&quot;Socialist Modes of Governance and the &#39;Withering Away of the State&#39;: Revisiting Lenin&#39;s &#39;State and Revolution,&#39;&quot; Theory &amp; Event 13, 2 (Summer 2010)

Zhivka Valiavicharska

The goal of this chapter is to present a reading of the Marxist theory of the State that is more complex than the version produced by recent “neo-institutionalist” critiques. With Marx’s historical works (The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution (1848), The Class Struggle in France, 1848 to 1850 (1850) and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)) as our point of departure, we attempt to show that his conception of the State takes its internal institutional dynamics into account without forfeiting the perspective of class analysis. In this manner, when Marx introduces the institutional aspects of the capitalist state apparatus into his historical analysis, he develops a conception of the State that is both more sophisticated than the “instrumentalist” perspective of some Marxists and some critics of Marxism, and less formalist than institutionalist interpretations.

This chapter explores how Marx’s conception of the political institutions of socialism (the social republic) was inherited from the radical elements of the republican tradition. I explore three dimensions of this inheritance. First, I discuss his support for replacing the institutions of representative government with a form of popular delegacy, where representatives are constrained by imperative mandates, the right to recall, and short terms of office. Second, I explain why Marx criticized the separation of powers and preferred legislative supremacy over the executive. Third, I discuss Marx’s belief in the necessity of placing the state’s administrative and repressive functions under popular control, by transforming the standing army into a civic militia and making the bureaucracy elected, accountable, and deprofessionalized.

Lenin’s Marxist politics has been profoundly misconstrued and distorted, both positively and negatively, as supposedly having wanted to strip capitalist society of its deceptive veneer and assert the unadorned proletariat as the be-all and end-all of “socialist” society. Certainly not merely the later Stalinist history of the Soviet Union, but also practices of the Soviet state under Lenin’s leadership in the Civil War, so-called “War Communism,” and the Red Terror, lent themselves to a belief in Lenin as a ruthless destroyer of “bourgeois” conditions of life. But, then, what are we to make, for instance, of Lenin’s pamphlets on The State and Revolution (1917) and “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)? For they emphasized both the necessary persistence of “bourgeois right” among the workers in the long transition from socialism to communism, requiring the continuation of state mediation, and the fact that Marxists had understood their effort as trying to overcome capital “on the basis of capitalism” itself. A prime example of Lenin’s insistence on the mediation of politics in society was his opposition to Trotsky’s recommendation that labor unions be militarized and subsumed under the state. Lenin wanted to preserve, rather, the important non-identity of class, party, and state in the Soviet “workers’ state,” which he recognized as necessarily carrying on, for the foreseeable future, “state capitalism” (characterized by “bureaucratic deformations” due to Russian conditions). Lenin thus wanted to preserve the possibility of politics within the working class, a theme that reached back to his first major pamphlet, What is to be Done? (1902). Lenin’s “last struggle” was to prevent the strangling of politics in the Soviet state, a danger he regarded not merely in terms of Stalin’s leadership, but the condition of the Bolsheviks more generally.

Theory and Event 13:2 (2010) Socialist Modes of Governance and the “Withering Away of the State”: Revisiting Lenin’s State and Revolution1 Zhivka Valiavicharska Introduction Written mostly in the wake of October 1917, State and Revolution remains Lenin’s most elaborate theoretical treatise on the architecture of socialist state governance. During a provisional liberal government with declining legitimacy and the imminent possibility of a government takeover by an alliance of the Bolsheviks with the Soviets of the Workers', Soldiers', and Peasants' Deputies, questions about the function of the state in the making of the socialist order became a matter of urgent address. Expanding on Marx and Engels’ unsystematic thoughts on the socialist state, Lenin wrote State and Revolution to articulate in detail the Bolshevik position against the different fractions of the Social-Democrats and the anarchists. He famously speaks of the gradual “withering away” of the administrative, judicial, and executive institutions of the state—an evolution towards the state's own self-annihilation, which will be paradoxically achieved through the dictatorship of the proletariat. Even the most sensitive readings of Lenin’s work seem to share a consensus about Lenin's formulations of state power: From his 1902 What Is to Be Done?, where he proposes an underground, centralized party structure as a strategic solution to the brutal crackdowns of the young Russian Social Democratic movement by the “political police” of the autocratic state, to his call for nationalizing banks and monopolizing grain production in his 1917 Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power?, Lenin retains the category of the state unchanged throughout, seen as a repressive apparatus of class domination. Such readings see its logical conclusion in the authoritarian and repressive machine during Stalin's regime. They also understand the socialist subject as positioned outside the party-state dyad, passively subordinated to a top-down authoritarian political regime. A close reading of State and Revolution speaks otherwise. Here I argue that by using the language of “withering away,” “disappearing” and “dying out” of the state, Lenin offers a vision of state power that functions by means other than violence and the law, a vision of a state that administers, regulates, and manages rather than rules by force. My interest, then, is in the ways the architects of socialism conceived of a radically different— socialist—subject in relation to the socialist state. The latter, by reorganizing property and state institutions, generated alternative practices of productive social subordination; they brought into reality subjective categories, self-understandings, and social practices and effects which we have yet to examine more closely. 1 Parts of this paper were presented at the Eleventh Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities “Imagining Justice and Injustice” at the University of California, Berkeley, April 2008. I thank Wendy Brown, Robert Meister, Brian Whitener, and Vessela Valiavitcharska, as well as the colleagues present at the conference, for their generously provided comments and suggestions. 1 What does State and Revolution say about the socialist concept of freedom and the socialist modes of subject production? What has often evaded the reader is Lenin's observation that practices of autonomy and self-governance cannot exist independently from “authority.” Viewing authority as an exercise of power or some form of submission to an “order”—an “order” broadly understood and yet dictated by the industrial mode of production—he defines autonomy and authority as relational terms. Rather than being “absolute” or independent, Lenin sees them as mutually constitutive categories. Forging a self-governing social order—what he describes as the gradual transformation towards socialism—then requires a certain practice of subjection or subjectivation. Here I would like to suggest that through such relational formulation of the authority-autonomy relationship Lenin arrives at an understanding of freedom that cannot be thought outside of subjection—an understanding of freedom which, because of the totalizing scope of the industrial mode of organization of labor, is a social, rather than a political category. The relationship between such “non-political” freedom and the socialist states' focus on reorganizing property, labor, and distribution of goods becomes crucial here. From the sweeping nationalization measures put into practice immediately after 1917, to the more experimental, hybrid forms of ownership and commodity distribution that followed during the NEP period, socialist states had put into motion the material domain—but not just to eradicate class divisions and deliver material equality “objectively.” If we understand the material domain as a relationforming medium, as a means of interpellating the self in relation to a collective order, we may be able to reach a more adequate understanding of the kinds of subject categories socialisms developed, the kinds of subjects they produced, as well as these subjects' sense of selfrealization, autonomy, and empowerment as they remain deeply conditioned by the state's governing practices. Class Relations and the Coercive State In State and Revolution, Lenin unequivocally defines the state as a product of irreconcilable class antagonisms. “[T]he state is an organ of class rule,” he says, “an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of ‘order,’ which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between the classes.”2 The bourgeois order uses the institutions of the state to control the means of production, to legitimate material inequality, and to conceal the hegemony and exploitative practices of the bourgeoisie over the working masses—it is the political means by which the bourgeois class exercises its dominance over the proletariat. Lenin further notes that the bourgeois liberal state has amassed enormous political, military, distributive, and bureaucratic power. This massive power concentration, in its legal and administrative configuration, is fully detached and alienated from the people, serving a minority to constrain and subordinate a majority. The proletarian revolution has to wrest that “special coercive force” away from the hands of the ruling class in an act that is necessarily ruptural and violent. 2 Vladimir Lenin, “State and Revolution” in Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), 25: 387 (all italics are original). 