Revolution at the Gates
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REVOLUTION AT THE GATES A Selection of Writings from February to October 1917 V.1. Lenin • Edited and with an Introduction and Afterword by Slavoj Zizek VERSO London. New York Contents This edition first published by Verso 2002 A Note on Bibliographical Sources Vll Introduction and Afterword © Slavoj Zizek 2002 Original Lenin texts: see p. vii All rights reserved Introduction: Between the Two Revolutions 1 The moral rights of the authors, editors and translators have been asserted Slavoj Zizek 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 642 Verso Revolution at the Gates UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F OEG 1 Letters from Afar 15 USA: 180 Varick Street, New York, NY 10014-4606 www.versobooks.com 2 The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution Verso is the imprint of New Left Books (" April Theses") 56 ISBN 1-85984-661-0 3 On Slogans 62 4 The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It 69 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library 5 One of the Fundamental Questions of the Revolution 106 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data 6 The Bolsheviks Must Assume Power 113 A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress 7 Marxism and Insurrection 117 Typeset in Minion by SetSystems Ltd, Saffron Walden, Essex Printed and bound in the UK by Biddies Ltd, Guildford and King's Lynn 8 The Tasks of the Revolution 124 www.biddles.co.uk 9 The Crisis Has Matured 133 1 0 Advice of an Onlooker 142 11 Letter to Comrades 144 12 Meeting of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies 162 VI CONTENTS Afterword: Lenin's Choice 165 Slavoj Ziiek A Note on Bibliographical Sources The Right to Truth - Materialism Revisited - The Inner Greatness of Stalinism - Lenin as a Listener of Schubert - Did Lenin Love His Neighbour? - From passage a l'acte to the Act Itself - Welcome to the Desert of the Real! - Redemptive Violence - Against Pure Politics - For They Know Not What They Believe - "Cultural Capitalism" - A Cyberspace Lenin? - Against Post-politics - Return ve1'SUS Repetition Lenin's texts are reprinted from: V. 1. Lenin, Collected Works, 4th English Index 337 edition, 42 volumes, Moscow: Progress Publishers 1964. 1 "Letters from Afar", vol. 23, pp. 295-342. Written March 7-26 1917. Translated from the Russian by M. S. Levin, Joe Fineberg and others. Edited by M. S. Levin. 2 "The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution (April Theses)", vol. 24, pp.21-9. First published in Pravda no. 26, 7 April 1917. Translated from the Russian and edited by Bernard Isaacs. 3 "On Slogans", vol. 25, pp. 185-92. Written in mid-July 1917. First published in pamphlet form in 1917. Translated from the Russian and edited by Stephan Apresyan and Jim Riordan. 4 "The Impending Catastrophe and How to Combat It", vol. 25, pp. 323-69. First published at the end of October 1917 in pamphlet form. Translated from the Russian and edited by Stephan Apresyan and Jim Riordan. 5 "One of the Fundamental Questions of the Revolution", vol. 25, pp. 370-77. First published on 27 September 1917. Translated from the Russian and edited by Stephan Apresyan and Jim Riordan. 6 "The Bolsheviks Must Assume Power", vol. 26, pp. 19-21. Written 25-27 September 1917, first published in 1921. Translated from the Russian by Yuri Sodobnikov and George Hanna. Edited by George Hanna. 7 "Marxism and Insurrection", vol. 26, pp. 22-7. Written 26-27 Septem ber 1917, first published in 1921. Translated from the Russian by Yuri Sodobnikov and George Hanna. Edited by George Hanna. 8 "The Tasks of the Revolution", vol. 26, pp. 59-68. First published in Rabochy Put nos 20 and 21, 9 and 10 October 1917. Translated from the Russian by Yuri Sodobnikov and George Hanna. Edited by George Hanna. Vlll A OTE ON BIBLIOGRAPHICAL SOURCES 9 "The Crisis Has Matured", vol. 26, pp. 74-85. Sections I-III and V first published on 9 October 1917 in Rabochy Put no. 20, sections IV and VI first published in 1924. Translated from the Russian by Yuri Sodob nikov and George Hanna. Edited by George Hanna. 10 "Advice of an Onlooker", vol. 26, pp.179-81. Written 21 October 1917, first published in Pravda on 7 November 1920, signed An Onlooker. Translated from the Russian by Yuri Sodobnikov and George Hanna. Edited by George Hanna. 