The Only Hope of Revolution is the Crowd: The Limits of

Democracy and the state

To begin with, we are presented with a very one-sided "insurrectionary" Lenin, who has no use for the struggle for reforms. Žižek asserts that Lenin's State and Revolution (Lenin: 1980) a key text of the 1917 revolution, is arguing that "in so far 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 ... since the State is an instrument of oppression, it is not worth trying to improve its apparatuses, the protection of the legal order, elections, laws guaranteeing personal freedom ...all this becomes irrelevant" (Žižek 2002b: 192). Perhaps this is Žižek "bending the stick" to make a point. Elsewhere, he shows a more nuanced understanding of Lenin's attitude towards formal democracy. When Lenin "underlines that there is no 'pure' democracy, that we should always ask whom does a freedom under consideration serve and where is its role in the class struggle, his point is precisely to maintain the possibility of the true radical choice. ... when Lenin asks about the role of a freedom within the class struggle, what he is asking is precisely: 'Does this freedom contribute to or constrain the fundamental revolutionary Choice?'" (Žižek 2004: unpaginated). But if that more nuanced position is Žižek's, then it is incumbent on him to include it in his long analysis of Lenin's writings. Its absence seriously distorts the argument.

Žižek's object is to rescue State and Revolution from socialists who focus on the text as envisioning "the prospect of abolishing the State, of the broad masses directly taking the administration of public affairs into their own hands" (Žižek 2002b: 192). Žižek is undoubtedly right in one thing -most do not read the pamphlet and come away seeing its key lesson as an argument that we are "entitled to exercise full violent terror." Most do in fact focus on its emancipatory vision of a world without state oppression. But this, according to Žižek, is misleading. We have to understand, he is saying, that even in this "libertarian" vision, there is embedded a politics of violence, that is a thread linking the 1917 Lenin with the "Jacobin-elitist Lenin of What Is to Be Done?" (Žižek 2002b: 192). But Žižek's gloss is wrong, and the conclusions about the place for the struggle for democracy might be Žižek's, but they are not Lenin's.

First of all -what does it mean to say we live "within the domain of the State" (the word "state" being for unknown reasons introduced with a capital letter)? The state is a contradictory component of the superstructure of modern society -part administrative, and part repressive. It arises out of the contradictions and complexity of developing class society, but becomes "a power standing above society and 'alienating itself more and more from it' in the words of Lenin and Marx's co-thinker, Frederick Engels (Lenin 1980: 393). The people who in any meaningful sense "live within the domain of the state" are the upper level bureaucrats and the privileged classes whose interests they serve. Ordinary people don't "live in the domain of the state" unless in the most general sense that we all live in societies that have states -and that is such a level of abstraction as to be meaningless.

Second, would Lenin really agree with the political conclusions Žižek summarizes -that "every democracy is a fake" and thus "it is not worth trying to improve" democratic rights? With a phrase, he has dismissed out of hand the struggles of literally millions of the world's oppressed.

From one standpoint, the history of the last half of the 20th century was a history of mass movements for the extension of this "fake" democracy. What was the Civil Rights movement in the United States, but a mass assertion of the right of African Americans to exercise their franchise?

