The potential of rage

Perhaps Lenin's main achievement was that he quietly removed the Orthodox Marxism notion of the revolution as a necessary step in historical progress. Instead, he followed Saint-Yust's view, which said the revolution is like the navigator who travels to unexplored territories.

That was Lenin's response to the major problem of Western Marxism: how is it that the working class does not constitute itself as a revolutionary agent? Western Marxism, of that time, was in a constant search for other social agents who would play the role of revolutionary agents to replace the working class sick: third world villagers, students and intellectuals; and disfellowshipped... but also refugees, for whom some desperate leftist think they are “nomads”

The failure of the working class as a revolutionary subject is in the nucleus of the Bolshevik revolution: Lenin's skill stood at the detection of the rage potential of disappointed villagers. The October revolution was won with the slogan “Land and Peace,” addressing the large rural mass, taking a moment of their radical discontent.

Against the Present

Lenin was thinking about these lines a decade before the revolution, which shows why he was terrified by the success he appeared on the horizon of the land reforms that Stolip carried out, which raided the creation of a strong new class of independent farmers. He wrote that if Stolip succeeded, the chance for revolution would be lost for decades. All Socialist revolutions, from Cuba to Yugoslavia, followed this pattern, catching the opportunity in an extreme crisis.

The point is not just that the revolution no longer travels with history, following their own laws, the problem is very different. Even if there is a law of history, a relatively predominent in the larger course of historical development, and the revolution can occur in some narrow interventional space, “against the present. ”

Some opposed Lenin of 1917, Lenin of the last years of his life, a more pragmatic and realistic Lenin that desperately sought to institutionalise the revolution in a much more modest way. However, what these two attitudes have in common is the unmerciful will to take power and then retain it.

Lenin's focus on taking power not only expresses his desire for power, but in fact means much more: his obsession (in the good sense of this term) for opening a free “rator,” space that would be controlled by emancipative forces outside the global capitalist system.

That's why every poem on a permanent revolution was completely foreign to Lenin when, after losing an expected revolution across Europe in the early 20th years, some Bolsheevics thought it would be better to lose power than to keep it under those conditions, ideas that terrified Lenin.

On the other hand, there was more prohitotism in Lenin's efforts to fill the free space outside the capitalist system with new content the paradox is that Lenin was pragmatistic about how to take power, but utopist about what to do with it.

And we are in similar circumstances today. While the leftist resistance against global capitalism fails continuously to undermine its advancement, it remains out of touch with many trends that clearly indicate the progressive disillusionment of capitalism. It's like the two trends (resistence and self-desigration) move to different levels and cannot meet with each other, so we have futile protests in parallel with inmanent destruction and there's no way to do these two together in a co-ordinated act of profiling capitalism.

The Real Optia

How did it get to this? While the left (most) desperately seeks to protect the rights of older workers against the attacks on global capitalism, there are almost exclusively progressive capitalists they (from Elon Musk to Mark Zuckerberg) who speak of post-capitalism as the next topic of capitalism and as if we knew that a new post-capitalist order is adjusted by capitalism itself.

Although Marks nʹa offers an insurmountable analysis of capitalist reproduction, his mistake was not only in preaching his final destruction of capitalism, but also in non-respecting how capitalism grew stronger after each crisis. There is a more tragic mistake in his work.

According to Wolfgang Streeck, Marksism was good for the final crisis of capitalism. We are entering that crisis today, but this crisis is simply that protracted process of destruction and detection, with no Aufhebung hegelian on the horizon, with no agents to give this destruction a positive turn and transform it into a passage of the highest levels of social organisation.

Looking at our apocalypse, from ecological disasters to mass migrations, people must follow what writer Samuel Becket says: “Try again. Fall back. You better lose. ”

The real utopia is the idea that if we go further inside the existing system of global capitalism, we will save ourselves. So it takes more than ever for Lenin's radical spirit combined with a ruthless pragmatism.

Perhaps someone will take the risk of repeating here a classic Soviet joke: at an official Moscow gallery, a painting appears with the title “Lenini in Warsaw”, in which was drawn Nedezda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, in her room in the Kremlin having wild sex with a new member of the Komsomol (mark: youth organisation in the Soviet Union). A surprised visitor to the gallery, when you see the painting, asks the guide: “But where is Lenin here?”, while the guide calmly answers: “Lenini is in Warsaw. ”

Let's imagine a similar exhibition in Moscow in 1980, with a painting of the same title (Linni in Warsaw) where top-members of Soviet nomenclature would be drawn, arguing about “risking” that represented Polish movements for solidarity for the interests of the Soviet Union. A Soviet visitor would ask the guide: “But where is Lenin here? ” and he would answer: “Lenini is in Warsaw. ”

The cause of Western interventions co-ordinated by the Pope and Reagan, and others, Lenin was in Warsaw in the 1970s and 1980s; his soul was there in the protests of workers from whom he led solidarity. The Independent - What?