Divided Sovereignties: Lenin and Dual Power (original) (raw)
Related papers
Dual power as a strategic concept plays a central role in the conceptualization of the revolutionary situation in Russia during 1917, both in the sense of the characterization of a particular conjuncture as revolutionary, but also as strategic direction, acquiring after October 1917 canonical status. Although associated with a ‘classical’ insurrectionary sequence, later discussions of dual power placed more emphasis on the more complex, uneven and lasting character of any potentially revolutionary strategy, from Gramsci’s distinction between war of movement and war of position to the debates on strategy in the 1970s. Recently, discussions of dual power have resurfaced in the context of the debates on the contradictions of contemporary attempts towards some form of ‘left governance’, but also in interventions by theorists such as Fredric Jameson. The aim of this presentation is to return to crucial moments of these debates in order to suggest it is necessary to move beyond thinking about dual power of either a typology of insurrectionary sequences or the simple articulation of parliamentary majority and movements from below. In this sense, instead of limiting it to the particular conjuncture of a revolutionary situation, it is better to think of a permanent dual power as an integral aspect of any potentially revolutionary strategy, or as a permanent trait of any politics of emancipation.
Utopia and Dystopia in Revolutionary Russia.pdf
The Russian Revolution Centenary Lecture, 2017
The Russian Revolution was set in the midst of maximal utopian creativity and dystopian despair during that exalted and hideous phase of human history from the 1870s to the 1940s. Utopias before the 18th century were edenic dreamlands and good times impossible to achieve; thereafter they became realistic possibilities, “premature truths” as Lamartine remarked, or coinciding with Progress, as Oscar Wilde wittily observed. But dystopias were produced by utopians who dreaded the prospect of success, with Zamyatin, Huxley, and Orwell supplying us their imperishable accounts. Above these dreams and nightmares hovered the confrontation between the Grand Inquisitor and the Silent Christ, their unresolved conflict, and the awareness that dystopia stalks utopia. The Revolution was driven by two utopias competing and collaborating with each other, the Bolshevik one for building the state, and the avant-garde one for creating the new human being. The main ideological source for state building was Marxism; the equivalent for nurturing the human resource was Nietzsche, and the model for the new person was the creative artist. The utopian new state was composed of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (yes, conceived as a utopia) and the somewhat anarchistic soviet democracy, both together mutating into the One Party dictatorship of the Soviet Union; the utopian moulding of the New Person likewise evolved into the New Soviet Person; but dystopias emerged both before and after such transitions.
Th e Ironic Triumph of Old Bolshevism: Th e Debates of April 1917 in Context
During the debates in Bolshevik party circles after Lenin's return to Russia in early April 1917, one central issue was the status of " Old Bolshevism. " According to Lenin, Old Bolshevism was outmoded, whereas other Bolsheviks such as Lev Kamenev and Mikhail Kalinin defended its relevance. Th e central tenet of prewar Old Bolshevism was " democratic revolution to the end, " a slogan that implied a vast social transformation of Russia under the aegis of a revolutionary government based directly on the narod. Far from being rendered irrelevant by the overthrow of the tsar, Old Bolshevism mandated a political course aimed at overthrow of the " bourgeois " Provisional Government. Lenin's innovative vision of " steps toward socialism " in Russia, prior to and independent of European socialist revolution was not a radical break with Old Bolshevism and it was not the central issue during the debates of April 1917. Th e actual Bolshevik message of 1917 (as documented by pamphlets issued by the Moscow Bolsheviks) was closer in most respects to the outlook of Lenin's opponents, as he came close to explicitly admitting. Th e usual characterization of the April debates as Lenin's successful attempt to imbue the Bolsheviks with a radically new vision of socialist revolution must therefore be rejected.
Value-form theory presents also a way to think about questions of revolutionary strategy and socialist transition. This is based in our reading of value form theory which suggests that the emergence of a social form whose reproduction entails the reproduction of particular capitalist social relations and relations of production, was the result of an entire series of singular and molecular social practices, struggles and conflicts, economic but also political and ideological. In this sense, it is impossible to put an end to the value form by decree and the plan in a certain way reproduces elements of the value form, including fetishistic results. Instead, what is needed is an entire period of experimentation with new forms of organization of production and distribution, but also of new political forms and new forms of collective intellectuality in a constant struggle against the reproduction of capitalist social relations and forms, and in constant antagonistic contradictions with the capitalist mode of production. Only by this extensive and expansive form of social experimentation and transformation and struggle it is possible to see the emergence of radically novel social relations and configurations that would be in a position to be reproduced as social forms..
Theses on the Chinese Question
1964
After 1960, the year in which the 81 so-called Communist Parties (including Mao's) demonstrated their unanimity on the programme of Krushevite opportunism, a de facto break occurred between Peking and Moscow. We have analysed various documents in which China outlines its own national variant of Stalinism, but unlike the other "national socialisms" of Arab, Cuban or Yugoslav stamp, Chinese "socialism" insists on calling bourgeois Russia to account, on setting itself up as defender of Marxism and reconstructing under its aegis the ranks of the world proletariat. It is this claim, more than the inevitable antagonisms between the Russian and Chinese States, which requires our response, since neither the social practice nor the official political ideology of the Peking leaders is directed toward victory for the Communist programme.
Lenin as an Original Political Theorist, or Not: Debunking the Textbook Interpretation
2019
Abstract: Lars T. Lih’s Lenin Rediscovered: “What Is to Be Done?” in Context, containing new translations of heretofore mangled Russian terms, proves that Lenin was not initially an authoritarian. It elucidates why What Is To Be Done? is more democratic than popularly believed, but The State and Revolution – not analyzed by Lih – is, ironically, less democratic, given its technocratic picture of “the dictatorship of the proletariat,” an outgrowth of Marx’s class-reductionist definition of politics and Engels’ vision of communism as the “administration of things.” This essay reveals what Lenin owed to Kautsky’s democratic Marxism and critiques Lukács’ theoretical justification for “Leninism.” Accepted for publication by Theory in Action. Tentatively scheduled for publication in Vol. 12, No. 3, July 31, 2019.