Revolution at the Gates by V.I. Lenin

Author:V.I. Lenin [Lenin, V. I.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-84467-818-1
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2014-05-20T04:00:00+00:00

This means that the authority of the Party is not that of determinate positive knowledge, but that of the form of knowledge, of a new type of knowledge linked to a collective political subject. The only crucial point on which the Chorus insists is that if the young comrade thinks that he is right, he should fight for his position within the collective form of the Party, not outside it—to put it in a somewhat pathetic way: if the young comrade is right, then the Party needs him even more than its other members. What the Party demands is that we agree to ground our “I” in the “we” of the Party’s collective identity: fight with us, fight for us, fight for your truth against the Party line – just don’t do it alone, outside the Party. Exactly as in Lacan’s formula of the discourse of the analyst, what is important about the Party’s knowledge is not its content, but the fact that it occupies the place of Truth.

God, Analyst, Party—the three forms of the “subject supposed to know”, of the transferential object; this is why, in all three cases, we hear the claim “God/the Analyst/the Party is always right”; and, as it was clear to Kierkegaard, the truth of this statement is always its negative – man is always wrong. This external element does not stand for objective knowledge, that is, its externality is strictly internal: the need for the Party stems from the fact that the working class is never “fully itself”. So the ultimate meaning of Lenin’s insistence on this externality is that “adequate” class-consciousness does not emerge “spontaneously”, that it does not correspond to a “spontaneous tendency” of the working class; on the contrary, what is “spontaneous” is the misperception of one’s social position, so that “adequate” class-consciousness has to be fought out through hard work. Here, again, the situation is homologous to the one in psychoanalysis: as Lacan emphasizes again and again, there is no primordial Wissenstrieb (drive-to-knowledge): the spontaneous human attitude is that of je n’en veux rien savoir – I don’t want to know anything about it; and, far from realizing our innermost tendency, the psychoanalytic treatment has to proceed “against the grain”.xli

We can make the same point in terms of the opposition between interpretation and formalization:xlii the external agent (Party, God, Analyst) is not the one who “understands us better than we do ourselves”, who can provide the true interpretation of what our acts and statements mean; rather, it stands for the form of our activity. What, then, is this Form? Let us take Ernst Nolte’s “revisionist” argument concerning the relationship between Nazism and (Soviet) Communism: reprehensible as it was, Nazism not only appeared after Communism; it was also, with regard to its content, an excessive reaction to the Communist threat. Furthermore, all the horrors committed by Nazism merely copy the horrors already committed by Soviet Communism: secret police, concentration camps, genocidal terror.… Is this the Form we are talking about? Is

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