This great rising of the oppressed laid the foundation for all the key social movements of the 1960s and 1970s. What was the ten-million strong Polish trade union Solidarność, but a monumental effort to win democracy against repressive Stalinist state capitalism? This enormous democratic movement at the beginning of the 1980s laid the basis for the undermining of Stalinist totalitarianism at the end of that decade. What was the great movement against apartheid in South Africa, but a millions-strong rebellion against lack of democracy, and an assertion of the right of the Black majority to enter into the official realm of politics? What were the movements for independence in India, the Chinese revolution, the anti-colonial uprisings in Africa, but movements by the oppressed majority to assert their democratic right to sovereignty? Of course Žižek -as a person of the left -would have supported the struggles of the workers and poor of Mississippi, Gdansk and Soweto. However, his careless gloss on Lenin -that "it is not worth trying" to improve "the protection of the legal order, elections, laws guaranteeing personal freedoms..." -leads in the opposite direction, to a political position of indifference towards these mass struggles for democratic reform. This is not Leninism as Lenin would have recognized it. Most of Lenin's adult political life was organized around the struggle for the extension of democracy, what Žižek claims the Lenin of 1917 would have seen as a struggle "not worth trying". Lenin of course knew the limitations of contemporary democracy. It was Lenin who in 1919 said, "the most democratic bourgeois republic is no more than a machine for the suppression of the working class by the bourgeoisie, for the suppression of the working people by a handful of capitalists" (Lenin 1987: 151). But Lenin, and all thinkers, has to be put into context. This 1919 statement on democracy was written at the high point of the spread of the Russian and European workers' council movement, which showed in life the possibility of an alternative to bourgeois democracy, the much more democratic workers' democracy based on direct democracy at the workplace. His 1917 State and Revolution -where he develops at length the theory of a workers' council based democracy -was written after three years of barbarous world war, and in the context of a fierce reaction against the February, 1917 revolution, a reaction with parliamentary socialists at its head. Take Lenin in a different context -at the mid-point of what would come to be known as the 1905 Revolution. In July 1905, the first wave of strikes had subsided, and the second wave (that would lead to the establishment of history's first workers' councils) had not yet begun. In this interregnum, "unlimited terror reigned in the streets" (Trotsky 1971: 83) according to Trotsky, along with Rosa Luxemburg, the 1905 revolution's great historian. In this context, Lenin wrote: "The full development of the productive forces in modern bourgeois society, a broad, free, and open class struggle, and the political education, training, and rallying of the masses of the proletariat are inconceivable without political freedom. Therefore it has always been the aim of the class-conscious proletariat to wage a determined struggle for complete political freedom and the democratic revolution" (Lenin 1977d: 511). There is nothing unique about this quote. This orientation towards advocating democratic reform was central to his political theory and practice while organizing against the autocracy.

It is outside the scope of this article, but in the context of a discussion of Lenin and democracy, one particular democratic demand distinguished Lenin and his party from all others of his time -his and their insistence on the right of oppressed nations to self-determination. It was here that Lenin parted company with Rosa Luxemburg, who had many strengths as a political theorist and activist, but -because she feared that its independence movement would not be led by Socialists -did not support the right of Poland to self-determination (Dunayevskaya 1991, Davis 1976). Lenin's insistence on this democratic right divided him from the reformists of the Second International (who consistently lined up with this or that imperialist power) and later from his successor, Joseph Stalin, whose counter-revolution against the Russian workers' state in many ways began with an attack on the right of small nations -including his own homeland of Georgiato exercise their right to self-determination (Lewin 1973, Lenin andTrotsky 1975). The contrast couldn't be greater: Lenin the revolutionary democrat, who on his deathbed saw the importance of the democratic demand of national self-determination; Stalin the counter-revolutionary autocrat whose consolidation of power involved the brutal suppression of the oppressed nationalities.

Lars T. Lih's introduction to the ideas of Lenin highlights clearly the democratic content to the life's work of Lenin and his socialist current. "Overthrowing the autocracy -in other words, achieving political freedom -is vital not only for Russia but for the workers who can then set out on the direct road of open political struggle. 'Open' should be understood as meaning 'without the censorship and repression that keeps us from bringing insight and organization to the workers in the most effective way possible" (Lih 2006: 117).

Elsewhere, Žižek has written clearly on not treating with disdain the formal democracy available under capitalism. In 2005 in New Left Review he argued that "formal democracy" can from one standpoint be seen as "a necessary but illusory expression of a concrete social reality of exploitation and class domination. But it can also be read in the more subversive sense of a tension in which the 'appearance' of égaliberté is not a 'mere appearance' but contains an efficacy of its own, which allows it to set in motion the rearticulation of actual socio-economic relations by way of their progressive 'politicization.' Why shouldn't women also be allowed to vote? Why shouldn't workplace conditions be a matter of public concern as well?" (Žižek 2005a: 130). But this nuanced understanding of the dual nature of democratic reforms under capitalism, is completely absent in his presentation of the 1917 Lenin.

