attention to organizational details and the importance of democratic centralism.

"Leftism, Communism's Childhood Disease" is crucial to recognizing the limits of anarchism or any kind of left-wing purism. "The Proletarian Revolution and Kautsky's Renegade" is important for understanding the argument for the dictatorship of the proletariat. I also really like "Letters from afar." They are models for "game time." The revolution is on the agenda, but not only the bourgeois revolution, but also the proletarian revolution. Lenin sees this when no one else does, and his anticipation has practical effects as he throws his party in preparation for it.