Very thought provoking piece by Zizek, going over the communist desire and thinking through the communist movements in history
In her stupendous Yesterday’s Tomorrow,[1] Bini Adamczak provides nothing less than the definitive account of what one cannot but call the ineradicable, absolutely authentic, Communist desire, the Idea of a society which fully overcomes domination:
“Unlike the slaves, who only wished to be as free as their masters, unlike the peasants, who wanted to give the lords a tenth of their crop instead of a fifth, unlike the bourgeoisie, who only wanted political freedom, not economic freedom, what the workers demanded was a classless society. What the Communists promised was the abrogation of all domination. And as long as they are remembered, their promise remains.” (80)
This desire is “eternal” in the simple sense that it is a shadow that accompanies all hitherto history which is, as Marx and Engels wrote, the history of class struggle. What makes Adamczak’s book unique is that she detects this desire through a very close analysis of the failures of the (European) Communist movement in the twentieth century, tracing them backwards from Hitler-Stalin pact to the brutal suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion. The details she describes make it clear that, say, the Hitler-Stalin pact cannot be accounted for just in the terms of brutal realpolitik (Stalin needed time to prepare for the war that loomed on the horizon). Weird excesses disturb this image, like the fact that in 1940 guards in gulags were forbidden to shout at prisoners “Fascists!¨” not to insult the Nazis:
“What remains incomprehensible, because irreducible to any calculation of power politics, is Beria’s order forbidding the guard stuff in the gulags from disparaging political prisoners – antifascists in the majority, frequently convicted of ‘Trotskyte-fascist deviations’ – with the epithet fascist”(34).
Adamczak’s focus is double, as the subtitle of her book makes it clear: “On the Loneliness of Communist Specters and the Reconstruction of the Future.” The absolute loneliness is that of the Communists who were purged but continued to believe in the Communist Idea embodied in the Party that liquidated them, i.e., to put it in Lacan’s terms, the Party remained for them the only big Other. The deadlock they faced is that the way out for them was not to insist on the purity of the Communist dream against its betrayal by the Party: this dream of the future itself had to be “reconstructed.” Most of them (just recall Arthur Koestler and Ignazio Silone) failed in this task, contributed to the liberal (or even conservative) critique of Communism, and produced writings in the style of “God that failed,” rejoining the anti-Communist Cold War warriors. As Adamczak notes, the absence of the Communist desire explains why, when European Communism disintegrated around 1990,
“the jubilant cries of the Cold War victors were so unconvincing: they lacked all joy. Instead of relief at averting looming danger or shared joy at the newfound fortune of the former oppressed, it expressed something resembling embittered malevolence: the schadenfreude those who stayed at home feel for their siblings drowned at sea.”(79)
Adamczak turns around here the well-known anti-Communist motto that those who do not want to talk about Stalinism should also keep quiet about Communism: “But what can be said about Stalinism by those who refuse to hear about Communism? Those who wish to write the history of this past without writing about the history of that future that was buried in it?”(80) Only Communism establishes the highest standards, by which it must be judged and critically rejected, which is why “the first reproach against anticommunism must be that of downplaying the crimes of Stalinism. Not because an idea was murdered alongside the people in the gulags – how cynical – but because Communism alone brought forth into the world the historically actionable demand to accept no disenfranchisements, to tolerate no more degradation.”(82) That’s why the worst thing a Communist can do is to half-heartedly defend Communist states in a modest comparative way:
“Communists react defensively to the (anticommunist) critique of Communism – not everything about Communism was bad – with parries – that wasn’t even Communism – or by attacking – criticism of the crimes of communism only serves to legitimate the crimes of the enemies. They are right on all counts. But what does it say about Communism to state that National Socialism was worse, that capitalism has been just as bad? What kind of verdict is it for Communism to say not everything but instead only almost everything was bad?”(140)
Just recall a similar defense of Cuba: yes, the revolution was a failure, but they do have good healthcare and education… And do we not hear a similar argumentation from those who “show understanding” for Russia, although they condemn the invasion of Ukraine: “the criticism of Russian crimes in Ukraine only serves to legitimate the crimes of the liberal West…”?
Adamczak also dismisses the “postmodern” Left which criticizes Communism for its focus on economy, while ignoring as “secondary” feminism, the struggle against sexual oppression, and all other domains of “cultural Marxism.” Such a critique comes all too close to comfortable historicism, which ignores the “eternity” of the Communist Idea. When an injustice happens, its historicist relativization by way of evoking specific circumstances (“he lived in another epoch when it was normal to be a racist or anti-feminist, so we shouldn’t judge him by today’s standards”) is wrong: we should do precisely that, measure the past wrongs by today’s standards. We should be shocked by how women were treated in past centuries, by how benevolent “civilized” people owned slaves, etc.
