SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK
In his wonderful short text
‘Notes of a Publicist’—written in February 1922 when the Bolsheviks, after
winning the Civil War against all odds, had to retreat into the New Economic
Policy of allowing a much wider scope to the market economy and private
property—Lenin uses the analogy of a climber who must backtrack from his first
attempt to reach a new mountain peak to describe what retreat means in a
revolutionary process, and how it can be done without opportunistically
betraying the cause:
Let us picture to ourselves a
man ascending a very high, steep and hitherto unexplored mountain. Let us
assume that he has overcome unprecedented difficulties and dangers and has
succeeded in reaching a much higher point than any of his predecessors, but
still has not reached the summit. He finds himself in a position where it is
not only difficult and dangerous to proceed in the direction and along the path
he has chosen, but positively impossible. [1]
In these circumstances, Lenin
writes:
He is forced to turn back,
descend, seek another path, longer, perhaps, but one that will enable him to
reach the summit. The descent from the height that no one before him has
reached proves, perhaps, to be more dangerous and difficult for our imaginary
traveller than the ascent—it is easier to slip; it is not so easy to choose a
foothold; there is not that exhilaration that one feels in going upwards,
straight to the goal, etc. One has to tie a rope round oneself, spend hours
with an alpenstock to cut footholds or a projection to which the rope could be
tied firmly; one has to move at a snail’s pace, and move downwards, descend,
away from the goal; and one does not know where this extremely dangerous and
painful descent will end, or whether there is a fairly safe detour by which one
can ascend more boldly, more quickly and more directly to the summit.
It would only be natural for a
climber who found himself in such a position to have ‘moments of despondency’.
In all probability these moments would be more numerous and harder to bear if
he could hear the voices of those below, who ‘through a telescope and from a
safe distance, are watching his dangerous descent’: ‘The voices from below ring
with malicious joy. They do not conceal it; they chuckle gleefully and shout:
“He’ll fall in a minute! Serve him right, the lunatic!”.’ Others try to conceal
their malicious glee, behaving ‘more like Judas Golovlyov’, the notoriously
hypocritical landowner in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s novel, The Golovlyov Family:
They moan and raise their eyes
to heaven in sorrow, as if to say: ‘It grieves us sorely to see our fears
justified! But did not we, who have spent all our lives working out a judicious
plan for scaling this mountain, demand that the ascent be postponed until our
plan was complete? And if we so vehemently protested against taking this path,
which this lunatic is now abandoning (look, look, he has turned back! He is
descending! A single step is taking him hours of preparation! And yet we were
roundly abused when time and again we demanded moderation and caution!), if we
so fervently censured this lunatic and warned everybody against imitating and
helping him, we did so entirely because of our devotion to the great plan to
scale this mountain, and in order to prevent this great plan from being
generally discredited!’
Happily, Lenin continues, our
imaginary traveller cannot hear the voices of these people who are ‘true
friends’ of the idea of ascent; if he did, ‘they would probably nauseate
him’—‘And nausea, it is said, does not help one to keep a clear head and a firm
step, particularly at high altitudes.’
Of course, a metaphor does not
amount to proof: ‘every analogy is lame’. Lenin goes on to spell out the actual
situation confronting the infant Soviet republic:
Russia’s proletariat rose to a
gigantic height in its revolution, not only when it is compared with 1789 and
1793, but also when compared with 1871. We must take stock of what we have done
and what we have not as dispassionately, as clearly and as concretely as
possible. If we do that we shall be able to keep clear heads. We shall not
suffer from nausea, illusions, or despondency. After enumerating the
achievements of the Soviet state by 1922, Lenin explains what has not been
done:
But we have not finished building
even the foundations of socialist economy, and the hostile powers of moribund
capitalism can still deprive us of that. We must clearly appreciate this and
frankly admit it; for there is nothing more dangerous than illusions (and
vertigo, particularly at high altitudes). And there is absolutely nothing
terrible, nothing that should give legitimate grounds for the slightest
despondency, in admitting this bitter truth; for we have always urged and
reiterated the elementary truth of Marxism—that the joint efforts of the
workers of several advanced countries are needed for the victory of socialism.
We are still alone and in a backward country, a country that was ruined more
than others, but we have accomplished a great deal.