Redemptive Violence?

Žižek's decontextualized and therefore overly abstract outline of what he call's Lenin's theory of the state, leads to an "ultraleft" dismissal of the struggle for democracy. Ultraleft is a term describing political theory and practice that sounds very "left-wing" (we are much more radical than those fighting for democracy) but in practice is highly conservative (we stand on the sidelines with arms folded while millions put their lives on the line for democratic reform). 2 But this is only part of the problem. His ultraleftism is tangled up with a grotesque fascination with violence.

These two aspects of his theory -ultraleftism and a fascination with violence -are linked.

Žižek's ultraleftism reveals itself in his utter contempt for a long list of political activities. "Médecins sans frontières, Greenpeace, feminist and anti-racist campaigns" are examples of what he calls "interpassivity: of doing things not in order to achieve something, but to prevent something from really happening, really changing. All this frenetic humanitarian, Politically Correct, etc. activity fits the formula of 'Let's go on changing something all the time so that, globally, things will remain the same!'" (Žižek 2002b: 170). His contempt for these activities is matched by his contempt for "one of the hottest topics in today's 'radical' American academia: postcolonial studies" (Žižek 2002b: 171).

He calls this academic radicalism "an empty gesture which obliges no one to do anything definite" (Žižek 2002b: 172).

And the solution? -reading Žižek, the inescapable conclusion is that, for him, what this "empty gesture" lacks is violence. This is made clear in one of the strangest parts of his analysis of Lenin, his long critique of the 1999 Hollywood film, Fight Club (Fincher 1999). Lead character Ed Norton together with new friend Tyler (Brad Pitt) "set up the secret organization, Fight Club. This is where equally unhappy men can experience some "real masculine emotion" -pain. ... [Tyler] turns the "slaves in white collars" at Fight Club into a guerrilla fighting force who wear a blackshirt uniform. They make explosives for Project Mayhem -to take on big business and the wealthy".

One socialist reviewer said the film "left a nasty taste in my mouth ... I was treated to over two hours of a nasty, cynical film whose violence was the least offensive part" (Shooter 1999: unpaginated). But Žižek is not offended in the least. He takes the film, and uses it to develop a theme he calls "redemptive violence." He calls the founding of Fight Club a "much more radical exercise" than "love for one's neighbour" (Žižek 2002b: 250). Žižek establishes this with impressive phraseology. A scene which involves "self-beating" is designed to "reach out and re-establish the connection with the real Other -to suspend the fundamental abstraction and coldness of capitalist subjectivity, best exemplified by the figure of the lone monadic individual who, alone in front of the PC screen, communicates with the entire world ... the very violence of the fight signals the abolition of this distance" (Žižek 2002b: 251-2).

The individual "alone in front of the PC screen" may be Žižek, but it is not the modern proletariat in either the office or the factory. Žižek would benefit from some class analysis. "[T]he film's starting point is the miserable lives many ordinary people have. But the everyman character and the film's narrator, played by Ed Norton, is not your average worker. He is employed by a leading car company to see how far they can get away with unsafe vehicles before they have to recall the product" (Shooter 1999: unpaginated)

. Norton is a member of the Professional Middle

Class -what we used to call the petty-bourgeoisie -a section of society that is prone to extreme individualism. "Radical" versions of this individualism can end up with a fixation on individual violence. Acts of individual violence are often seen as the only way to resist capitalist society, because the class standpoint of the petty bourgeoisie is divorced from the day-to-day collective work and struggles of the mass of the oppressed, and therefore distant from the great potential power of working-class collective action.