2 A single reading of State and Revolution may only register Lenin’s emphasis on the need for a violent takeover of the state and its coercive use—in fact, for many years Lenin has been dismissed on those grounds by even some of the most sympathetic students of the revolutionary process. A closer look at the text, however, shows that revolutionary action, as Lenin imagined it, has a more ambiguous relationship to both violence and rupture, and indicates that he is far from indulging in utopian illusions about the revolutionary project. On the one hand, Lenin considers the liberal state, which has emerged historically as the political outcome of the capitalist reconfiguration of productive forces and property, to be a major and inevitable element in class domination and class reproduction, and asserts, against the Mensheviks, that only a rupture, a revolutionary takeover of the state, can uproot the exploitative practices of the capitalist material organization. He sharply condemns the lingering legacy of reformists such as Eduard Bernstein who remain loyal to the bourgeois institutions and stand for approaches to solving social inequalities through the regulatory procedures of the liberal state. In the heart of its composition, the liberal state is indelibly marked by bourgeois privilege and reinscribes an unequal and exploitative social order. Thus, if class inequality is to change, the bourgeois state needs to be appropriated violently so it can be rejected in its entirety. On the other hand, however, Lenin is equally dismissive of anarchist doctrines that invest all hopes in the singular and final act of abolishing the “state machine.” He opposes vehemently anarchists who assume that abolishing the state will eradicate all social oppression overnight. Such views remain outrightly utopian, completely blind to the historical dimensions of social transformation. For him, framing the revolutionary question in terms of either a violent action or a carefully steered reform misses the possibility of understanding the revolutionary task as an intricate historical process that requires both. “How can [Engels’] panegyric on violent revolution, which [he] insistently brought to the attention of the German Social-Democrats between 1878 and 1894 […], be combined with the theory of the ‘withering away’ of the state to form a single theory?”—Lenin asks, relentlessly defending the “proper” meaning of Engels’ notion of “the withering away” from bourgeois reformist interpretations that try to omit the revolutionary act of abolishing the bourgeois institutions.3 “The supersession of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is impossible without a violent revolution,” Lenin insists.4 He is nonetheless eager to add that this violent appropriation will be the last sovereign act of the state, followed by the gradual “selfannihilation” of both state power and class inequality. The revolutionary takeover, rather than being a final and triumphant moment in the struggle, stands for the beginning of the historical task of the revolution. Both an authoritarian gesture and a slow social transition are necessary to turn the revolutionary vision into historical reality. Why does the takeover of the state, its singular destruction, fall short in the project of social emancipation? Lenin clearly understood that the anarchist doctrine of abolition presumes an organic, self-governing social whole existing prior to and independent of the state. Anarchist anti-statist discourse builds upon a mechanistic notion of the state, seen as a prosthesis grafted onto a preexisting social domain; it invests the social body with an innate naturalism, the selfgoverning potentials of which are suppressed by the artificiality of the state. Lenin could not be 3 4 Lenin, “State and Revolution,” Collected Works, 25: 399. Ibid., 400. 3 further from such an organicist vision of the social, with its conception of social freedom and autonomy built on a deeply mistaken dichotomy of an artificial state vs. a living, self-sufficient and self-regulating social organism. To reduce the complex, mutually dependent, dialectically constitutive, and historically conditioned state-society relationship to a simple dichotomy means to attribute ontological qualities to the “social”—a position that Lenin fiercely rejects. Lenin views the state as a powerful and necessary instrument for carrying out the revolution precisely because the struggle is a long historical transformation that cannot be fulfilled by a single revolutionary rupture. Thus, much in the spirit of Rousseau, he alerts us to the limits of spontaneous action and contends that, rather than completing the revolutionary endeavor, a violent takeover only provides a founding opportunity for a slow historical evolution. True human liberation can only happen if we undergo a process of social cohesion that would produce the subjective experience of human emancipation. This is precisely why Lenin’s focus quickly shifts to a careful interpretive reading of Engels’ Anti-Duhring, which first offers the term “withering away” to argue for the state’s crucial involvement in a slow cultivation of selfgoverning and self-administering practices leading to the state’s “self-annihilation.”5 Withering Away: The Non-Bureaucratic and the Non-Political State Valuable efforts have been made recently to reclaim various aspects of Lenin’s political thought.6 Yet, some of them warn us against strict divisions between Lenin’s contributions to the revolutionary movement and their subsequent development under Stalin, pointing to the immanent ontological claims in Lenin’s work when it comes to his views on state power. Slavoj Zizek is among those who alert us to the fact that Lenin’s conception of the state somehow remains a general rather than a historical category throughout his work, and that Lenin’s state is ultimately founded on the premise that it organizes social relations through oppression and remains an inherently coercive mechanism of domination. This ontological gesture expresses itself fully under Stalin, Zizek observes, and this is the case both with the "bad" Lenin of Party elitism in What Is to Be Done? and the later, “good” Lenin of State and Revolution.7 Any such 5 Ibid., 395-401. Slavoj Zizek’s Revolution at the Gates: Selected Writings of Lenin from 1917 (London and New York: Verso, 2002) and Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Zizek, eds., Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007). Of particular pertinence here will be Zizek’s call for the reactivation of Lenin’s legacy in the contemporary context in his “Introduction: Between the Two Revolutions,” in Revolution at the Gates, 3-12, and “Afterword: Lenin’s Choice,” Revolution at the Gates, 167-336. See also Slavoj Zizek, “A Plea for Leninist Intolerance,” Critical Inquiry 28, no. 2 (Winter 2002): 542-66. Kevin Anderson's study on Lenin's encounters with Hegel remains a key theoretical contribution to understanding Lenin as a dialectical thinker, recovering some of his influence on Western political thought from the Frankfurt School member Karl Korsch to Lefebvre and Althusser. Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism: A Critical Study (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1995). It is actually the historians who, over several generations of sensitive scholarship, have been much more persistent in disarticulating Lenin's historical and political legacy from Stalinism—from the first revisionist readings of Lenin and Stalin dating back from the 1960s in the work of historians such as Robert Tucker, Moshe Lewin, or Stephen Cohen, to Lars T. Lih's most recent epic historical reconstruction of Lenin's What Is to Be Done?. Lars T. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? in Context (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2008). Even the monolithic, static understanding of “Stalinism” has not been left intact by the historians. The work of Sheila Fitzpatrick from the 1980s onwards and the younger generation of Foucaultian scholars, among them Stephen Kotkin, Igal Halfin, and Jochen Hellbeck, have rendered the Stalinist period as a dynamic and tumultuous social terrain by uncovering the multiple conflicts, as well as the various political and social investments in the project. (See footnote 50 for references to their work on the Soviet subject.) 7 Slavoj Zizek, “Afterword: Lenin’s Choice,” 192. 6 4 distinctions inevitably spell the failure of work attempting to redeem Lenin fully from having a stake in the Stalinist outcome.8 “The element of truth […] is that you cannot separate the unique constellation which enabled the revolutionary takeover in October 1917 from its later “Stalinist” turn in its aftermath,” Zizek states, calling their internal juncture “the real Leninist tragedy.”9 If, however, one takes Lenin's preoccupation with the “withering away” and the “selfannihilation” of the state seriously, or his famous comparison of the function of the future state to the operations of the post-office, a different argument emerges, one that offers a radical reformulation of state power and state governance. But what does it exactly mean for the state to “wither away”? Two sets of questions need to be addressed: First, is it that the state will disappear as a political entity and transform itself into a set of self-governing practices? Is it that the state as a conceptual category will become obsolete and meaningless as other forms of social practice fall into place? And second, how do these “non-political” forms of state conduct target the means of production and the regulation of the economy, rather than the population? Rather than governing persons, Lenin recalls Engels, the state will be administering things, regulating the process of production, mobilizing the material domain. What claim does this statement make about the material dimensions of subject formation? Does it mean that, in some deterministic fashion, the economic administration of things, the reorganization of our material activities, will automatically and inevitably lead to social emancipation? Or, does it perhaps imply that a corporeal experience inevitably participates in processes of subject formation? All these questions seek to offer the beginnings of a more precise articulation of the socialist understanding of freedom in relationship to socialist practices of subject formation, as they were imagined by the architects of socialism. In State and