Lenin in PART II philosophy Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/634574/9780822389552-007.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 6 Lenin and the Savas Michael-Matsas Path of Dialectics 1. “Il faut continuer, je ne peux pas continuer, je vais continuer”—You must continue, I cannot continue, I will continue. These are the last words by Samuel Beckett in The Unnamable.¹ They are also our words. What to continue? How to continue? The all-pervading philistinism of the rulers triumphantly proclaims that nothing emancipatory exists any more; everything that remains will continue its humiliating existence forever. So, why continue? The end of the twentieth century appears to vindicate the impasse, to annihilate every gain of the liberation achieved since 1917, signifying its complete destruction. The collapse of the post-revolutionary bureaucra- tized regimes, which did everything possible to distort and betray in the most horrendous ways the principles upon which they were founded, likewise threatens to bury under their rubble what was also the exact opposite of their tyranny, the revolutionary expectation of a Commu- nist perspective. The flag of surrender is raisedupon the ruins: emanci- pate yourselves from emancipation. This is the order of the day. But the world is hideous and insupportable as never before. We must continue. But from this perspective at least, we cannot continue. “We cannot stand this world that we don’t have the will to deny.”² This is the nightmare of contemporary nihilism, “the nihilism of the last man,” as Nietzsche described it. A century later, this disease of nihilism is not solely European in scope but global. It declares the end of metaphysics, Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/634574/9780822389552-007.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 102 Michael-Matsas of all systems, of all ideologies, of the “great meta-narratives,” of revo- lutions, of Communism, even of history itself. In a typical chiliastic and ludicrous manner, not only by the likes of Fukuyama and company, it even gives an exact date for the End: 1989. This new fashionable eschatology presents itself as the tomb of all eschatologies, keeping their fallacy and rejecting everything emancipa- tory in their kernel. The collapse of all certainty is dogmatically con- sidered as the highest certainty. The most vulgar market metaphysics is raised as the doctrine of the end of all metaphysics. On the left and on the right they rush to give answers—the already known. But the main question is to find how to pose the right questions. Taking Lenin as our cue, the first thing to learn is precisely this: boldly, without preconceptions and prejudices, without being trapped by previous examples, focusing on the object itself, to enter the dialectical realm of questioning, searching to find the new, most tormenting, not yet known questions, which emerge in every dramatic turning point of history and cognition. Here, in the turning points, in the void created by the rupture of historical continuity, the painful inner dialogue is heard: “You must continue, I cannot continue, I will continue.” 2. This inner dialogue had shaken Lenin himself, as never before, in those days of torment in 1914 that look so much like our days, when the body of Europe was torn apart by antagonisms and nationalistic fever, when the “Great War” was exploding among the different imperialist powers, and when the historical opponent of imperialism, the official “socialist camp” at that time would also self-destruct. For Lenin the shock was terrible. When he heard the news about the vote in support of the kaiser’s war budget by the SPD, or of Plekhanov’s support of the tsarist government’s war effort, he simply could not be- lieve it. Lenin was never the unemotional icon of steel portrayed by Stalinists. The shock puts in relief his human, all too human, qualities. Furthermore, without this initial, desperate denial of what was real, without the moment of temporary powerlessness, without the terrible moment of recognition of the impossibility of continuing, while you Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/634574/9780822389552-007.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Lenin and the Path of Dialectics 103 know at the same time that you must continue, it is impossible to appre- ciate the tension and the impulse necessary for the leap that establishes continuity. Beckett recounts the truth. Lenin, by means of his own path, en- counters this truth.³ Continuity is not growth, extension, and repeti- tion of the same. It is a contradiction that by its own sharpening and culmination finds the path to its transcendence leading into another, new contradiction. Continuity is the fruit of its necessity as well as of the impossibility to be established. 3. A contradiction cannot be resolved automatically or smoothly. Its ob- jective nature always implies the real threat of a catastrophe. It de- mands probing and grasping its specific logic, and from there emerges the elaboration of a strategy of overcoming it in practice. It is precisely here that Lenin is incomparably relevant today. Lenin was not immobilized by the first shocking impression, nor did he rush into making immediate, hasty political answers and conclu- sions. He turned instead to the fundamental questions that needed to be asked. Often erroneously seen as a pragmatist, his response here could not have been further from this. After the declaration of war and the collapse of the Second International, while the conflagration in the battlefields escalated, he plunged into a systematic study of philosophy, most notably of Hegel’s The Science of Logic, in the Berne Library from September 1914 to May 1915. Only after this cycle of profound philosophical work was completed did Lenin then go on to write, from the second half of May to the first half of June 1915, his pamphlet “The Collapse of the Second Interna- tional” and begin the elaboration of an analysis of imperialism. These major works were in turn followed by other crucially significant theo- retical and practical studies leading to the change of strategy in the “April Theses” of 1917, the libertarian The State and Revolution, and the final assault on the Winter Palace. But the point of departure should not be forgotten. The preparation for the “assault to heaven” began in the silence of the Berne Library, over the open books of Hegel. The new epoch of crisis, into which humanity and the international Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/634574/9780822389552-007.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 104 Michael-Matsas workers’ movement had entered as a result of the eruption of the “Great War,” decomposed and recomposed all social relations and functions, both material as well as mental. The crisis was not restricted to the productive-economic structure; it involved all levels of reality. It be- came a crisis of civilization, a crisis of all objective, historically de- veloped forms of social consciousness, of all given conceptions of the world, of all forms and ways of representation. It was an epistemologi- cal crisis that involved not just the privileged classes and the intellectu- als tied to them but the popular classes as well, first of all the working class, its political leadership, and its own organic intellectuals. The ultimate capitulation of social democracy to capitalism, to the imperialist state and its war aims, had been prepared well in advance by the acceptance of a theoretical horizon adapted to the limits of the capitalist world itself and its fetishist illusions. Only a theoretical approach that challenged the limits of bourgeois society, its worldview or, rather, the fragments of it, could transcend the epistemological crisis in its entirety; that is to say, only then could such an approach go beyond a vague “crisis consciousness” (Andras Gedö),⁴ and give a conscious expression to the interests of the working class, a sense of real direction to a new praxis of revolutionary transfor- mation. From this vantage point, Lenin’s turn to questions of dialecti- cal method and epistemology, as it is recorded in his Philosophical Note- books of 1914–15, constitutes the first decisive step of an entire strategy to overcome the crisis of leadership of the working class that erupted with the beginnings of the war. 4. The collapse of the Social Democratic International from top to bot- tom, to its very foundations, revealed that something terribly destruc- tive had taken place in its theoretical-methodological foundations, not solely in its actual politics. This demanded an exhaustive fundamen- tal re-examination of Marxism in contradistinction with the official conception of Marxism as it was institutionalized by the “popes” and “cardinals” of “Marxist orthodoxy” such as Kautsky and Plekhanov. But the radical break needed to go one stage further. It was not content with asking anew what the foundations of Marxism were. More than Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/chapter-pdf/634574/9780822389552-007.pdf by guest on 30 September 2021 Lenin and the Path of Dialectics 105 this, it needed to search for a philosophical answer as to what a foun- dation itself actually represents. The “orthodox Marxism” of the Second International was charac- terized above all by its indifference, if not by an open rejection, of the need for a philosophical foundation of Marxism. Above all, the origins of Marxian dialectics in the Hegelian dialectic, even the very notion of