The classic theoretical expression of this is the chaotic thinker Georges Sorel. There were left-wing revolutionary syndicalists at the beginning of the last century who saw Sorel's philosophic justification of the role of violence (best expressed in his Reflections on Violence) as part of their ideological armour in the fight against capitalism. "In 1905, Sorel declared flatly that 'revolutionary syndicalism' is the practical realization of what is truly essential in Marxism. For him, it was an expression of Marxism 'superior to any and all theoretical formulations', because it expressed the class struggle in a conscious, militant and direct fashion" (Portis 1980: 64).

But we now have more than a century of experience since that was written. The sobering truth is that Sorel's fascination with action and violence -unrooted in anything resembling a political economy let alone class politics -was most useful not to the left, but to the far right. The Italian fascist Benito Mussolini said: "I owe most to Georges Sorel. This master of syndicalism by his rough theories of revolutionary tactics has contributed most to form the discipline, energy and power of the fascist cohorts" (Shils 1971: 24). In fact the film Žižek celebrates has some clear references to fascism. One reviewer characterizes the film's violence as "anti-capitalist fascist terror" (Jarvis 1999, unpaginated). Another points out that, as well as wearing black shirt uniforms, the explosives made by the films "heroes" are made "from a concoction made from human fat.

These are not unwitting references to Nazism. They are part of a film whose conclusion is that a brutal army is the force to bring down the present system" (Shooter 1999: unpaginated). Žižek is aware of this, citing favourably an analysis of Fight Club which argues that the organization founded by the two key protagonists "ends up transforming into a fascist organization with a new name: Project Mayhem" Diken and Laustsen 2001: 2). But this acknowledgement of the reactionary message embedded in the film is added on as an after-thought. Žižek celebrates the film as a response to capitalist alienation -ignoring that this response, as well as proto-fascist, is deeply misogynist. "We're a generation of men raised by women. I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer we need" says Tyler at one point. And the fat used in the making of their soap? It comes from a liposuction clinic, allowing for the following line: "It was beautiful. We were selling rich women their fat asses back to them" (Fincher, 1999).

Marx talked about the working class becoming the subject of history. For Žižek however, subjectivity is individualized in a way that is characteristic of thinkers who do not root their thinking in class analysis. "The first lesson of Fight Club" he writes is "that we cannot go directly from capitalist to revolutionary subjectivity: the abstraction, the foreclosure of others, the blindness to the other's suffering and pain, has first to be broken in a gesture of taking the risk and reaching directly out to the suffering other -a gesture which, since it shatters the very kernel of our identity, cannot fail to appear extremely violent" (Žižek 2002b: 252). But working class subjectivity -understood as the development of class consciousness -is not an individual gesture of risk taking and violence. It is a product of collective work and collective struggle, something completely absent in Žižek's analysis.

This picture of Žižek's fascination with violence, helps illuminate his very particular reading of State and Revolution, examined earlier. The key for him is not the emancipatory vision of the withering away of the state. The key is the fact that "every democracy is a fake" and thus "we are legitimately entitled to exercise full violent terror." Violence, for Žižek, is an end in itself. It was not for Lenin. Lenin's generation of socialists was quite aware of the sometimes violent nature of the struggle for change. They were, after all, operating inside a repressive Tsarist autocracy. Siberia and prison were the almost inevitable reward for becoming a political activist. Lenin -like Malcolm X in the 1960s -was a defender of the right of the mass movement to resist the violent attacks of the state, including the right of the oppressed to use violence in return. But both Lenin and Malcolm X knew that this was not an end in itself. The key was developing the capacities of the mass of the working class as a whole. Tactics had to be chosen that "were calculated to bring about the direct participation of the masses and which guaranteed that participation" (Lenin 1977c: 193). For those activists who celebrated violence as an end in itself, Lenin had very strong words. "[W]ithout the working people all bombs are powerless, patently powerless ... an appeal to resort to such terrorist acts as the organization of attempts on the lives of ministers by individuals and groups that are not known to one another means, not only thereby breaking off work among the masses, but also introducing downright disorganization into that work." Acts of terrorism by individuals can create "a short-lived sensation" but that is followed quickly by "apathy and passive waiting for the next bout" (Lenin 1977c: 189 and 191).