11 "Letter to Comrades", vol. 26, pp. 195-215. First published in Rabochy Put nos 40, 41, and 42, 1, 2 and 3 November 1917. Translated from the Russian by Yuri Sodobnikov and George Hanna. Edited by George Hanna. Introduction 12 "Meeting of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies", vol. 26, pp.239-41. First published in Izvestia no. 207, 26 October 1917. Translated from the Russian by Yuri Sodobnikov and George Hanna. Edited by George Hanna. The numbered footnotes are editorial; all other footnotes are Lenin's own. Introduction: Between the Two Revolutions Slavoj Zizek The first public reaction to the idea of reactualizing Lenin is, of course, an outburst of sarcastic laughter. Marx is OK - today, even on Wall Street, there are people who still love him: Marx the poet of commodities, who provided perfect descriptions of the capitalist' dynamic; Marx of Cultural Studies, who portrayed the alienation and reification of our daily lives. But Lenin - no, you can't be serious! Doesn't Lenin stand precisely for the failure to put Marxism into practice, for the big catastrophe which left its mark on the whole of twentieth-century world politics, for the Real Socialist experiment which culminated in an economically inefficient dictatorship? So, if there is a consensus among (whatever remains of) today's radical Left, it is that, in order to resuscitate the radical political project, we should leave the Leninist legacy behind: the ruthless focusing on the class struggle, the Party as the privileged form of organization, the violent revolutionary seizure of power, the ensuing "dictatorship of the proletariat" ... are all these not "zombie-concepts" to be abandoned if the Left is to have any chance in the conditions of "post-industrial" late capitalism? The problem with this apparently convincing argument is that it endorses all too easily the inherited image of Lenin the wise revolutionary Leader who, after formulating the basic co-ordinates of his thoug~t and practice in What Is to Be Done?, simply ruthlessly pursued them thereafter. What if there is another story to be told about Lenin? It is true that today's Left is undergoing the shattering experience of the end of an entire epoch for the progressive movement, an experience which compels it to reinvent the very basic co-ordinates of its project - however, it was an exactly homologous experience that gave birth to Leninism. Recall Lenin's shock when, in autumn 1914, all European Social Democratic parties (with the honourable exception of the Russian Bolsheviks and the Serb Social Democrats) adopted the "patriotic line" - Lenin even thought that the issue of Vorwarts, the daily newspaper of the German Social Democrats, which reported how 4 REVOLUTION AT THE GATES INTRODUCTION: BETWEEN THE TWO REVOLUTIONS 5 Social Democrats in the Reichstag voted for military credits, was a forgery Entre nous: If they kill me, I ask you to publish my notebook "Marxism & by the Russian secret police destined to deceive the Russian workers. In that the State" (stuck in Stockholm). It is bound in a blue cover. It is a collection era of the military conflict that cut the European continent in half, how of all the quotations from Marx & Engels, likewise from Kautsky against difficult it was to reject the notion that one should take sides in this conflict, Pannekoek. There is a series of remarks & notes, formulations. I think with a and to fight against the "patriotic fervour" in one's own country! How week's work it could be published. I consider it imp. for not only Plekhanov 2 many great minds (including Freud) succumbed to the nationalist temp but also Kautsky got it wrong. Condition: all this is entre nous. tation, even if only for a couple of weeks! The existential engagement is extreme here, and the kernel of the Leninist This shock of 1914 was - to put it in Alain Badiou's terms - a desastre, a "utopia" arises from the ashes of the catastrophe of 1914, in his settling of catastrophe in which an entire world disappeared: not only the idyllic the accounts with the Second International orthodoxy: the radical imperative bourgeois faith in progress, but also the socialist movement which accom to smash the bourgeois state, which means the state as such, and to invent a panied it. Lenin himself (the Lenin of What Is to Be Done?) lost the ground new communal social form without a standing army, police or bureaucracy, under his feet - in his desperate reaction there is no satisfaction, no "I told in which all could take part in the administration of social matters. For you so!". This moment of Verzweiflung, this catastrophe, cleared the ground Lenin, this was not a theoretical project for some distant future - in October for the Leninist event, for breaking the evolutionary historicism of the 1917 he claimed: "We can at once set in motion a state apparatus constituting Second International - and Lenin was the only one who realized this, the of ten if not twenty miilion people." 3 This urge of the moment is the true only one who articulated the Truth of the catastrophe. Through this utopia.