More than that, Lenin notes,
‘we have preserved intact the army of the revolutionary proletarian forces; we
have preserved its manoeuvring ability; we have kept clear heads and can
soberly calculate where, when and how far to retreat (in order to leap further
forward); where, when and how to set to work to alter what has remained
unfinished.’ And he concludes:
Those Communists are doomed
who imagine that it is possible to finish such an epoch-making undertaking as
completing the foundations of socialist economy (particularly in a small-peasant
country) without making mistakes, without retreats, without numerous
alterations to what is unfinished or wrongly done. Communists who have no
illusions, who do not give way to despondency, and who preserve their strength
and flexibility ‘to begin from the beginning’ over and over again in
approaching an extremely difficult task, are not doomed (and in all probability
will not perish).
Fail better
This is Lenin at his
Beckettian best, foreshadowing the line from Worstward Ho: ‘Try again. Fail
again. Fail better.’ [2] His
conclusion—to begin from the beginning—makes it clear that he is not talking
about merely slowing down and fortifying what has already been achieved, but
about descending back to the starting point: one should begin from the
beginning, not from the place that one succeeded in reaching in the previous
effort. In Kierkegaard’s terms, a revolutionary process is not a gradual progress
but a repetitive movement, a movement of repeating the beginning, again and
again.
Georg Lukács ended his
pre-Marxist masterwork Theory of the Novel with the famous sentence: ‘The
voyage is over, the travel begins.’ This is what happens at the moment of
defeat: the voyage of a particular revolutionary experience is over, but the
true travel, the work of beginning again, is just starting. This willingness to
retreat, however, in no way implies a non-dogmatic opening towards others, an
admission to political competitors, ‘We were wrong, you were right in your
warnings, so let us now join forces’. On the contrary, Lenin insists that such
moments are the times when utmost discipline is needed. Addressing the
Bolsheviks’ Eleventh Party Congress a few months later, in April 1922, he
argued:
When a whole army (I speak in
the figurative sense) is in retreat, it cannot have the same morale as when it
is advancing. At every step you find a certain mood of depression . . . That is
where the serious danger lies; it is terribly difficult to retreat after a
great victorious advance, for the relations are entirely different. During a
victorious advance, even if discipline is relaxed, everybody presses forward on
his own accord. During a retreat, however, discipline must be more conscious
and is a hundred times more necessary, because, when the entire army is in
retreat, it does not know or see where it should halt. It sees only retreat;
under such circumstances a few panic-stricken voices are, at times, enough to
cause a stampede. The danger here is enormous. When a real army is in retreat,
machine-guns are kept ready, and when an orderly retreat degenerates into a
disorderly one, the command to fire is given, and quite rightly, too.
The consequences of this
stance were very clear for Lenin. In answer to ‘the sermons’ on the nep preached
by Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries—‘The revolution has gone too far.
What you are saying now we have been saying all the time, permit us to say it
again’—he told the Eleventh Party Congress:
We say in reply: ‘Permit us to
put you before a firing squad for saying that. Either you refrain from
expressing your views, or, if you insist on expressing your political views
publicly in the present circumstances, when our position is far more difficult
than it was when the white guards were directly attacking us, then you will
have only yourselves to blame if we treat you as the worst and most pernicious
white-guard elements.’ [3]
This ‘red terror’ should
nonetheless be distinguished from Stalinist ‘totalitarianism’. In his memoirs,
Sándor Márai provided a precise definition of the difference. [4] Even
in the most violent phases of the Leninist dictatorship, when those who opposed
the revolution were brutally deprived of their right to (public free) speech,
they were not deprived of their right to silence: they were allowed to withdraw
into inner exile. An episode from the autumn of 1922 when, on Lenin’s
instigation, the Bolsheviks were organizing the infamous ‘Philosophers’
Steamer’, is indicative here. When he learned that an old Menshevik historian
on the list of those intellectuals to be expelled had withdrawn into private
life to await death due to heavy illness, Lenin not only took him off the list,
but ordered that he be given additional food coupons. Once the enemy resigned
from political struggle, Lenin’s animosity stopped.