In a certain sense, it is unfair to Lenin's opponents to use them in such a way to critique Žižek is using his role as an intellectual in the most irresponsible of fashions. For him these are just words, to shock and impress an academic audience. But there are activists in the world trying to find theories and practices that will help them deal with the oppression and exploitation that are the bitter daily reality for millions. Should any of them read Žižek and take him at his wordone shudders at the political conclusions that could be drawn. Forget about democracy, forget about the struggle for reforms, understand your right to "extreme terror", and look for the revolutionary gesture of violence to confront "The Other" -the only way to develop your revolutionary subjectivity. If these conclusions weren't so potentially dangerous, they would be laughable.

The Obvious Barbarism of Stalinism

"The very thin layer of those who still think and feel and have not so far been strangled, shot, starved or frozen, is depressed, oppressed, and -silent" (Joffe 1978: 222 Žižek knows very well the horrors of Stalinism. "'Really Existing Socialism' was barbarism" (Žižek 2002b: 192) he quite accurately observes. "I am from the East, I know what shit it was. I have no nostalgia for Stalinism" (Rasmussen 2004: unpaginated). But this reads like an "add-on" to his basic orientation, similar to his giving a nod to the fact that Fight Club -a film he idolizes -does have a "few" fascist overtones. His basic position in the Afterword to Revolution at the Gates is very much pro-Stalin. "We should" he argues "stop the ridiculous game of opposing the Stalinist terror to the 'authentic' Leninist legacy betrayed by Stalinism: 'Leninism' is a thoroughly Stalinist notion" (Žižek 2002b: 193). This is the oldest intellectual exercise of the 20 th century, one practiced by both left and right. Stalin is rooted in Lenin. Therefore if you choose Lenin, you get Stalin. The only difference is one of attitude. The right says "Stalin was horrible -that means Lenin was horrible too." The left says "O.K., Stalin was horrible, but he had to be, he was up against imperialism -he is just an extreme Lenin." But if, to get Lenin, the left has to also apologize for Stalinist barbarism, then it would be better to forget about Lenin.

The great tragedy of the 20 th century was that in country after country, large sections of the workers' movement -often the most militant and organized -defined their left politics with reference to Stalin. They accepted, in other words, that to take on board Lenin, they had to take on board Stalin as well. Those worker militants often did wonderful work in spite of being influenced by Stalinism. But Stalinism inside Russia and Eastern Europe -which is the subject of Žižek's analysis -was the ideology of totalitarian states. In Russia's case, it was also the ideology of the counter- Žižek, says that "we still lack a satisfactory theory of Stalinism" citing the inadequacies of Franz Neumann, Herbert Marcuse and the Habermasian school (Žižek 2005b: unpaginated). But in this list, there is a strange absence -the entirety of the main body of Marxist anti-Stalinism, represented by followers of Leon Trotsky. This is not accidental. Žižek has little understanding of the tradition he calls "Trotskyite". He argues, for instance, that you can only accept the authentic "act" of revolution, if you "endorse the act fully in all its consequences" including the possibility of "the Worse." His meaning is clear -to embrace October 1917, you have to also accept responsibility for Stalinism in the 1930s. He has nothing but contempt for "the nostalgia of Trotskyite (sic) and other radical Leftists for the early days of the Revolution, with workers' councils popping up 'spontaneously' everywhere, against the Thermidor, that is, the later ossification of the Revolution into a new hierarchical state structure" (Žižek 1999: 377). But this theoretical perspective cannot explain why the leading figure of anti-Stalinism became Leon Trotsky -along with Lenin the pre-eminent leader of the October Revolution. Who embraced the revolutionary act more fully than Leon Trotsky -president of the Petrograd Soviet in 1905 and again in 1917, organizer of the insurrection in October 1917, organizer of the Red Army in the desperate prosecution of the Civil War? This embrace of the revolutionary act did not require a subsequent embrace of Stalinism. In fact, to hold onto this revolutionary act, demanded the embracing of resistance to Stalinism, what Antonov-Ovseyenko accurately labeled "counter-revolution."

