To return to our initial dilemma about the proper interpretation of the Soviet experiment, one needs to draw one final line and ask, What was Lenin's unique, extraordinary innovation? What was the substance of his transformative action? Here I think that Jowitt rather than Žižek gave the accurate answer. The charismatic vanguard party, made up of professional revolutionaries, was invented by Lenin over one hundred years ago, in 1902, when he wrote his most influential text, What Is to Be Done? Lars Lih disagrees with the “textbook interpretation” of Leninism (the predestined-pedagogical role of the revolutionary vanguard, i.e., the Communist Party) and insists that many, if not most, Social Democrats at the beginning of the twentieth century were convinced of the need to bring consciousness to the class from “without.”125 According to Lih, the thrust of the criticism from other socialists was aimed not at What Is to Be Done, but rather at his “Letter to a Comrade,” written in September 1902, and especially One Step Forward Two Steps Backwards, published in the spring of 1904. But this “injection approach” (bringing consciousness from the outside, awakening a dormant proletariat) was not the thrust of Lenin's main revision of classical Marxism: it was not educational action per se, but rather the nature of the pedagogical agent that mattered in the story. This “party of a new type” symbolized what Antonio Gramsci later called the “New Prince”: a new figure of the political that absorbs and incorporates the independent life of society up to the point of definitive osmosis or asphyxiation.
BOLSHEVISM AS POLITICAL MESSIANISM
Lenin created a mystique of the party as the ultimate repository of strategic wisdom, a “community of saints” dedicated to bringing about the cataclysmic millenium: it was the historical agent, for it encompassed the professional revolutionaries, those who, by reuniting their acting and thinking faculties, regained “the grace of the harmonious original being.”126 One statement speaks volumes about the totemic entity he wished to create: “We believe in the party, we see in her the reason, the honor and the conscience of our epoch … the only guarantee for the liberation movement of the working class.”127 For the Bolsheviks, “like Christ, the party was, at one and the same time, a real institution and an incarnated idea. The formation of the Party was the First Coming; not fully appreciated by an immature working class, it heralded a Second Coming and the apotheosis of workers' consciousness at which point all workers would join the Party, thereby rendering it superfluous. The eschatological significance of the Party explained the zeal with which the Marxists guarded its purity.”128 Lenin developed an exclusivist vision of party unity founded on unflinching adherence to the established doctrinal line and not on a consensual agreement about the main ideological tenets. For him, it was “the unity of Marxists, not the unity of Marxists with the enemies and distorters of Marxism.”129 As I have shown, this unwillingness to compromise over the interpretation of history is one of the fundamental features of the sacralization of politics.
Leninism was a form of modern messianism intolerant of realities escaping its ideological panorama. It was a production recipe for The Communist Manifesto's “scenario for the drama of millenarian redemption.”130 The professional revolutionaries who made up “the party of a new type” were, according to Yury Piatakov, “men of miracles” bringing into life “that which is considered impossible, not realizable and inadmissible…. [W]e are people of special temper, without any equivalents in history precisely because we make impossible possible.”131 Therefore, the party was the embodiment of historical reason and militants were expected to carry out its orders without hesitation or reservation. Discipline, secrecy, and rigid hierarchy were essential to such a party, especially during clandestine activities (like those in Russia). The main role of the party was to awaken proletarian self-consciousness and instill revolutionary doctrine (faith) into the dormant proletariat. This was the party's salvific mission, and because of it the party was the embodiment of freedom. Instead of relying on the spontaneous development of consciousness among the industrial working class, Leninism saw the party as a catalytic agent bringing revolutionary knowledge, will, and organization to the exploited masses.132 Futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was right when he said:
When we say Lenin
We mean the Party
And when we say Party
We mean Lenin.133
First Leninism, then Stalinism, codified the total commitment to an apocalyptic scenario dedicated to bringing about not only a new type of society but also a new type of human being.134 With its ambition to initiate an anthropological revolution, Marxism can be regarded as a form of utopian radicalism—utopian because it is basically future oriented and overlooks the perennial features of the human condition, radical inasmuch as it aims to transform the body politic and establish a form of social organization totally different form all previous ones. Moreover, in its Bolshevik application, this utopian radicalism turned into “a set of values and beliefs, a culture, a language, new forms of speech, more modern customs and new ways of behaving in public and in private.” And the name under which all this came together was Stalinism—a self-identified separate and superior civilization.135 Marxism-Leninism as mythology therefore relied on two mutually conditioning myths: a sustaining one (the first workers' state with its corollary the Great October Revolution) and an eschatological one (the realization of Communism).136 According to these myths, Marx's collectivity of self-determined, quasi-divine beings undergoing “perpetual becoming that knows no limits and continually striving forwards anew” entered its kairos, accomplishing the ultimate destiny prefigured by history. This triumphant tale of humanity's renewal was provisioned only by surrender and self-sacrifice to the will of the leader (unqualified yet).137 It was the “scientific” answer to the paradox of theodicy intrinsic to Marxism: the eschatological subject was identified, but its coming of age needed leadership—the Kautskyan intervention from without, Lenin's party of a new type and, why not, ultimately Stalin's revolution from above. Marxism-Leninism was the formula used to reconcile the ever-expanding rational mastery of the world with the aspiration for individual liberation.
The Leninist party is dead (it is quite ironic that the Gennady Zyuganov-style epigones of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation combine Slavophile orthodoxy, xenophobia, imperialism, and Bolshevik nostalgia in a baroque nationalist-cum-egalitarian collectivistic blending).138 But the cult of the party as a sacred institution, the sectarian vision of a community of virtuous, ascetic, righteous individuals selflessly committed to improving the life of humanity and erecting Nikolai Chernyshevky's “Crystal Palace” here and now is not extinct.139 It explains the nature of the post-Communist transitions where initiatives from below are still marginal and the center of power remains, in many cases, as conspiratorial, secretive, and nondemocratic as it was in pre-Leninist and Leninist times. Is this bound to stay the same? My answer is tentatively negative; after all, the monolith is broken, the dream of Communism as the secular kingdom of God has failed. The challenge remains, however, of coming to terms with Lenin's legacies and admitting that Sovietism was not imposed by extraterrestrial aliens on an innocent intelligentsia but rather found its causes, origins, and most propitious ground in the radical segments of Russian political culture.140 To put it simply, the Third International and the major schism within the world Marxist movement were the consequences of Lenin's defiant gesture, his seizure of power in the fall of 1917. His determination to force socialist revolution upon the czarist empire, and implicitly upon the world, triggered the beginning of the epoch of totalitarian politics. And his single-mindedness would be emulated by others. Rosa Luxemburg again anticipated the significance of the Bolshevik push for state power: “Their October uprising was not only the actual salvation of the Russian Revolution: it was also the salvation of the honor of international socialism.”141 Indeed, until 1989, the October Revolution remained the central symbolic pillar of the world Communist movement.