For Stalinism, however, even
such silence resonated too much. Not only were masses of people required to
show their support by attending big public rallies, artists and scientists also
had to compromise themselves by participating in active measures such as
signing official proclamations, or paying lip-service to Stalin and the
official Marxism. If, in the Leninist dictatorship, one could be shot for what
one said, in Stalinism one could be shot for what one did not say. This was
followed through to the very end: suicide itself, the ultimate desperate
withdrawal into silence, was condemned by Stalin as the last and highest act of
treason against the Party. This distinction between Leninism and Stalinism
reflects their general attitude towards society: for the former, society is a
field of merciless struggle for power, a struggle which is openly admitted; for
the latter, the conflict is, sometimes almost imperceptibly, redefined as that
of a healthy society against what is excluded from it—vermin, insects, traitors
who are less than human.
A Soviet separation of powers?
Was the passage from Lenin to
Stalin necessary? The Hegelian answer would evoke retroactive necessity: once
this passage happened, once Stalin won, it was necessary. The task of a
dialectical historian is to conceive it ‘in becoming’, bringing out all the
contingency of a struggle that might have ended differently, as Moshe Lewin
tried to do in Lenin’s Last Struggle. Lewin points, firstly, to Lenin’s
insistence on full sovereignty for the national entities that composed the
Soviet state—no wonder that, in a letter to the Politburo of 22 September 1922,
Stalin openly accused Lenin of ‘national liberalism’. Secondly, he emphasizes
Lenin’s stress on a modesty of goals: not socialism, but culture, universal
literacy, efficiency, technocracy; cooperative societies, which would enable
the peasants to become ‘cultured traders’ in the context of the nep. This was
obviously a very different outlook from that of ‘socialism in one country’. The
modesty is sometimes surprisingly open: Lenin mocks all attempts to ‘build
socialism’; he plays repeatedly on the motif of party deficiencies, and insists
on the improvizational nature of Soviet policy, to the extent of quoting
Napoleon’s ‘On s’engage . . . et puis on voit’.
Lenin’s final struggle against
the rule of state bureaucracy is well known; what is less known, as Lewin
perspicuously notes, is that Lenin had been trying to square the circle of
democracy and the dictatorship of the party-state with his proposal for a new
ruling body, the Central Control Commission. While fully admitting the
dictatorial nature of the Soviet regime, he tried to establish at its summit a
balance between different elements, a ‘system of reciprocal control that could
serve the same function—the comparison is no more than approximate—as the
separation of powers in a democratic regime’. An enlarged Central Committee
would lay down the broad lines of policy and supervise the whole Party
apparatus. Within it, the Central Control Commission would:
act as a control of the
Central Committee and of its various offshoots—the Political Bureau, the
Secretariat, the Orgburo . . . Its independence would be assured by its direct
link to the Party Congress, without the mediation of the Politburo and its
administrative organs or of the Central Committee. [5]
Checks and balances, the
division of powers, mutual control—this was Lenin’s desperate answer to the
question: who controls the controllers? There is something dreamlike, properly
phantasmatic, in this idea of a Central Control Commission: an independent,
educational, controlling body with an ‘apolitical’ edge, consisting of the best
teachers and technocrats, to keep in check the ‘politicized’ Central Committee
and its organs—in short, neutral expertise keeping party executives in line.
All this, however, hinges on the true independence of the Party Congress—de
facto already undermined by the prohibition of factions, which allowed the top
Party apparatus to control the Congress and dismiss its critics as
factionalists. The naivety of Lenin’s trust in specialists is all the more
striking if we bear in mind that it came from a leader who was otherwise fully
aware of the all-pervasiveness of political struggle, which allows for no
neutral position.
The direction in which the
wind was already blowing is apparent in Stalin’s 1922 proposal to simply
proclaim the government of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic as
also the government of the republics of Ukraine, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Armenia
and Georgia:
If this decision is confirmed
by the Central Committee of the rcp, it will not be made public, but
communicated to the Central Committees of the Republics for circulation among
the Soviet organs, the Central Executive Committees or the Congresses of the
Soviets of the said Republics before the convocation of the All-Russian
Congress of the Soviets, where it will be declared to be the wish of these
Republics. [6]
The interaction of the higher
authority with its base is thus not only abolished—so that the higher authority
simply imposes its will—but, adding insult to injury, it is re-staged as its
opposite: the cc decides what wish the base will put to the higher
authority as its own.
