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There is only one correct answer to those Leftist intellectuals who desperately await the arrival of a new revolutionary agent capable of instigating the long-expected radical social transformation. It takes the form of the old Hopi saying, with a wonderful Hegelian twist from substance to subject: "We are the ones we have been waiting for." (This is a version of Gandhi's motto: "Be yourself the change you want to see in the world.") Waiting for someone else to do the job for us is a way of rationalizing our inactivity. But the trap to be avoided here is that of a perverse self-instrumentalization: "we are the ones we have been waiting for" does not mean we have to discover how it is we are the agent predestined by fate (historical necessity) to perform the task--it means quite the opposite, namely that there is no big Other to rely on. In contrast to classical Marxism where "history is on our side" (the proletariat fulfils the predestined task of universal emancipation), in the contemporary constellation, the big Other is against us: left to itself, the inner thrust of our historical development leads to catastrophe, to apocalypse; what alone can prevent such calamity is then, pure voluntarism, in other words, our free decision to act against historical necessity. In a way, the Bolsheviks found themselves in a similar predicament at the end of the civil war in 1921: two years before his death, when it became clear that there would be no imminent European-wide revolution and that the idea of building socialism in one country was nonsense, Lenin wrote:
"What if the complete hopelessness of the situation, by stimulating the efforts of the workers and peasants tenfold, offered us the opportunity to create the fundamental requisites of civilization in a different way from that of the West European countries?" (V.I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 33, Moscow: Progress Publishers 1966, p. 479.
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