Lenin 2017: Slavoj Zizek

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This was my first exposure to Slavoj Žižek's writing. He contributes a substantial opening essay and a small afterword. Half of the book is devoted to Lenin's writings in the last years of his life (1921-23). This was the period of the NEP, the New Economic Policy, and Lenin was intent on defending this 'reversion' to capitalist economics while simultaneously denouncing the gathering, inertial growth of 'the bureaucracy', in fact the recomposition of a fundamentally unreformed Tsarist state apparatus.

In hindsight, Lenin's myopia is truly sad. He sees the problem in organisational terms, proposing a revamped Control Commission of good communists to root out corruption. He also calls for intensive education, both in general and specifically in management principles, to be made a priority. Everywhere he sees a 'lack of culture', which is rendering the efforts of the communists to chart a proletarian way forward null and void.

Fine speeches are being made by the Bolshevik intelligentsia, but the state machine - its numberless functionaries - sits in torpid paralysis, looking after its own material interests.

Lenin writes in clear and increasingly urgent terms as his illness gets worse. He sees the disease creeping into the ranks of the Party itself.

Žižek's writing, by contrast, is weaselly. First the credit: Žižek is smart, well-read and has thought about things. He has, though, no good answers as to why the revolution finally failed (1991) or what the ambitious and dedicated Marxist should be aspiring to today.

He hides this ignorance in the highly abstracted language of Hegelian-tinged continental Marxism in which the ploy is to recompose the problem in tiers of layered abstractions, without ever instantiating the resulting totality to a decisive and compelling problematic of transition.

See, I can do it too.

I agree that in this theoretical hole, Žižek is not alone. Indeed no-one has been able to find their way out. Žižek is surely best as a cultural critic and debunker and that alone is worth the price of his books. I will read more of him.