The British Trotksyist Alex Callinicos also calls Russian Stalinism a counter-revolution, and identifies four inter-related aspects. First was the euphemistically named forced "collectivization" of agriculture, in reality the launching of a civil war against small peasant holdings by the state resulting in millions of deaths, relocations and imprisonments. Driving the regime to this "primitive accumulation" was the second aspect of the counter-revolution, the need to subordinate all efforts to industrialization, to allow the Soviet Union to catch up with the advanced west. And collectivization "allowed the regime drastically to increase grain exports and thereby to finance imports of plant and equipment from the West." Growing war fears with the west fuelled the drive for rapid industrialisation. Lenin in 1919 argued "We are living not merely in a state, but in a system of states, and it is inconceivable for the Soviet Republic to live alongside of the imperialist states for any length of time. One or other must triumph in the end." For Lenin and Trotsky, the conclusion was to win the other states to workers' revolution through the Communist International, founded in 1919. For Stalin the conclusion was, industrialize and become a Great Power. But this required the third aspect of the counter-revolution -systematic coercion. To achieve industrialization, there was feverish urbanization (driving peasants to the cities) and a massive increase in exploitation. "Real wages in 1932 were at most 50 per cent of their 1928 level." There was resistance to these attacks by workers in the cities, just as peasants in the countryside resisted the expropriation of their land. This capacity to resist had to be crushed in order for the counter-revolution to succeed, and thus any inside the cities with a memory of the politics of workers' resistance had to be repressed. The coercion, then, was directed first and foremost at former and current activists in the Bolshevik Party, the party that, for more than a generation, had been the leading exponent of workers' opposition to exploitation. This coercion culminated in the Great Terror of 1936-38 where several hundred thousand people perished. On the backs of these three aspects, then, the fourth came into play, the upward mobility of a new generation of non-"Old Bolshevik" rulers. The Terror "wiped out the generation of Bolsheviks who had been shaped by the underground struggle against Tsarism and led the October Revolution itself." Their shoes were filled by a new generation organized not around world revolution, but around national industrial and military growth, a new bureaucratic ruling class (Callinicos 1992: 29-35). That is, in outline, an understanding of Stalinism that has stood the test of time. It confronts head-on the obvious barbarism of Stalinism, and insists that -Stalin's claims to the contrary -this barbarism has nothing to do with any left project, it has nothing to do with Lenin. That is why Trotsky -Lenin's closest collaborator from 1917 until Lenin's deathsaid there was "between Bolshevism and Stalinism not simply a bloody line but a whole river of blood."

This kind of analysis -rooted in political economy and concrete historical study -does not exist for Žižek. His analysis wanders in a garden of culture, biography and comment and is frequently more favourable to Stalin than Lenin. At one level, he says, Lenin's attempt to lead a revolution in 1917 was a "utopia" a kind of "madness," and "if anything, Stalinism stands for a return to the realistic 'common sense'" (Žižek 2002b: 5). Two prominent Marxist anti-Stalinist (and Trotskyist) theorists identify 1928, the first five-year plan and the beginning of forced industrialization as a watershed in the transition from a workers' state to counter-revolution and state capitalism (Cliff 1974, Dunayevskaya 1946. Žižek quotes approvingly an analysis that sees that same year and that same event the year as "not a kind of 'Thermidor' but, rather, the consequent radicalization of the October Revolution" (Žižek 2002b: 317). This "radicalization" led to the death of millions of peasants, and the destruction of virtually the entirety of the 1917-era Bolshevik party. He also combines his fascination with violence with an analysis of Stalin's rule. He praises the reign of "institutional terror" in the Stalin regime as parallel to some kinds of treatment in psychoanalysis. " [W]hat, in politics, is self-destructive terror is of a totally different order in the psychoanalytic community -here, the Stalin figure is a 'good' one" (Žižek 2002b: 316). With a phrase -and a bad analogy -he sweeps away the pain and suffering of the millions who suffered under that terror.