Revolution Lenin envisions nothing less than the practical realization of total social subjectivation, a social entirety where, strikingly, “complete,” radical human freedom is possible. It is, however, a kind of freedom that can never be thought or practiced outside of subjection, it is a practice of freedom and social selfrealization radically conditioned by the material dimensions of human activity. For Lenin, the bourgeois political and administrative institutions have cultivated an enormous bureaucratic apparatus, which generates its own class, a “gentry” of bureaucrats. He considers this class of state bureaucrats a major problem facing the future socialist project, as it could grant privileges that reproduce bourgeois proletarian inequalities, and it could dangerously result in a concentration of power with its own logic of social dynamics and relations of domination replicating the class stalemates ingrained in the institutions of the bourgeois state. The rise of state bureaucracy is often what Lenin means by the alienation of the state; he sees the legal 8 Ibid. “The key premiss of State and Revolution,” Zizek writes, “is that you cannot fully ‘democratize’ the State; the State ‘as such’, in its very notion, is a dictatorship of one class over another; […] [and] insofar as we still dwell within the domain of the State, we are legitimately entitled to exercise full violent terror, since, within this domain, every democracy is a fake.” Ibid. While Zizek himself refers to Lenin's Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power? as quoted in Neil Harding's Leninism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), it is a reference which seems quite unaware of this particular text's overarching vision of a radically democratized state apparatus. Zizek, “Afterword: Lenin’s Choice,” 293. By contrast, Kevin Anderson gives a much more sensitive reading of Lenin's formulations of state power written immediately prior to and after October 1917, emphasizing Lenin's interest in direct democracy and his insistence on grounding the new state order in the soviets' grassroots forms of self-governance. "State and Revolution: Subjectivity, Grassroots Democracy, and the Critique of Bureaucracy,” Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism, 148-169. 9 5 machine as prone to insulating a class of bureaucrats, granting them administrative power and placing them “above” the ordinary people.10 And yet, Lenin finds in capitalist state bureaucracy the most essential conditions for overcoming bureaucratic privilege, for the dissolution of the state machine and for the complete socialization of the whole. “The development of capitalism,” he states, “creates the preconditions that enable really ‘all’ to take part in the administration of the state. Some of these preconditions are: universal literacy, […] the ‘training and disciplining’ of millions of workers by the huge, complex, socialized apparatus of the postal service, railways, big factories, large-scale commerce, banking, etc., etc.”11 And further: Capitalist culture has created large-scale production, factories, railways, the postal service, telephones, etc., and on this basis the great majority of the functions of the old “state power” have become so simplified and can be reduced to such exceedingly simple operations of registration, filing and checking that they can be easily performed by every literate person, can quite easily be performed for ordinary “workmen’s wages,” and that these functions can (and must) be stripped of every shadow of privilege, and every semblance of “official grandeur.”12 The capitalist system has provided the social infrastructure and the level of literacy that would enable anyone to perform the regulating functions of the state; people would not need to acquire specialized knowledge to enhance the efficiency of the social body; rather, every person would be schooled and gradually accustomed to the habit of performing their bureaucratic duties. Thus, while giving rise to a modern state bureaucracy and the inequalities generated by its privileges, the capitalist mode of production has also provided a way out of it—it contains the conditions and the instruments for its own overcoming. Such slow cultivation of social practice […] will of itself lead to [the] gradual “withering away” of all bureaucracy, to the gradual creation of an order—an order without inverted commas, an order bearing no similarity to wage slavery—an order under which the functions of control and accounting, becoming more and more simple, will be performed by each in turn, will then become a habit and will finally die out as the special functions of a special section of the population.13 Lenin sees in such gradual habituation a possibility for a collective—in fact, total— subjectivation: it would eventually “become universal, general and popular; and there will be no getting away from it, there will be ‘nowhere to go.’ The whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory, with equality of labor and pay.”14 What happens, in the process of forging practices of such all-encompassing social subjection, to the political institutions of the state, and consequently, to the idea of politics itself? Bureaucracy and parliamentarism often appear as synonyms in State and Revolution. Lenin shows little respect for the democratic parliamentary system with its division between the people on the one 10 Lenin, Collected Works, 25: 391. Ibid., 473. 12 Ibid., 420-21. 13 Ibid., 426. 14 Ibid., 474. 11 6 hand, and on the other, a class of political elite involved in a “permanent shuffle” that strives to “get near the ‘pie’ [and] the lucrative and honourable posts.”15 The privileged status of state officials creates an insurmountable wall that separates the people from their institutions. Further, and more importantly, sovereign power has slipped away from the legislative body and fallen to the executive branches of the state: the “division of labor” between legislative and executive powers has turned parliaments into “mere talking shops,” degraded to the role of “fooling the common people” rather than actually running the state. By mutating into a monstrous bureaucratic edifice, bourgeois democratic parliamentarism has defeated its ends—namely, providing popular democratic governance and attending to the needs of the populace. Lenin looks back at the historical experience of the Commune to offer a script for alternative state organization. He brings Marx’s analysis of the Commune in The Civil War in France to remind us that during the Commune, there was “a gigantic replacement of certain institutions by other institutions of a fundamentally different type.”16 That would mean, in a Hegelian fashion, that “‘quantity [is] being transformed into quality’: democracy, introduced as fully and consistently as it is at all conceivable, is transformed from a bourgeois democracy into a proletarian democracy; from the state (=a special force for the suppression of a particular class) into something which is no longer the state proper.”17 Or again: “We cannot imagine democracy, even proletarian democracy, without representative institutions, but we can and must imagine democracy without parliamentarism.”18 This line will be further explored in Can the Bolsheviks Retain Power?, written clearly in conjunction with State and Revolution, where Lenin develops his thoughts on how the replacement of one set of institutions by another entails the possibility of a massive subversion of the modern bourgeois apparatus and its reconversion into a broadly accessible system, into a set of social duties exercised and managed collectively and democratically.19 Lenin is eager to position himself against those who suggest that abolishing the state would be an act sufficient in itself: Abolishing bureaucracy at once, everywhere and completely, is out of the question. It is a utopia. But to smash the old bureaucratic machine at once and to begin immediately to construct a new one that will make possible the gradual abolition of all bureaucracy—this is not a utopia, it is the experience of the Commune, the direct and immediate task of the revolutionary proletariat.20 One of the daunting tasks of the socialist state is then to devise alternative methods and provide different incentives to compel subjects to exercise collectively and collaboratively the regulatory functions of the state. This will also require that politically formulated majority-minority oppositions slowly dissipate into an order of productive self-governing social interactions. Lenin contends that majority governance constantly reinscribes practices of domination, and moreover, 15 Ibid., 423-24. Ibid., 419. 17 Ibid., 419. 18 Ibid., 424. 19 Lenin, “Can the Bolsheviks Retain Power?,” in Collected Works, 26: 87-136. 20 Lenin, Collected Works, 25: 425. 16 7 it fails to engage the overwhelming numbers of overworked “wage-slaves,” who are politically disillusioned, alienated, or barred from political life.21 What is this largest proportion of politically conscious and active wage slaves that has so far been recorded in capitalist society? One million members of the SocialDemocratic Party—out of fifteen million wage-workers! Three million organized in trade unions—out of fifteen million! Democracy for an insignificant minority, democracy for the rich—that is the democracy of capitalist society. If we look more closely into the machinery of capitalist democracy, we see everywhere […] restriction after restriction upon democracy, [which] exclude and squeeze out the poor from politics, from active participation in democracy.22 In this sense, the “majority” in parliament is not necessarily the majority of those suffering in poverty, and the bourgeois state is therefore no guarantee for democracy in the full sense of the word. In fact, at some point along the process of revolutionary transformation, a “truly complete democracy [will] become possible, a democracy without any exceptions whatsoever. And only then will democracy begin to wither away.”23 This means that democracy will be extended to “such an overwhelming majority of the population” that notions of majority and minority will become unnecessary and obsolete, together with thinking in the liberal terms of democracy altogether. A heterogeneous but cohesive social fabric will replace all division, together with the need for coercion, violence, and oppression: “People will gradually become accustomed to observing the elementary rules of social intercourse that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years in all copy-book maxims. They will become accustomed to observing them without force, without coercion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for coercion called the state.”24 Similarly, the category of bourgeois right, which preserves and reproduces social fragmentation and structural social inequalities, will become obsolete. The atomized category of the individual connected to the whole through the abstract body of the state is simply a segregating mechanism, a technique of severing the concrete ways in which humans are materially and socially interconnected. The state, in turn, will slowly disintegrate into a set of “habits” and chains of productive collaborative activity, where the population will become “accustomed to observing the necessary rules of social intercourse when there is no exploitation, when there is nothing that arouses indignation, evokes protest and revolts, and creates the need for suppression.”25 Recalling Marx from The Poverty of Philosophy, Lenin concludes that political power will become unthinkable, and as a consequence, there will be no need for a political state to regulate politically framed conflicts and antagonisms. Lenin describes how oppositional politics will disappear as a mode of possible human interaction, and with it, politics in general: “At a certain stage in the process,” he argues, “the state which is withering may be called a non-political state.”26 21 Ibid., 460. Ibid., 460-61. 23 Ibid., 462. 24 Ibid., 462. 25 Ibid., 462. 26 Ibid., 438. 22 8 One should note here that the power under discussion is political, not just any form of power— Lenin makes a point to note that transition to what he defines as the higher phase of socialism is not about eradicating all power, but about utilizing those means of power that interpellate and govern individual action in concert with the social whole, while eliminating both the need for violence and the prohibitive elements of the law. He expands, [W]e are convinced that […] the need for violence against people in general, for the subordination of one man to another, and of one section of the population to another, will vanish altogether since people will become accustomed to observing the elementary conditions of social life without violence and without subordination.27 It is through this slow withering away—of politics, of juridical rule, of the parliamentary regime, and of state-administrative practices that enable inequality and privilege—that Lenin finds the realization of “true” freedom. As state governance develops its alternative forms, it would eradicate all need for conflict and violence, and consequently, the need for coercion—these are all to fade into a realm of impossibility. Society would then move towards the rise of social power. “As soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom,” Lenin quotes from Engels’ letter to Bebel, “the state as such ceases to exist.”28 Only then would one be able to think of the population in a holistic way, as a continuous social entity: a “world commune” or “community,” as Lenin’s calls it, which would have achieved its own emancipation. A totalizing gesture clearly structures Lenin's theory of the state, and it remains the most wishful aspect of his vision. Lenin is strangely unable to imagine that this uniformly coherent social fabric may only be possible at the expense of a negated and suppressed remainder, at the cost of an unimaginable “outside” drawing the contours of the very imaginary of the social. He could not foresee that the process of cohering the whole may create an externality that would haunt the integrity of the social—with a threat of return. It has been suggested that it was precisely these outsides—the desire for capitalism condemned and walled off, the brutal state atrocities covered in silence, and the danger of having a bureaucracy evolve into an end in itself—that haunted the socialist regimes and made their way back with a vengeance. I return to these questions below. Most important here is the way State and Revolution formulates a circularity of power that renders the coercive and juridical institutions of the state all but unnecessary. It picks up the opposition between capital and labor as a starting point to formulate an alternative practice of governance and a form of power that aspires to eradicate oppositions between the state and the social, between majority and minority, between oppressed and oppressors, and to imagine a practice of governance where violence and coercive control would be unnecessary—a social order that would make resistance unthinkable. What Foucault, some fifty years later, articulated in the form of critique of the liberal state in his writings on governmentality, Lenin in State and Revolution grasped as a vision of alternative state power and a possibility for alternative social governance dormant in the capitalist mode of production. 27 28 Ibid., 456. Ibid., 440. 9 The Revolution as an Historical Becoming Lenin’s writings have often been dismissed as sheer deterministic statements about the historical necessity of the revolution and the inevitability of the socialist future. Yet, his urgent and instructive voice throughout, his insistent, systematic attacks on every “false” articulation of the social movement and every “mistaken” interpretation of Marx’s words show his keen awareness that this delicate, precarious human project lies in the ambiguous space between collective human agency and a chain of historical openings. Lenin’s language betrays a sense of mission, a calling; his pamphlets, letters, telegrams, and orders summon and steer rather than describe and analyze. The imperative force of his voice, permeated with anxiety and urgency throughout, suggests that there is very little margin for error. It betrays the pressing feeling that, as Georgy Lukács eloquently phrased it in a book published in 1924 on the occasion of Lenin’s death, a “chance” may be missed, a chance to seize on the fragile possibility of driving history into a daring human vision.29 The slightest missteps along the way—the determinist predictions of the orthodox Marxists, the different forms of Bernsteinian opportunism, the anti-authoritarian doctrines of the anarchists—could sidetrack the revolutionary becoming into either the stalemate of reenacting the experiences of exploitation or the dead-end of constant utopian deferrals into the future. Lenin knows quite well that utopian and opportunistic leanings are inevitable in the process, as are the infinite and unpredictable historical situations in which struggles inevitably find themselves. Only theoretical rigor combined with accurate analysis of the concrete historical situations can guide us through the labyrinth of historical openings and enable us to discern and mobilize the revolutionary potentials hiding in the diversity of social forces. For Lukács this was the ultimate enactment of Marx’s philosophy of praxis, the “final elimination of all utopianism, the concrete fulfillment of the content of Marx’s program: a theory become practical.”30 Marx saw that the capitalist mode of production—together with the capitalist world market— enables a totality of social interactivity that provides the preconditions for global social interconnectedness and a world-historical development. As a result, seemingly disconnected social movements may, in fact, be a result of larger historical dynamics. Social forces can therefore no longer be seen as isolated and examined in themselves; rather, they must be analyzed in relation to one another, each from the point of its own historical context. This is where critical knowledge gains instrumental value: a careful, sensitive analysis of the historical contingency of social phenomena gives enormous agency to humans. If history is to belong to humanity, the political value of the ever-changing social forces needs to be correctly identified and constantly redeployed in view of the larger purpose of the revolutionary struggle. This is what prompts Lenin to distinguish between “abstract” theoretical analysis and concrete political tasks and to bring the question of organization and tactics to the forefront of the revolution. Back in 1924, Lukács called this kind of knowledge a revolutionary Realpolitik, but also a “world historical responsibility.”31 It is the responsibility of having grasped a precarious possibility—to bring about, for the first time in the course of history, a better human life and a present that belongs to the oppressed. The proletarian class, as Lukács shows in his History and 29 Georgy Lukacs, Lenin: A Study of the Unity of His Thought (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1971), 34. Ibid., 73. 31 Ibid., 34. 