Lenin’s children
I’m struck, and not for the first time, by the commonplace gesture of anti-Leninism. A gesture which, less than a decade ago, had its determinate correlate in anti-stalinism: a gesture of belonging to an epoche and the ‘consciousness’ of such. That is, a gesture emptied of any concrete relationship to Lenin’s politics and shaped, I think, by what Vahamakis calls “platitudinous community”. Because, consistently, I cannot see where the anti- comes in, except as a sign of being part of ‘the now’. I cannot see, for instance, where Lenin figures except as a figure of disrepute and, in turn, repute. Or, of fidelity and infidelity and all that this implies about the familial-isation of politics (biopolitics, anyone?).
Now, I’m more than keen to dispense with Lenin’s politics, which in any case are not, simply, Lenin’s. But the proper name functions here both as an obstacle — everyone, apparently, knows what Leninism is. And it works as a conduit for the gestural: no one is required to actually read Lenin to position themselves as being against Lenin. But the politics remains intact, more or less: The hierarchy between mind and body and the priveliging of the former over the latter, the managerial perspective that this gives rise to and emerges from, the role henceforth granted to the Party as a collective intellect which must, as he saw it, intervene from the ‘outside’ and into the body of workers, inert, mass and cretinous, childlike.
Less, because intellectuality is, since WWII in many countries, massified (not therefore The Party, but a diffused activism levitated by the arrogance of its self-definition as ‘actor’ and, by implication, the relegation of most of the world to ‘in-active’, again). This massification makes for a heightened panic, competition, the urge to return to the General Measure (Negri’s juridicism) or for a mundane, if still, messianic intercession of the Big Event (or spectacular protests, the decline of which I guess I’m expected to mourn like everyone else, but still think the problem and solution lies elsewhere than in the ‘visible’). But either way, neither the messianic spectacular nor absolute democracy seem to me to amount to an escape from Lenin’s time, the temporal rythmn of the production line, keyboard or sewing machine. Clack Clack.