Tact and terror
A further feature of Lenin’s
final battles to which Lewin draws our attention is an unexpected focus on
politeness and civility. Lenin had been deeply upset by two incidents: in a
political debate, Moscow’s representative in Georgia, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, had
physically struck a member of the Georgian cc; and Stalin himself had verbally
abused Krupskaya (having discovered that she had transmitted to Trotsky Lenin’s
letter proposing a pact against Stalin). The latter incident prompted Lenin to
write his famous appeal:
Stalin is too rude, and this
defect, though quite tolerable in our midst and in dealings among us
Communists, becomes intolerable in a General Secretary. That is why I suggest
that the comrades think about a way to remove Stalin from that post and appoint
in his place another man who in all respects differs from Comrade Stalin in his
superiority, that is, more tolerant, more loyal, more courteous and more
considerate of the comrades, less capricious. [7]
Lenin’s proposals for a
Central Control Commission and his concern that civility be maintained in no
way indicate a liberal softening. In a letter to Kamenev from this same period,
he clearly states: ‘It is a great mistake to think that the nep put an end to
terror; we shall again have recourse to terror and to economic terror.’
However, this terror, which would survive the planned reduction of the state
apparatus and Cheka, would have been more a threat than an actuality: as Lewin
recounts, Lenin sought a means ‘whereby all those who would now [under the nep]
like to go beyond the limits assigned to businessmen by the state could be
reminded “tactfully and politely” of the existence of this ultimate weapon.’ [8] Lenin
was right here: dictatorship refers to the constitutive excess of
(state) power, and at this level, there is no neutrality. The crucial question
is whose excess? If it is not ours, it is theirs.
In dreaming, to use his own
expression, about the ccc’s mode of work in his final 1923 text, ‘Better Fewer,
But Better’, Lenin suggests that this body should resort to:
some semi-humorous trick,
cunning device, piece of trickery or something of that sort. I know that in the
staid and earnest states of Western Europe such an idea would horrify people
and that not a single decent official would even entertain it. I hope, however,
that we have not yet become as bureaucratic as all that and that in our midst
the discussion of this idea will give rise to nothing more than amusement.
Indeed, why not combine
pleasure with utility? Why not resort to some humorous or semi-humorous trick
to expose something ridiculous, something harmful, something semi-ridiculous,
semi-harmful, etc.? [9]
Is this not almost an obscene
double of the ‘serious’ executive power concentrated in the cc and Politburo?
Tricks, cunning of reason—a wonderful dream, but a utopia nonetheless. Lenin’s
weakness, Lewin argues, was that he saw the problem of bureaucratization, but
understated its weight and true dimension: ‘his social analysis was based on
only three social classes—the workers, the peasants and the bourgeoisie—without
taking any account of the state apparatus as a distinct social element in a
country that had nationalized the main sectors of the economy.’ [10]
The Bolsheviks quickly became
aware that their political power lacked a distinct social basis: most of the
working class on whose behalf they exerted their rule had vanished in the Civil
War, so they were in a way ruling in a void of social representation. However,
in imagining themselves as a pure political power imposing its will on society,
they overlooked how—since it de facto owned, or acted as caretaker for the
absent owner of, the forces of production—the state bureaucracy ‘would become
the true social basis of power’:
There is no such thing as
‘pure’ political power, devoid of any social foundation. A regime must find
some other social basis than the apparatus of repression itself. The ‘void’ in
which the Soviet regime had seemed to be suspended had soon been filled, even
if the Bolsheviks had not seen it, or did not wish to see it. [11]
Arguably, this base would have
blocked Lenin’s project of a ccc. It is true that, in both an anti-economistic
and determinist way, Lenin insists on the autonomy of the political, but what
he misses, in Badiou’s terms, is not how every political force represents some
social force or class, but how this political force of representation is
directly inscribed into the represented level itself, as a social force of its
own. Lenin’s last struggle against Stalin thus has all the hallmarks of a
proper tragedy: it was not a melodrama in which the good guy fights the bad
guy, but a tragedy in which the hero becomes aware that he is fighting his own
progeny, and that it is already too late to stop the fateful unfolding of his
wrong decisions in the past.
A different path
So where are we today, after
the désastre obscur of 1989? As in 1922, the voices from below ring with
malicious joy all around us: ‘Serves you right, lunatics who wanted to enforce
their totalitarian vision on society!’ Others try to conceal their malicious
glee; they moan and raise their eyes to heaven in sorrow, as if to say: ‘It
grieves us sorely to see our fears justified! How noble was your vision to
create a just society! Our heart was beating with you, but reason told us that
your plans would finish only in misery and new unfreedoms!’ While rejecting any
compromise with these seductive voices, we definitely have to begin from the
beginning—not to build further upon the foundations of the revolutionary epoch
of the 20th century, which lasted from 1917 to 1989, or, more precisely,
1968—but to descend to the starting point and choose a different path.