30 10 Class Consciousness, is the only collective historical subject that embodies the unity of the social at this historical juncture. Only the proletarian class, as the subject-object of the historical process, is capable of walking humanity up this narrow path. As a result of the rationalization of the labor process, of the specialization and fragmentation of knowledge and human activity, and of the commodification of needs, the bourgeois subject has acquired a fragmented and reified knowledge of reality that he cannot transcend. Plugged into a rationalized production process that is increasingly preexisting and self-sufficient, the bourgeois subject finds himself gradually deprived of all agency, his activity progressively becoming more passive, his thought more contemplative. Only the working class can surpass the reified and contemplative stance of the bourgeoisie and restore the integrity of the fragmented social whole. “Capitalist society is— immediately—the same for both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat,” Lukács observes in History and Class Consciousness, “but […] this same reality employs the motor of class interests to keep the bourgeoisie imprisoned within the immediacy while forcing the proletariat to go beyond it.”32 Confronted with the “brute fact of the most elementary gratification of his needs,” with his own exploitation and misery, the worker is able to “[perceive] the split of his being preserved in the brutal form of what is in its whole tendency a slavery without limit.”33 The irreducibly unique, accidental nature of life clashes with the rational, quantified, and systematized process of capitalist production in the experience of the worker; his labor is objectified and quantified in a regime of exchange value; the needs crucial for his survival are only available to him in the forms of commodities. Hence he embodies—in his physical, living being, in his material needs, and in the material liminality of his human constitution—the very historical contradictions that capitalism produces. This is how the proletarian class is able to grasp the material and sociohistorical preconditions for its own existence and gain self-knowledge as a subject, i.e. become conscious as a class. Proletarian class consciousness is “the last consciousness in the history of mankind,” Lukács reminds us; “the revolutionary victory of the proletariat does not imply, as with the former classes, the immediate realization of the socially given existence of the class, but, as the young Marx clearly saw and defined, its self-annihilation.”34 The working class is the only historical subject that can overcome itself as a class. Its practical revolutionary activity dissipates antitheses between subject and object, thought and action, theory and practice, and furls the revolutionary drive into the historical present. Its action abolishes all fragmentation, transforms into historical reality the potentials of social collectivity, and brings into being the social whole dwelling in the industrial mode of production. Towards the end of History and Class Consciousness Lukács locates the agency of the revolution, of the emancipatory restoration of the collective, in an understanding of a Party as a vanguard force detached from the masses, and the text’s multiple tensions produced by Lukács’ idealist residuals have been noted repeatedly. Much later, in his famous 1967 preface to the longawaited second edition of the book, he admits to committing “ethical idealism” and “party elitism” in his loyalty to Hegel.35 Responding to his main critics, he also corrects himself with 32 Georgy Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1972), 164. 33 Ibid., 166. 34 Ibid., 70- 71. 35 Martin Jay was among the first to elaborate on how Lukacs’ concepts of fragmentation and totality have made the somewhat incomplete transition from a bourgeois to a materialist understanding. “Georg Lukacs and the Origins of 11 regards to the omission of the central question of labor and the economy in his account of the totality of the historical process and refines his views on the relationship between objectification and human alienation. There he stresses the importance of labor in Marx’s radical reformulation of the Hegelian dialectic: it is only with the insertion of labor as the mediator between human activity and nature in the historical process that we can finally rid ourselves of the last vestiges of ontological conceptions of nature, as well as deliver a successful critique of deterministic reductions of Marx’s method, reductions framing the economy as an objective process with internal laws, independent of human activity.36 This was certainly the vision driving his unfinished Ontology of Social Being, an ambitious eight-part project he undertook towards the end of his life.37 Yet it was as early as 1924, in his work on Lenin, that already signs of a practical, materialist conception of the historical process as totality appear. Lukács undertook the study of Lenin without being aware of the latter’s philosophical fragments on Hegel’s Logic, written in 1914 but published only in the early 1930s, nor, it seems, of State and Revolution.38 This is where he emphasizes the crucial importance of the material reorganization of human life for restoring the fractured social whole, and where he realizes that the concept of totality can become relevant for a project of collective emancipation only if it recognizes the corporeal and material dimensions of human activity. State and Revolution takes this point to its most radical end, which Antonio Negri has called Lenin’s “revolutionary invention of the body.”39 Once the proletariat’s self-annihilation restores the fragmented whole, violence and coercive control would be unnecessary. State governance, then, would be primarily focused on regulating matter and productive activity to craft a set of productive subordinations—so that “there would be nobody to be suppressed and no opposition to be faced.”40 Socialist Freedom and Socialist Subjects Socialist critiques have detected the fictional category of the individual nested in the liberal notion of freedom, an individual who knows freedom only by virtue of an abstract bond, objectivized in a system of rights and duties. Right cannot be an abstract category separated from the historical materiality of human life. “Freedom cannot represent a value in itself (anymore than socialization),” Lukács notes in History and Class Consciousness.41 It should not be an the Western Marxist Paradigm,” in Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukacs to Habermas (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 81-127. 36 As Lukacs himself noted, the project was primarily concerned with restoring the place of totality in the conception of the revolutionary process. However, omitting labor as the “metabolic interaction between society and nature” meant for him that “the most important real pillars of the Marxist view of the world disappear and the attempt to deduce the ultimate revolutionary implications of Marxism in as radical a fashion as possible is deprived of a genuinely economic foundation. […]In consequence, my account of the contradictions of capitalism as well as of the revolutionisation of the proletariat is unintentionally colored by an overriding subjectivism.” Ibid., xviii. 37 Lukacs managed to complete the preliminary drafts of only three parts, one on Hegel, one on Marx, and one on labor. The drafts have undergone intense revisions thanks to the critical responses, intense discussions, and numerous disagreements with his closest students. For a glimpse of the process, see “Notes on Lukacs’ Ontology” written and published collectively by his students Ferenc Feher, Agnes Heller, Gyorgy Markus and Mihaly Vajda. See also the response to the notes by Gaspar M. Tamas, “Lukacs’ Ontology: A Metacritical Letter,” in Lukacs Reappraised, ed. Agnes Heller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 154-176. 38 Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, xx. 39 Antonio Negri, “What to Do Today with What Is to Be Done?, or Rather: The Body of the General Intellect,” in Lenin Reloaded, 297-307. 40 Lenin, Collected Works, 25: 464 41 Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, 292. 12 ideological category but a social reality carried out by the practical social activity of humans. It is only when antinomies between rights and duties, leader and masses, political action and passive reflection, thought and action dissolve in the practical social activity of humans that freedom will become a lived human experience.42 Lenin’s work demonstrates keen awareness that such freedom-as-practice would need to recognize the priority of the social nowhere else but in the activity of labor. Labor, that most fundamental and creative of all human activities, that collective history-making human force, cannot and should not be objectified, quantified through the mediating abstraction of money, and offered for exchange. Socialism needs to restore the unmediated social meaning of labor and need: “there will be no need for society, in distributing products, to regulate the quantity to be received by each; each will take freely ‘according to his needs.’”43 Because the inevitable sociality of labor is already implicated in industrial development, “freeing” humans would always require some form of subordination on their part, a subordination that embraces the particular forms of social dependency of industrial modernization. In State and Revolution, Lenin rejects arguments claiming that autonomy can exist in itself, independently from, and opposed to authority. “Authority and autonomy are relative terms,” he opposes the anarchists who, fixated on a coercive, mechanistic concept of a state opposed to an organismic notion of society, proclaim themselves against all authority, all power.44 He considers such dichotomies to be dangerously dehistoricizing. “The sphere of their application [i.e. that of autonomy and authority] varies with the various phases of development, [and] it is absurd to take them as absolutes,” he states, while defending Engels’ critique of anarchist anti-authoritarianism.45 Engels, he continues, simply “ridicules the muddled ideas of the Proudhonists, who called themselves ‘anti-authoritarians,’ i.e., repudiated all authority, all subordination, all power.”46 By prescribing innate self-governing abilities to the social body, anarchists naturalize the social experience and move further away from the historical realization of the revolution, into deeper utopianism. Against the autonomists Lenin insists that any form of autonomy or freedom in the context of the industrial mode of production is inconceivable without the circulation of some form of power: “Take a factory, a railway, a ship on the high seas, said Engels: is it not clear that not one of these complex technical establishments, based on the use of machinery and the systematic cooperation of many people, could function without a certain amount of subordination and, consequently, without a certain amount of authority or power?”47 Rather chillingly, Lenin’s vision asserts that, given the inevitable historical conditions of industrial production, the experience of human emancipation can be ruthlessly engineered, and that such experience of freedom is the indispensable dimension of a rational project of social regulation and subject production. A new formulation of autonomy emerges here: autonomy that recognizes the radical dependency of the subject, where the subject’s agency can never circulate outside a certain mode of subordination. Because Lenin’s freedom is always already a category carrying an element of 42 Jay, “Lukacs and the Western Marxist Paradigm,” 110-111. Lenin, Collected Works, 25: 469. 44 Ibid., 437. 45 Ibid., 437. 46 Ibid., 436. 47 Ibid., 436-37. 