The annoying thing about Žižek's analysis of Stalinism is that it's not really an analysis at all, but a series of comments. The centrepiece of the section is a long discussion of the playwright, Bertolt Brecht's attitude towards the Stalinist states of Eastern Europe. Apparently, when Russian tanks moved into Berlin in 1953 to crush a workers' uprising, Brecht celebrated. Apparently he "was tempted for the first time in his life to join the Communist Party -is this not an outstanding case of what Alain Badiou has called la passion du réel which defines the twentieth century? It was not that Brecht tolerated the cruelty of the struggle in the hope that it would bring a prosperous future: the harshness of the violence as such was perceived and endorsed as a sign of authenticity" (Žižek 2002b: 194). Does Žižek endorse this "passion for the real"? Does he agree that violent repression from the Russian occupiers gives this intervention a "sign of authenticity" as something we should endorse? Žižek doesn't say. His analysis wanders along, making this or that random observationbut leaving open the conclusion that Brecht was right. Mostly he seems enthralled by violence and the use of force as ends in themselves.

The obvious rebuttal to Brecht would be his contemporary George Lukács. Like Brecht, Lukács accommodated himself to the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe. Unlike Brecht, Lukács welcomed the anti-Stalinist uprisings of the 1950s, supporting Imre Nagy's dissident government in 1956. But somehow, for Žižek, this made Lukács "the ultimate Stalinist. In contrast to Lukács, Brecht was unbearable to the Stalinist cultural establishment because of his very 'over-orthodoxy' ... If the young Lukács of History and Class Consciousness was the philosopher of Lenin's historical moment, after the 1930s he turned into the ideal Stalinist philosopher who, for that very reason, in contrast to Brecht, missed the true greatness of Stalinism" (Žižek 2002b: 196-7).

Surely there are alternatives to this confusing argument. Perhaps we should judge Brecht on his plays, and not on his overt political stances. He was after-all, a playwright. Perhaps both Brecht and Lukács were wrong to submit for so long to the Stalinist regimes in which they worked.

But perhaps they had little choice. Perhaps they were individuals caught up in huge historical forces that neither they, nor any other individual could control, and lived with it as best they could. Perhaps it would be best to try -as Trotsky and his heirs have done -to understand those forces through key writings with a view to putting together a consistent picture of his views on this subject. Any who wish to pursue this task in detail, should read their paper. They point out his reverence for the departed Stalinist Eastern European regimes as "liberated zones". He doesn't see Stalin as the negation of Marxism, but "as being the realiser of Marxism, however 'perverted' its realisation."

Their conclusion is harsh, and accurate.

Žižek's Lenin, therefore, is not the 'Lenin' of the left, but the 'Lenin' of the right. Just as conservative critics are interested in 'Lenin' insofar as he gave us Stalin, orthodox Communism, the Cold War and the gulag, so Žižek is interested in a 'Lenin' of the Master, the Act, the carving of the field and the Good Terror. Žižek's Lenin is also the 'Lenin' that Stalin built: the 'cult of Lenin' Stalin used to legitimate his own agenda of the omnipotence of the Leader, widespread terror and power as an in-itself ... In short, it is a Leninism for Stalinists (Robinson And Tormey, 2003: unpaginated).

It is almost a generation since the collapse of the European Stalinist state systems. Today's new left has come out from the shadows of the Stalinist "One Long Night." However, this generation, like all before it, is reaching back to pick up the threads of anti-capitalist struggle from the past.

Many have rediscovered Marx. Some are starting to rediscover Lenin. But a casual reading of older generation to confront head-on the problems of the past, and in part this means honestly confronting the horror that was Stalinism -a horror that sullied the name of the left for three

generations. Yet Žižek talks about Stalinism's "Inner Greatness." The very fact that Žižek can without editorial comment publish such a headline in a book published by Verso, one of the world's leading left-wing publishers, is a sign of the fact that Stalinism remains an unresolved issue for today's left.