But how? The defining problem
of Western Marxism has been the lack of a revolutionary subject: how is it that
the working class does not complete the passage from in-itself to for-itself
and constitute itself as a revolutionary agent? This question provided the main
raison d’être for Western Marxism’s reference to psychoanalysis, which was
evoked to explain the unconscious libidinal mechanisms preventing the rise of
class consciousness that are inscribed into the very being or social situation
of the working class. In this way, the truth of the Marxist socio-economic
analysis was saved: there was no reason to give ground to revisionist theories
about the rise of the middle classes. For this same reason, Western Marxism has
also engaged in a constant search for others who could play the role of the
revolutionary agent, as the understudy replacing the indisposed working class:
Third World peasants, students and intellectuals, the excluded. It is just
possible that this desperate search for the revolutionary agent is the form of
appearance of its very opposite: the fear of finding it, of seeing it where it
already stirs. Waiting for another to do the job for us is a way of
rationalizing our inactivity.
It is against this background
that Alain Badiou has suggested we should reassert the communist hypothesis. He
writes:
If we have to abandon this
hypothesis, then it is no longer worth doing anything at all in the field of
collective action. Without the horizon of communism, without this Idea, nothing
in historical and political becoming is of any interest to a philosopher.
However, Badiou continues:
to hold on to the Idea, the
existence of the hypothesis, does not mean that its first form of presentation,
focused on property and the state, must be maintained just as it is. In fact,
what we are ascribed as a philosophical task, even a duty, is to help a new
modality of existence of the hypothesis to come into being. [12]
One should be careful not to
read these lines in a Kantian way, conceiving of communism as a regulative
Idea, and thereby resuscitating the spectre of ‘ethical socialism’, with
equality as its a priori norm or axiom. Rather, one should maintain the precise
reference to a set of social antagonisms which generates the need for
communism; the good old Marxian notion of communism not as an ideal, but as a
movement which reacts to actual contradictions. To treat communism as an
eternal Idea implies that the situation which generates it is no less eternal,
that the antagonism to which communism reacts will always be here. From which
it is only one step to a deconstructive reading of communism as a dream of presence,
of abolishing all alienating representation; a dream which thrives on its own
impossibility.
Though it is easy to make fun
of Fukuyama’s notion of the End of History, the majority today is Fukuyamaist.
Liberal-democratic capitalism is accepted as the finally found formula of the
best possible society; all one can do is to render it more just, tolerant and
so on. The simple but pertinent question arises here: if liberal-democratic
capitalism is, if not the best, then the least bad form of society, why should
we not simply resign ourselves to it in a mature way, even accept it
wholeheartedly? Why insist on the communist hypothesis, against all odds?
Class and commons
It is not enough to remain
faithful to the communist hypothesis: one has to locate antagonisms within
historical reality which make it a practical urgency. The only true question
today is: does global capitalism contain antagonisms strong enough to prevent
its indefinite reproduction? Four possible antagonisms present themselves: the
looming threat of ecological catastrophe; the inappropriateness of private
property for so-called intellectual property; the socio-ethical implications of
new techno-scientific developments, especially in biogenetics; and last, but
not least, new forms of social apartheid—new walls and slums. We should note
that there is a qualitative difference between the last feature, the gap that
separates the excluded from the included, and the other three, which designate
the domains of what Hardt and Negri call ‘commons’—the shared substance of our
social being, whose privatization is a violent act which should be resisted by
force, if necessary.
First, there are the commons
of culture, the immediately socialized forms of cognitive capital: primarily
language, our means of communication and education, but also shared
infrastructure such as public transport, electricity, post, etc. If Bill Gates
were allowed a monopoly, we would have reached the absurd situation in which a
private individual would have owned the software tissue of our basic network of
communication. Second, there are the commons of external nature, threatened by
pollution and exploitation—from oil to forests and the natural habitat
itself—and, third, the commons of internal nature, the biogenetic inheritance
of humanity. What all of these struggles share is an awareness of the
destructive potential—up to the self-annihilation of humanity itself—in
allowing the capitalist logic of enclosing these commons a free run. It is this
reference to ‘commons’ which allows the resuscitation of the notion of
communism: it enables us to see their progressive enclosure as a process of
proletarianization of those who are thereby excluded from their own substance;
a process that also points towards exploitation. The task today is to renew the
political economy of exploitation—for instance, that of anonymous ‘knowledge
workers’ by their companies.