43 13 corporeality and socialization, an emancipatory project is imaginable only if it recognizes human practice as subordinate to concrete forms of material organization. Subjects and their Material Reality If this is the case, then—if the socialist subject’s experience of autonomy is inevitably tied to a form of subjection determined by some profound recognition of the inevitability of the social and its concrete material order—what then compels subjects to accept and perform their own regulation, to enable their own dependence, urging them to enact their own social subjection? At the end of his Society Must be Defended, Foucault suggests that the socialist state could be studied as a biopolitical state. He makes the tempting observation that what has evaded the scrutiny of socialist critique were precisely the biopolitical practices of the liberal state, and hypothesizes that the socialist projects unwittingly imported the unquestioned racist premises of the biopolitical modalities of power, redeployed them, and brought them to their logical extremes in the form of purification, extermination, and cover-up murder. “[Socialism] inevitably reaffected or reinvested the very power-mechanisms constituted by the capitalist state or the industrial state. […] It has in fact taken [biopower] up, developed, reimplanted, and modified it in certain respects, but it has certainly not reexamined its basis or its modes of working.” But does one want to call this biopolitics proper with absolute certainty?48 Socialists were obsessed with producing the socialist citizen and the “new human” through normative practices that extended beyond what could be strictly called biopolitical technologies, concerned with maximizing efficiency, productivity, and profit.49 Recently, historians of Stalinism have attempted to gain sight of the complex apparatuses of socialist governance employed in remaking the Soviet citizen, to examine the state’s interpellating mechanisms and subjectivating practices, to refocus on the multiple agencies and self-investments that made possible the new social order. Stalinist rule deployed discourses and knowledges towards reeducating and remodeling the self in intricate ways, and their intricacies may not be done justice to if they are easily called “ideological”—in the commonly used sense of 48 Interestingly, a sense of anxiety has prefaced Foucault’s arguments on state socialism. Here is the full quote: “I find this very difficult to talk about. To speak in such terms is to make enormous claims. To prove the point would really take a whole series of lectures (and I would like to do them). But at least let me just say this: In general terms, it seems to me—and here, I am speculating somewhat—that to the extent that it does not, in the first instance, raise the economic or juridical problems of types of property ownership or modes of production—or to the extent that the problem of the mechanics of power or the mechanisms of power is not posed or analyzed—[socialism] inevitably reaffected or reinvested the very power-mechanisms constituted by the capitalist State or the industrial State.” Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (New York: Picador, 2003), 261. 49 Recently there have there been a few attempts to develop Foucaultian analyses of the various biopolitical technologies of the socialist states, among them Susan Greenhalgh, Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng's China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Governing China's Population: from Leninist to Neoliberal Biopolitics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); see also Momchil Hristov, “Biopolitiques de l'habitat socialiste. Le privé comme objet gouvernemental dans les politiques de l'Etat bulgare des années 1950 et 1960,” in Histoire@Politique: Politique, Culture, Societe 7 (2009), http://www.histoire-politique.fr/index.php?numero=07&rub=dossier&item=70, accessed March 6, 2009. As I think this work opens much needed and extremely valuable horizons for the studies of socialism, I am interested in working towards a slow and difficult elaboration of a theory of productive socialist governance that would begin with a careful theoretical exploration of the disjunctures between the liberal and socialist governing modes while keeping sight of their overlapping dimensions. 14 the word.50 But most importantly, to define the socialist state entirely and only as a biopolitical state would miss one of its most defining governing principles: that of administering material reality. Lenin argues that reorganizing radically the anatomy of material reality, of labor and ownership—abolishing private property and building new practices of collective, cooperative, and communal ownership—will bring about a radically different—socialist—subjectivity. Engels’ famous sentence from Anti-Duhring, “[t]he government of persons is replaced by the administration of things, and by the conduct of processes of production,” is reinterpreted again to suggest that besides—or perhaps, prior to—regulating human bodies, devising measures, deploying norms, and rewarding behavior to encourage the productive forces of populations, the socialist state would be interested in the management of “things.”51 Lenin’s commitment to an uncompromising materialism finally resurfaces here: administering over things, that is, having control over the means of production and distribution of things, bears the capacity to alter the way humans relate to each other, to generate the necessary effects of productivity, to outline the contours of possible human action, and to define the modes of intelligible social interaction. Redrawing the limits of material human activity will also redefine what is socially thinkable and doable, what transpires as legible social reality. He insists: “[W]e are entitled to say with the fullest confidence that the expropriation of capitalists will inevitably result in an enormous development of the productive forces of human society.”52 Although Lenin’s certainty is somewhat unsettling, it should not be read, as it has often been done, as a form of evolutionary economic determinism. He does not offer a teleological revolutionary narrative which unfolds according to objective laws of historical development. On the contrary, his certainty comes from the theoretical position that the economy can-not be understood as an 50 Indebted to Foucault and earlier revisionist histories of Stalin’s era, Stephen Kotkin and Oleg Kharkhordin have made some of the most decisive steps to shift the focus towards the study of the Soviet subject. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). See also Igal Halfin and Jochen Hellbeck’s analysis of the place of the subject in Kotkin’s work, “Rethinking the Stalinist Subject: Stephen Kotkin’s Magnetic Mountain and the State of Soviet Historical Studies,” Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 3, 44 (1996): 456-63; Anna Krylova’s study of the liberal premises in notions of Soviet subjectivity in Western scholarship on Stalinism, “The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies,” in The Resistance Debate in Russian and Soviet History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003): 168-210. More recently, Jochen Hellbeck and Igal Halfin focus on the making of the Stalinist self on the basis of autobiographical sources and personal diaries. Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006); “Speaking out: Languages of Affirmation and Dissent in Stalinist Russia,” ed. Michael-David Fox, The Resistance Debate in Russian and Soviet History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003): 102-137; Igal Halfin, Terror In My Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003); From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000); One of the main concerns raised with regards to Halfin and Hellbeck’s work is the danger of committing the interpretive error of equating fully the structure of power and the agents that reproduce it, of seeing the subject as the full continuation, the “mirror image” of the words it utters, thus buying into the official Stalinist discourse. See for example Eric Naiman’s response to Halfin and Hellbeck, “On Soviet Subjects and the Scholars Who Make Them,” Russian Review 60, 3 (2001): 307-15; “Interview with Igal Halfin and Jochen Hellbeck,” Ab Imperio 3 (2002): 217-260 (in Russian); David L. Hoffmann, “Power, Discourse, and Subjectivity in Soviet History,” Ab Imperio 3 (2002): 273-284; Svetlana Boym, “How is the Soviet Subjectivity Made?,” Ab Imperio 3 (2000): 285-296 (in Russian). To open some of the impasses on the question of circularity, Alexei Yurchak offers a brilliant ethnographic study of the performative rearticulations of state ritual and official discourse during late socialism. Alexei Yurchak, Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006). 51 Engels, quoted by Lenin, Collected Works, 25: 396. 52 Lenin, Collected Works, 25: 468-69. 15 objective field external to human activity, subject to its own laws, cycles, and teleological movement that has the capacity to dictate historical development. Rather, labor, in its metabolic relationship to things, appears a historically agentic—and irreducibly collective—activity. This is why there are no historical predictions in his political vision. How long will it take?—he asks. That we don’t know: “[H]ow rapidly this development will proceed, how soon it will reach the point of breaking away from the division of labor, of transforming labor into ‘life’s prime want’—we do not and cannot know.”53 The arrival of the new social order cannot be “promised,” he cautions, and we have to always remember that this project is not an inevitability but requires enormous human will and human endeavor. If—and this “if” demands an extended historical process of conscious acting upon history; this “if” contains the monstrous machine of the dictatorship—if it succeeds, then and only then are we “entitled” to say that the socialist constellation will have begun: That is why we are entitled to speak only of the inevitable withering away of the state, emphasizing the protracted nature of the process and its dependence upon the rapidity f development of the higher phase of communism and leaving the question of the time required for, or the concrete forms of, the withering away quite open, because there is no material for answering these questions. 