The man that hath no music in himself Nor is not mov'd with the concord of sweet sounds Is fit for treasons strategems and spoils. The motion of his spirit are as dull as night And his affections dark as Erebus. Let no such man be trusted.
John Halle
Lenin was conflicted on this, http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9305/articles/sisk.html but, I've always found what Lionel Trilling said in one of his essays in_ The Liberal Imagination_ where this anecdote that Zizek cites here below revealing. Michael Pugliese
http://homestudio.thing.net/revue/content/beverley.htm (Worth a look see, "THE IDEOLOGY OF POSTMODERN MUSIC AND LEFT POLITICS, " by John Beverly) http://www.kwinrw.de/lenin/disc2.htm
Diskussion Debate / Débat
Slavoj Žižek: Lenin, Lukacs, Stalin
Ultimately, the reproach of the Central Committee members to Bukharin was that he was not ruthless enough, that he retained traces of human weakness, of "soft-heartedness":
"Voroshilov: Bukharin is a sincere and honest man, but I fear for Bukharin no less than for Tomsky and Rykov. Why do I fear for Bukharin? Because he is a soft-hearted person. Whether this is good or bad I do not know, but in our present situation this soft-heartedness is not needed. It is a poor assistant and adviser in matters of policy because it, this soft-heartedness, may undermine not only the soft-hearted person himself but also the party's cause. Bukharin is a very soft-hearted person." (1)
In Kantian terms, this "soft-heartedness" (in which it is easy to recognize a distant echo of Lenin's reaction against listening to Beethoven's Appasionata: one must not listen to such music too much, because it makes you soft, and all of a sudden you want to cuddle your enemies instead of mercilessly destroying them...) is, of course, the remainder of the "pathological" sentimentality that blurs the subject's pure ethical stance. And here, at this key point, it is crucial to resist the "humanist" temptation of opposing to this Stalinist ruthless self-instrumentalization any kind of "Bukharinian" natural goodness, of the tender understanding of and compassion with common human frailty, as if the problem with the Stalinist Communists resided in their ruthless, self-erasing, dedication to the Communist cause, which turned them into monstrous ethical automata and made them forget common human feelings and sympathies. On the contrary, the problem with the Stalinist Communists was that they were NOT "pure" enough, and got caught in the perverse economy of duty: "I know this is heavy and can be painful, but what can I do, this is my duty..." The standard motto of ethical rigor is "There is no excuse for not accomplishing one's duty!"; although Kant's "Du kannst, denn du sollst! (You can, because you must!)" seems to offer a new version of this motto, he implicitly complements it with its much more uncanny inversion: "There is no excuse for accomplishing one's duty!"(2) The reference to duty as the excuse to do our duty should be rejected as hypocritical; suffice it to recall the proverbial example of a severe sadistic teacher who subjects his pupils to merciless discipline and torture. Of course, his excuse to himself (and to others) is: "I myself find it hard to exert such pressure on the poor kids, but what can I do - it's my duty!" The more pertinent example of it is precisely that of a Stalinist Communist who loves mankind, but nonetheless performs horrible purges and executions; his heart is breaking while he is doing it, but he cannot help it, it's his Duty towards the Progress of Humanity... What we encounter here is the properly perverse attitude of adopting the position of the pure instrument of the big Other's Will: it's not my responsibility, it's not me who is effectively doing it, I am merely an instrument of the higher Historical Necessity... The obscene jouissance of this situation is generated by the fact that I conceive of myself as exculpated for what I am doing: isn't it nice to be able to inflict pain on others with the full awareness that I'm not responsible for it, that I merely fulfill the Other's Will... this is what Kantian ethics prohibits. This position of the sadist pervert provides the answer to the question: How can the subject be guilty when he merely realizes an "objective", externally imposed necessity? By subjectively assuming this "objective necessity," i.e. by finding enjoyment in what is imposed on him.(3) So, at its most radical, Kantian ethics is NOT "sadist," but precisely what prohibits assuming the position of a Sadean executioner. What, then, does this tell us about the respective status of coldness in Kant and in Sade? The conclusion to be drawn is not that Sade sticks to cruel coldness, while Kant somehow has to allow for human compassion, but quite the opposite: it is only the Kantian subject that is effectively thoroughly cold (apathetic), while the sadist is not "cold" enough, his "apathy" is a fake, a lure concealing the all too passionate engagement on behalf of the Other's jouissance. And, of course, the same goes for the passage from Lenin to Stalin: the revolutionary political counterpoint to Lacan's Kant avec Sade is undoubtedly Lenin avec Stalin, i.e. it is only with Stalin that the Leninist revolutionary subject turns into the perverse object-instrument of the big Other's jouissance. Let us make this point clear apropos of Lukacs' History and Class Consciousness, THE attempt to deploy the philosophical stance of the Leninist revolutionary practice. Can Lukacs really be dismissed as the advocate of such a pseudo-Hegelian assertion of proletariat as the absolute Subject-Object of History? Let us focus on the concrete political background of History and Class Consciousness, in which Lukacs still speaks as a fully engaged revolutionary. To put it in somewhat rough and simplified terms, the choice, for the revolutionary forces in the Russia of 1917, in the difficult situation in which the bourgeoisie was not able to bring to the end the democratic revolution, was the following one: - on the one hand, the Menshevik stance was that of the obedience to the logic of the "objective stages of development": first democratic revolution, then proletarian revolution. In the whirlpool of 1917, instead of capitalizing from the gradual disintegration of State apparatuses and building upon the widespread popular discontent and resistance against the Provisional Government, all radical parties should resist the temptation to push the momement too far and rather join forces with democratic bourgeois elements in order to first achieve the democratic revolution, waiting patiently for the "mature" revolutionary situation. From this point, a socialist takeover in 1917, when the situation was not yet "ripe," would trigger a regression to primitive terror... (Although this fear of the catastrophic terrorist consequences of a "premature" uprising may seem to augur the shadow of Stalinism, the ideology of Stalinism effectively marks a RETURN to this "objectivist" logic of the necessary stages of development. (4) - on the other hand, the Leninist stance was to take a leap, throwing oneself into the paradox of the situation, seizing the opportunity and INTERVENING, even if the situation was "premature," with a wager that this very "premature" intervention will radically change the "objective" relationship of forces itself, within which the initial situation appeared as "premature," i.e. that it will undermine the very standard the reference to which told us that the situation was "premature."