It is, however, only the
fourth antagonism, the reference to the excluded, that justifies the term
communism. There is nothing more private than a state community which perceives
the excluded as a threat and worries how to keep them at a proper distance. In
other words, in the series of the four antagonisms, the one between the
included and the excluded is the crucial one: without it, all the others lose
their subversive edge. Ecology turns into a problem of sustainable development,
intellectual property into a complex legal challenge, biogenetics into an
ethical issue. One can sincerely fight for the environment, defend a broader
notion of intellectual property, oppose the copyrighting of genes, without
confronting the antagonism between the included and the excluded. Even more,
one can formulate some of these struggles in terms of the included threatened
by the polluting excluded. In this way, we get no true universality, only
‘private’ concerns in the Kantian sense. Corporations such as Whole Foods and
Starbucks continue to enjoy favour among liberals even though they both engage
in anti-union activities; the trick is that they sell products with a
progressive spin: coffee made with beans bought at ‘fair-trade’ prices,
expensive hybrid vehicles, etc. In short, without the antagonism between the
included and the excluded, we may find ourselves in a world in which Bill Gates
is the greatest humanitarian, fighting poverty and disease, and Rupert Murdoch
the greatest environmentalist, mobilizing hundreds of millions through his
media empire.
What one should add here,
moving beyond Kant, is that there are social groups which, on account of their
lack of a determinate place in the ‘private’ order of social hierarchy, stand
directly for universality: they are what Jacques Rancière calls the ‘part of no
part’ of the social body. All truly emancipatory politics is generated by the short-circuit
between the universality of the public use of reason and the universality of
the ‘part of no part’. This was already the communist dream of the young
Marx—to bring together the universality of philosophy with the universality of
the proletariat. From Ancient Greece, we have a name for the intrusion of the
excluded into the socio-political space: democracy.
The predominant liberal notion
of democracy also deals with those excluded, but in a radically different mode:
it focuses on their inclusion, as minority voices. All positions should be
heard, all interests taken into account, the human rights of everyone
guaranteed, all ways of life, cultures and practices respected, and so on. The
obsession of this democracy is the protection of all kinds of minorities:
cultural, religious, sexual, etc. The formula of democracy here consists of
patient negotiation and compromise. What gets lost in this is the position of
universality embodied in the excluded. The new emancipatory politics will no
longer be the act of a particular social agent, but an explosive combination of
different agents. What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of
proletarians who have ‘nothing to lose but their chains’, we are in danger of
losing everything. The threat is that we will be reduced to an abstract, empty
Cartesian subject dispossessed of all our symbolic content, with our genetic
base manipulated, vegetating in an unliveable environment. This triple threat
makes us all proletarians, reduced to ‘substanceless subjectivity’, as Marx put
it in the Grundrisse. The figure of the ‘part of no part’ confronts us with the
truth of our own position; and the ethico-political challenge is to recognize
ourselves in this figure. In a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as
from our symbolic substance. Today, we are all potentially homo sacer, and the
only way to avoid actually becoming so is to act preventively.
[1] V. I.
Lenin, ‘Notes of a Publicist’, published posthumously in Pravda, 16 April 1924;
Collected Works, vol. 33, Moscow 1966, pp. 204–7.
[2]
Samuel Beckett, ‘Worstward Ho’, Nohow On, London 1992, p. 101.
[3]
Lenin, ‘Eleventh Congress of the rcp(b)’, Collected Works, vol. 33, pp. 281–3.
[4]
Sándor Márai, Memoir of Hungary: 1944–1948, Budapest 1996.
[5] Moshe
Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle [1968], Ann Arbor, mi 2005. pp. 131–2.
[6]
Quoted in Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, Appendix 1, pp. 146–7.
[7]
Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 84.
[8]
Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 133.
[9]
Lenin, ‘Better Fewer, But Better’, Collected Works, vol. 33, p. 495.
[10]
Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 125.
[11]
Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 124.
[12] Alain
Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy, London and New York 2008, p. 115.
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