54 Deeply aware that the revolution is a daunting historical task, Lenin placed enormous emphasis on the conscious reorganization of the economy as the most important element of the revolutionary process. State and Revolution makes an important “scientific” distinction between the dictatorship of the proletariat, with its conscious and gradual reorganization of material activity, and the “higher phase” of socialism, or communism. Unlike Lukács, for whom the concept of collective consciousness always retains a fundamental place in the revolutionary process, Lenin saw the complete overcoming of capitalism in reaching beyond dialectical formulations of the revolutionary problem. Thus Lenin’s “higher phase” of socialism will have accomplished a slow process of forgetting: a forgetting that will have eradicated all consciousness of class oppression, opposition, and struggle, it will have sent the past into a state of amnesia that will have set history in motion and will have inaugurated us into the present. Socialist Materiality and Socialist Subjectivity Lenin could not imagine that this past may remain haunting the present, that it could linger in its ghostliness to both constitute and undermine the very integrity of the social. It was precisely bureaucratic privilege, the violent state, and the desire for capitalism that resurfaced during the various historical experiences of socialism almost without exception. Externalized behind the walls or covered in silence, they came back—to no one’s surprise, indeed—to haunt the wellintended blueprints, and eventually, to spell their spectacular demise. And yet, the irony does not lie in the fact of the failed blueprints subverted by their own totalizing assumptions. The irony is that socialisms endured throughout the twentieth century, and that they produced ineradicable histories. 53 54 Ibid., 469. Ibid., 469. 16 As anthropologist Katherine Verdery’s The Vanishing Hectare implies, a forgetting happened indeed.55 Her research on land restitution in post-socialist Romania captures the way the members of the Aurel Vlaici Village, while trying to reclaim their land nationalized by the socialist state, are confronted with an irrecuperable past: old, pre-socialist agricultural registries are missing, the actual owners are dead. Where state registries, blueprints, and notary acts are found, it is nearly impossible to restore the exact property lines on the ground: the sweeping reforms in socialist large-scale agriculture have completely wiped out bridges, roads, trees, and cornerstones previously marking the physical lines of property. Socialist modernization has converted even the measuring units of land. The newly-drawn boundaries have become a painful and continuous site of contestation: fences shift and hectares “vanish” overnight and the village community finds itself struggling with the paradoxical task of reconstructing something that does not exist anymore, of recreating an irretrievable past. Verdery’s work, a result of over a decade of close observations, is an excellent account of how the organization of material reality and productive forces, the different use of material resources and the social networks that govern their redistribution during socialism, participated in the production of the socialist subject, established the material conditions of and posited the material limits for the subject’s social self-realization. Among the pioneers of such work, Verdery approaches methodologically the system of property relations as a “cultural system, an organization of power, and [a set of] of social relations, all coming together in social processes.”56 Insisting that property regimes are “person-forming,” she looks at the categories of socialist ownership to bring into focus the ways in which the specific organization of the material domain had provided an active terrain for the subjects’ social making and remaking. A property regime, she states, “being a relation among persons with respect to values,” defines “person55 Katherine Verdery, The Vanishing Hectare: Property and Value in Postsocialist Transylvania (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003). 56 Verdery, The Vanishing Hectare, 47. There is already an extensive body of literature on the political economies of socialism and their everyday aspects, which cannot be referenced exhaustively here. Janos Kornai’s certainly foundational work distinguishes between two tendencies in the histories of socialist political economies: the classical system and its reform versions. Janos Kornai, Economies of Shortage (Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishers, 1980); The Socialist System (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); Among the classical analyses remain Burawoy’s comparative study of the socialist and postfordist modes of factory production in his The Politics of Production: Factory Regimes under Capitalism and State Socialism (London: Verso, 1985). Katherine Verdery’s earlier work has had tremendous influence on advancing our understanding of relationships between socialism’s ownership regimes, its subjects, and the socialist state. See What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), as well as Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery, eds., Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Everyday Life in the Postsocialist World (Boulder: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999). Here is some additional work that reinforces the shift of inquiry towards the interpellative agency of property regimes, towards relationships between ownership practices and the production of one’s sense of autonomy, boundedness, and collectivity: Gerald Creed, Domesticating Revolution: From Socialist Reform to Ambivalent Transition in a Bulgarian Village (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998); Caroline Humphrey’s colossal ethnographic case study of socialist collective ownership and organization of labor Marx Went Away but Karl Stayed Behind. Karl Marx Collective: Economy, Society, and Religion in a Siberian Collective Farm (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), as well as her more recent The Unmaking of Soviet Life: Everyday Economies After Socialism (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2002); Katherine Verdery and Caroline Humphrey, eds., Property in Question: Value Transformation in the Global Economy. (Oxford Berg Press, 2007); see also Elizabeth Dunn’s insightful work on remaking the laboring subjects in the process of reorganizing factory production from socialism to capitalism, Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004). 17 entities.”57 Put differently, the organization of the material domain is a relation-forming medium and a means of interpellating the self in relation to a collective order; it draws the conditions of possibility and impossibility for one’s self-realization as a social being, it defines one’s sense of boundedness and autonomy, dependency and power.58 One of Verdery’s most significant observations in terms of our main point here—to inquire how socialist subjectivities came about in relation to the specific material order of the socialist state— is that the socialist system did not only reorganize the means of production and appropriation, but also transformed property law. The latter, which had previously legitimated entitlements to the material domain by granting legal rights to its subjects, was limited to a set of administrative practices managing the use of material assets. Socialism in Verdery’s account thus “superseded” property rights and put into place a huge bureaucracy that governed the land and its use by administrative measures, decrees, etc. It granted various forms of administrative autonomy to employees and public entities. Such administrative autonomy (control, administration, usufruct rights, etc.) defined the relations of subjects to land and all other material resources and goods, and without giving them a right to ownership, it drew the contours of subjects’ responsibilities over the material sphere and the forms of entitlement to products of collective labor. An administrative “right” should not be confused with usufruct right, Verdery warns. It was much more than this: subjects who were granted the administrative management of a farm or a segment of factory production were subordinate to the state; however, their autonomy was so broad and undefined that they could use the farm indefinitely and have substantial discretion over the distribution of goods. “The rights were so extensive,” Verdery explains, “as to approximate those of ownership […], yet the power to exercise them was premised on the prior existence of the state’s power as owner, from which the administrator’s power was derived.”59 In other words, without owning it, managers had a sovereignty of sorts over the state’s material resources; similarly, material resources and goods, while belonging to the state, became easily “appropriable” through widely practiced, in fact ubiquitous, “informal” ways of acquiring products of collective labor. Verdery observes that the challenge of managing land productivity and redistributing its resources in a context of shortage or “soft-budget constraints” generated by the planned economy required both hoarding and constant bartering and exchange of raw materials, machines, produced goods, even land, resulting in the unprecedented mobility of the material domain and its dynamic, unstable boundaries of ownership and use. Such dynamic management and movement of resources, however, was made possible through informal practices of exchanging favors and gifts, forming elaborate horizontal networks of collaboration and hierarchies of power 57 Verdery, The Vanishing Hectare, 172-73. Verdery gives a detailed and sensitive account of how intricately the loosely defined relationship between state and cooperative property was negotiated, and how productivity was managed through practices of informal reciprocal exchange of material resources. What she calls the “two-tiered system of material boundaries” of socialist material organization consisted of personal ownership on the one hand, and state and cooperative ownership on the other. Personal possession consisted of land, real estate and other material resources (a car, animals, etc); it had strict limitations over its quantity and its economic use to prevent any possibility for accumulating profit out of it. While “private property” still figured both as a legal category and as a regime of production and ownership (these are “petty commodity producers” such as tailors, carpenters, and freelancers of sorts, usually in the crafts and specialized manual labor), it amounted to a negligible section of the national economic activity, having been projected to dissipate slowly. Ibid, 70. 