The actual Communist power is not only fighting its capitalist opponents; it is betraying the emancipatory dream, which brought it into existence. This is why a true critique of actually-existing socialism should not just point out that life in a Communist state was mostly worse than life in many capitalist states. Its greatest “contradiction” is the antinomy in its very heart, not just the stark contrast between the Idea and reality, but the less perceptible change in the Idea itself. The idealized image of the future promised by the Communist power is incompatible with the Communist Idea. In the last act of The Tempest, Prospero says to Caliban: “This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.” Every Communist has to say something similar about Stalinism, the largest “thing of darkness” in the history of Communism: in order to really understand it, the first gesture is to “acknowledge it as mine,” to fully accept that Stalinism is not a contingent deviation or misapplication of Marxism but is implied as a possibility by its very core… But does Hegel not say something similar in his famous lines on the French Revolution?
“Never since the sun had stood in its firmament and the planets revolved around him had it been perceived that man’s existence centers in his head, i.e., in thought. /…/ Anaxagoras had been the first to say that nous governs the world; but not until now had man advanced to the recognition of the principle that thought ought to govern spiritual reality. This was accordingly a glorious mental dawn. All thinking beings shared in the jubilation of this epoch. Emotions of a lofty character stirred men’s minds at that time; a spiritual enthusiasm thrilled through the world, as if the reconciliation between the divine and the secular was now first accomplished.”[2]
Note that Hegel says this a quarter of a century after the French Revolution, and also decades after he showed how the freedom the French Revolution wanted to actualize necessarily turned into terror. And we should say exactly the same about the October Revolution after experiencing Stalinism as its consequence: it also was “a glorious mental dawn. All thinking beings shared in the jubilation of this epoch. Emotions of a lofty character stirred men’s minds at that time; a spiritual enthusiasm thrilled through the world…” We have to endure fully this antinomy, avoiding both traps: the dismissal of Stalinism as an error due to contingent circumstances, as well as the quick conclusion that Stalinism is the “truth” of the Communist desire. This antinomy is brought to extreme in Lenin’s State and Revolution, a book whose vision of the revolution is definitely grounded in the authentic Communist desire: as Lenin writes, with the revolution,
“for the first time in the history of civilized society, the mass of the population will rise to take an independent part, not only in voting and elections, but also in the everyday administration of the state. Under socialism all will govern in turn and will soon become accustomed to no one governing.”[3]
This properly Communist dimension is condensed in Lenin’s famous formula “Every kitchen maid should learn to rule the state,” which was endlessly repeated through the 1920s as a slogan of women’s emancipation. However, it is worth taking a closer look at the precise context of Lenin’s justification of this slogan which, at first sight, may appear extremely utopian, especially since he emphasizes that the slogan designates something that “can and must be done at once, overnight,” not in some later Communist future. Lenin begins his line of argumentation by denying being utopian: against anarchists, he asserts his utter realism. He is not counting on “new men” but on “people as they are now, with people who cannot dispense with subordination, control, and ‘foremen and accountants’”:
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I did some very cursory research, I couldn't really find any satisfying answers, but I think the state sponsored homophobia is tied with nationalism. Conservative politicians use the EU's support for LGBT rights as the boundary for the 'decadent' West vs the 'traditional' East
Interesting study
Nationalism and homophobia in Central and Eastern EuropeAbstract:
In terms of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) rights, few organizations have done as much to promote the legal equality of sexual minorities as the European Union (EU). Especially since the inclusion of sexual orientation in the equalities agenda through Article 19 of Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU; formerly Article 13 TEC), there has been increased pressure at the European level for existing members and accession states to promote the equal rights of their LGBT citizens (Slootmaeckers and Touquet 2016). Despite similar top-down pressure, however, the degree of legal equality for LGBT individuals—not to mention social attitudes towards homosexuality—differs markedly across the region, with the situation particularly difficult in the states of the EU’s Eastern Partnership. The aim of this chapter is to suggest that the failure of Europeanization—understood here as the adoption of EU laws and values—to liberalize attitudes towards sexual minorities in Central and Eastern Europe can be explained in large part with reference to the nation. In line with the conclusions of Freyburg and Richter (2010) and Schimmelfennig and Sedelmeier (2005) on the need to move beyond rationalist arguments and incorporate ideational factors to explain the relative success or failure of Europeanization, I argue that in many Central and East European member states and accession countries, homosexuality clashes with discourses of national identity, which have greater resonance among the population. This chapter will also demonstrate that EU support for LGBT equality can also have a negative impact on attitudes towards non-heteronormative individuals in states that are neither EU member states nor candidate countries, in that nationalist politicians use the EU’s more liberal position towards LGBT rights to draw a boundary between the ‘decadent West’ and ‘traditional East’ for their own social and political purposes. The analysis will focus in particular on the case studies of Latvia, Serbia and Russia to show that in each case, the marginalization of LGBT individuals is legitimized with calls to ‘the defence of the nation’.