°Vlad
Nate asked what’s up with the appeal of Lenin (in certain parts of the blogsphere). Surprised me too. At best, it seems like an index of intellectual detachment. At worst, it seems like an echo of Lenin’s admiration for Taylorism, the fantasy of regaining some mythical and lost managerial role (aka ‘public intellectual’), or furnishing oneself with an apparently realpolitik or ‘engaged’ gloss.
Adam Roberts over at the Valve cites Nabokov calling Lenin a “philistine” in matters of art, and charges him with “laying the grounds for a primitive, regional, political, state-controlled, utterly conservative and conventional literature”. That the latter undoubtedly became the case does not, however, suggest that it was ‘philistinism’ at work, or that one should ignore the class-laden (or specifically haute bourgeois) character of such an accusation.
In other words, Lenin did not incline toward state-controlled art production because he was a “philistine”, but because (as in all other matters) he regarded the process of revolutionary subjectivation as that of the party (consisting of left-wing intellectuals) taking control of the state. Surely this is more odious and worthy of criticism than any apparent vulgarity of taste.
As for Adam’s suggestion that “the attachment many on the left have for Lenin is rooted in the sense that Lenin got things done, he made the revolution actually happen, he did more than simply sit around talking about it”. This is the great lie of Leninism, the heroic individual, the recapitulation of the patriarch, etc etc.
Combining an absurdist (if not simply appalling) account of history and movements with the apparent expediency of iconisation (that rests, ultimately, on the supposition that ‘the masses’ are in need of superstition to guide them), it seems that the cult of Lenin notches up a gear the more detached one gets from the experience and prospect of movement.
Here’s Paul Mattick, in 1935, on the idolatry of Lenin.
And, while Jodi Dean’s question of “What is worth dying for?” is a question worth asking, it might be pointed out that Lenin was never at any risk of dying for that which is associated as His cause. Moreover, denying the fact that Lenin’s (and Trotsky’s) apparently ‘revolutionary violence’ was directed as much against (other) revolutionaries — that is, against those with whom they disagreed about the course of the revolution — as it was against the Tsarist forces does not make one a revolutionary. Only, dare I say, a party hack propagandist.
Don’t have time to read Adam Roberts’ article right now but I really like his novels of which I think I’ve read three.
cheers
Pete
Pete [January 17, 2006 @ 1:08 pm]
I’ll take that as a sound recommendation. His remarks were in no way appalling, as are those who are seeking to pay homage to Lenin, that’s for sure.
s0metim3s [January 17, 2006 @ 1:22 pm]
I couldn’t agree more Angela. I missed this the first time around, great stuff. I’ll have to check out the Mattick. At some point I’d like to have a super honed response to this Lenin stuff, ground glass to drop into the syrup of self-satisfied Lenin talk, to choke that stuff off before it begins. Reading folks like Mattick is part of that agenda, need to move all that higher on the priorities list.
Nate [January 25, 2006 @ 4:28 pm]
sorry to be bringing the ruckus over to your blog, but still . . .
Of course, the embrace of Taylorism is a major problem with Lenin, and probably betrays his lack of understanding of what proletarians experience (the danger of the bourgeois vangaued again), but still it seems a bit easy to blame him for that with eighty years of hindsight.
I think there’s also, and I think this is the substantial problem with the Bolsheviks, of what else you might have expected him to do other than use disciplinary power in the factories and the red army. I used, in my anarcho days, to just say ‘bah’ to this kind of question, if I was pushed arguing that the Bolsheviks should never have kickstarted a minoritarian revolution, but I tend to think now that it is a fair question, and most a lot of the behaviour of the Bolsheviks, Stalin, etc can be explained with reference to practicaly exigencies.
“Lenin was never at any risk of dying for that which is associated as His cause”
This strikes as just being false - was he really never in personal danger? Surely there were any number of people who wanted to off him for most of his life?
mark [January 25, 2006 @ 6:18 pm]
Mark, I’m not sure what you mean by the ease of hindsight, but it’s not like there weren’t significant conficts over the bolshevik’s Taylorisation of the factories at the time. This, after all, is pretty much what was called - at the time and by Lenin - ‘Left Communism’. The question of minority-majority might be the problem of a representational politics, but it’s not my problem.
It’s your assumption that the bolsheviks “kickstarted a revolution” and were driven by “practical exigencies” that I find silly, at best.
Not even Lenin himself had such a view of the agency of the bolsheviks or the course of the revolution. Trotsky, maybe, who was so embittered by his own treatment that he explains every turn of events as a consequence of (mostly individual) ‘leadership’. But anyone whose entire theory amounts to ‘I should be the leader’ is kind of a nut, imo.
And “practical exigencies” - positivist rubbish, which I think can only ever incline towards viewing people as things (eg, Taylorism). But I do so love the way you’ve moved from the assertion of a bolshevism as the eminent revolutionary subject to the monstrous alibi of ‘the objective conditions made them do it’. The only consistency here is the search for justifications.
As for speculating whether Lenin was ever in danger, I guess one can assume there were people who wanted to off him. But one doesn’t have to assume that Lenin was never the object of his decisions to use violence or that he ever entered the field of such. So, as a response to Jodi Dean’s argument that Leninism is important because it poses the question of what’s worth dying for, I think Lenin’s distance from the violence and death that Jodi sees as pivotal might be considered as pertinent.
s0metim3s [January 27, 2006 @ 11:26 am]
In other words, Lenin did not incline toward state-controlled art production because he was a “philistine”, but because (as in all other matters) he regarded *the process of revolutionary subjectivation as that of the party (consisting of left-wing intellectuals) taking control of the state.*
Please explain?
( And ‘hi’! )
@ndy [April 26, 2006 @ 2:01 am]