59 Ibid., 57. 58 18 which, while destabilizing the boundedness of property, remained quite resilient over time. “Extended networks of reciprocity,” Verdery observes, “moved products upward, laterally, and downward, all in the service of collecting people whose goodwill, trades of raw material, protection, patronage, and effort would put socialism’s productive means into motion.”60 Using material resources and appropriating products of labor in socialism was therefore not so much a legally defined activity, governed through a system of rights and restrictions. It was rather a web of complex negotiations, dependent on informal social networks, on cultural practices of collaboration and reciprocal exchange.61 Analyses like Verdery’s help us make several important points: First, the socialist subject-state relationship structured within itself a crucial ambiguity, an ambiguity which seriously challenges attempts to draw strict boundaries between the individual and the collective, between public and private, between state and the social. Because boundaries between public management and personal use became highly permeable and virtually impossible to delineate, categories such as “corruption” and “conflict of interest” are often completely inadequate when viewed from the internal logic of socialist reality; when used in scholarship on socialism, such categories betray the liberal presumptions of the scholar more than they contribute to a careful and sensitive understanding. On the contrary, a strong continuity of state and subject existed, a continuity which nevertheless did not translate into a subject fully equated with the structure of power. Such continuity was marked by a high degree of negotiability. These flexible domains of agency permitted a heterogeneity of autonomous practices, which reconfigured the normative regimes of the state, while also reinstated the state's normative authority. Socialisms as Spectral Histories There is a reason why I have brought Verdery’s analysis into what began as a purely textual reading of Lenin’s conceptual formulations of the socialist state. Returning to and rethinking our conceptions of the theoretical foundations of the socialist states may add to a more careful understanding of those states’ modes of governance, and consequently, may contribute to a more subtle knowledge of the historical forms of productive social subordination and experience of autonomy during socialism. Historians and anthropologists have raised questions about subjectivity, everyday practice, and the multiplicity of social agencies to unsettle the stability of the totalitarian paradigm—and yet, totalitarianism’s political valence powerfully persists in the postsocialist constellations to enable the unrestrained reign of neoliberal politics, the massive privatization of the commons, and the widening gap between poverty and wealth. Jacques Derrida, in Specters of Marx, wrote that “whether we like it or not,” we already bear the mark of Marx’s messianic calling for a more just future. One may also want to add the mark of 60 Verdery, The Vanishing Hectare, 70. Much has been written on the formation of the ubiquitous “informal” practices of exchange, the amassment of social capital and status, and the emergence of inequalities as a result of the clumsy centralized distributive machine. Much of this work nevertheless retains or reproduces a state-society distinction in various ways, which Verdery cautiously circumvents. Recent Bourdieu-influenced sociological research, drawing from Janos Kornai's work on the political economy of socialism, has been incredibly valuable in capturing these self-reproducing networks of exchange and reciprocity, or “second networks,” sometimes seen as ubiquitous subversions responsible for the system's crash, other times as compensatory social mechanisms enabling its survival. 61 19 Lenin, the Lenin who managed to will the future into the present. Slavoj Zizek has called this Lenin the “Lenin-in-becoming,” “the Lenin whose fundamental experience was that of being thrown into a catastrophic new constellation in which old coordinates proved useless and who was thus compelled to reinvent Marxism.”62 We are marked by being heirs to the fact that the revolutionary attempt has taken place in history, that it can no longer be simply a vision because it has left an irreducible historical imprint. Derrida writes: Whatever one may think of the event, of the sometimes terrifying failures of that which was thus begun, of the techno-economic or ecological disasters, and the totalitarian perversions to which it gave rise (perversions that some have been saying for a long time are precisely not perversions, that is, they are not pathological and accidental corruptions but the necessary deployment of an essential logic present at the birth, of an originary disadjustment—let us say, for our part, in a too-elliptical fashion and without contradicting this hypothesis, they are the effect of an ontological treatment of the spectrality of the ghost), whatever one may think also of the trauma in human memory that may follow, this unique attempt took place. A messianic promise, even if it was not fulfilled, at least in the form in which it was uttered, even if it rushed headlong toward an ontological content, will have imprinted an inaugural and unique mark in history. And whether we like it or not, whatever consciousness we have of it, we cannot not be its heirs. There is no inheritance without a call to responsibility.63 Derrida insists that if we are to know ourselves, we need to recognize that we are history’s inadvertent creations—and this is what makes us history’s heirs. This inheritance comes with enormous responsibility: of both needing to know the dead (“one has to know,” Derrida insists) and of understanding the heterogeneity of that inheritance, of always being aware of the multiple, spectral, and never fully graspable—rather than singular, causal, and final—ways in which the dead bear on the living. Such responsibility would leave any historically-minded person deeply perplexed by the words of renowned Bulgarian philosopher Ivaylo Dichev from back in the early 1990s: The wall separated neither nations, nor cultures, nor natures of some sort; it was absolutely arbitrary, running between towns, houses, households: it vanished into thin air (except for souvenirs and tourist guidebooks), as if it had never existed. Thus there is nothing to learn from the fall of communism, no moral to be taken. The enemy left no corpse behind—you have ruined economies, killed people, polluted lands, but the transcendence as artifact is nowhere to be seen; the will to power disappeared in being defeated and one could ask oneself whether one’s life had been real at all.64 62 Zizek, “Introduction: Between the Two Revolutions,” in Revolution at the Gates, 11. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International (New York and London: Routledge, 1994), 92. 64 Ivaylo Dichev, as quoted by Susan Buck-Morss in Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia East and West (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2000), 242. A version of the quoted paper, delivered at the Dubrovnik conference in 1990, is published as “The Post-Paranoid Condition,” in Post-Theory, Games, and Discursive 63 20 By “transcendence as artifact” I take Dichev to mean the irreducible historicity of that reality, of history’s material-spectral resistance—the “corpse” and the “ghost,” in Derrida’s terms—which Dichev felt had vanished in the air, had left no significant material or social or cultural legacy. It is not clear what Dichev means by “real” when doubting his own lived experience, but his sense of dissolution persuasively illustrates how vitally the subject’s integrity depends upon the power he or she opposes. One should nevertheless acknowledge the force of his denial not only as symptomatic of the immediate post-1989 political condition, but also as immensely consequential for subsequent political development. His generation gave birth to the westwardlooking intellectual and political movements in Bulgaria which, calling for democracy and free markets, mobilized the progressive social forces to help bring down the authoritarian regimes in the late 1980s. What emerged as Bulgarian progressive politics and progressive intellectual thought after 1989 articulated itself by radically repudiating the Left project on the grounds of a narrow, predominantly Stalinist understanding of Marxist thought, by condemning its historical legacies, and by dismissing it as the disastrous failure of unattainable utopia. Interlaced with the peculiar meanings of the postsocialist Right and Left, a discredited “Marxism,” associated with all discourses and politics on the Left in general, became the constitutive outside of postsocialist critical inquiries. It set the outer boundaries of the politically speakable and imaginable to help a hegemony of neoliberal discourses and practices settle. For the last twenty years, social services and resources were privatized, the modern state’s collectively built infrastructure was expropriated, labor protection laws were dismantled, wealth consolidated, the jarring reality of extreme material disparities appeared, and the neoliberal logic permeated the sphere of education and cultural life without any challenge from within. Paradoxically, any possibility for retrieving critical thought on the Left remains locked in a self-defeating closure, delegitimated a priori—by its past. A postsocialist politics for social justice would therefore need to take the difficult road of rethinking the socialist legacies and their philosophical foundations not just to put a light on the terror, not just to reconcile the losses and move forward, not just to establish the truthnarratives and build the monuments to their victims, but to delve into their uneven, contradictory endeavors and reopen them for the future. Resistance: The Bulgarian Case, ed. Alexander Kiossev (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 10518. 21

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