Here, one must be careful not to miss the point: it is not that, in contrast to Mensheviks and sceptics among the Bolsheviks themselves, Lenin thought that the complex situation of 1917, i.e. the growing dissatisfaction of the broad masses with the irresolute politics of the Provisional Government, offers a unique chance of "jumping over" one phase (the democratic bourgeois revolution), of "condensing" the two necessary consecutive stages (democratic bourgeois revolution and proletarian revolution) into one. Such a notion still accepts the fundamental underlying objectivist "reified" logic of the "necessary stages of development," it merely allows for the different rhythm of its course in different concrete circumstances (i.e. in some countries, the second stage can immediately follow the first one). In contrast to this, Lenin's point is much stronger: ultimately, there is no objective logic of the "necessary stages of development," since "complications" arising from the intricate texture of concrete situations and/or from the unanticipated results of "subjective" interventions always derail the straight course of things. As Lenin was keen in observing, the fact of colonialism and of the over-exploited masses in Asia, Africa and Latin America radically affects and "displaces" the "straight" class struggle in the developped capitalist countries - to speak about "class struggle" without taking into account colonialism is an empty abstraction which, translated into practical politics, can only result in condoning the "civilizing" role of colonialism and thus, by subordinating the anti-colonialist struggle of the Asian masses to the "true" class struggle in developped Western states, de facto accepting that bourgeoisie defines the terms of the class struggle... (Again, one can discern here the unexpected closeness to the Althusserian "overdetermination": there is no ultimate rule so that, with a reference to it, one can measure "exceptions" - in actual history, there are in a way only exceptions.) One is tempted to resort here to Lacanian terms: what is at stake in this alternative is the (in)existence of the "big Other": Mensheviks relied on the all-embracing foundation of the positive logic of historical development, while Bolsheviks (Lenin, at least) were aware that "the big Other doesn't exist" - a political intervention proper does not occur within the coordinates of some underlying global matrix, since what it achieves is precisely the "reshuffling" of this very global matrix.
This, then, is the reason why Lukacs had such admiration for Lenin: his Lenin was the one who, apropos of the split in the Russian Social Democracy into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, when the two factions fought about a precise formulation of who can be a party member as defined in the party program, wrote: "Sometimes, the fate of the entire working class movement for long years to come can be decided by a word or two in the party program." Or the Lenin who, when he saw the chance for the revolutionary takeover in the late 1917, said: "History will never forgive us if we miss this oportunity!" At a more general level, the history of capitalism is a long history of how the predominant ideologico-political framework was able to accommodate (and to soften the subversive edge of) the movements and demands that seemed to threaten its very survival. Say, for a long time, sexual libertarians thought that monogamic sexual repression is necessary for the survival of capitalism - now we know that capitalist can not only tolerate, but even actively incite and exploit forms of "perverse" sexuality, not to mention promiscuous indulgence in sexual pleasures. However, the conclusion to be drawn from it is NOT that capitalism has the endless ability to integrate and thus cut off the subversive edge of all particular demands - the question of timing, of "seizing the moment," is crucial here. A certain particular demand possesses, in a certain moment, the global detonating power, it functions as a metaphoric stand-in for the global revolution: if we unconditionally insist on it, the system will explode; if, however, we wait too long, the metaphoric short-circuit between this particular demand and the global overthrow is dissolved, and the System can, with sneering hypocritical satisfaction, make the gesture of "You wanted this? Here you have it!", without anything really radical happening. The art of what Lukacs called Augenblick (the moment when, briefly, there is an opening for an ACT to intervene into a situation) is the art of seizing the right moment, of aggravating the conflict BEFORE the System can accomodate itself to our demand. So we have here a Lukacs who is much more "Gramscian" and conjecturalist/contingentian than it is usually assumed - the Lukacsean Augenblick is unexpectedly close to what, today, Alain Badiou endeavours to formulate as the Event: an intervention that cannot be accounted for in the terms of its pre-existing "objective conditions." (5) The crux of Lukacs's argumentation is to reject the reduction of the act to its "historical circumstances": there are no neutral "objective conditions", i.e. (in Hegelese) all presuppositions are already minimally posited.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ----
(1) J. Arch Getty and Oleg V. Naumov The Road to Terror. Stalin and the Self-Destruction of the Bolsheviks, 1932-39, New Haven and London: Yale University Press 1999, p. 100.
(2) For a more detailed account of this key feature of Kant's ethics, see Chapter II of Slavoj Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder, London: Verso 1996.
(3) See Alenka Zupancic, Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan, London: Verso Books 2000.
(4) Let us also not forget that, in the weeks before October Revolution, when the debate was raging between Bolsheviks, Stalin did take side against Lenin's proposal for an immediate Bolshevik takeover, arguing, along the Menshevik lines, that the situation is not yet "ripe," and that, instead of such dangerous "adventurism," one should endorse a broad coalition of all anti-Tsarist forces.
(5) See Alain Badiou, L'etre et l'evenement, Paris: Editions du Seuil 1988.