Jodi Dean: belief

Transcript context

…Second video question, please. My question is about Communism. Along with Alain Badiou, you are one of the philosophers who reinvigorated the philosophical discussion of the idea of Communism with a series of books and conferences and events. So I’m wondering about your thinking about that project and the potential for Communism now. Mostly, thinking about your editions of collective works of Lenin, different volumes that you’ve produced with Lenin’s works, and in some of your events, also your event with Jordan Peterson. And so, my sense is that, for the most part, you work within the Communist tradition, in addition to Hegel and Lacan, but yet sometimes it seems like your position is that every part of the 20th century experience has to be erased, has to be forgotten, has to be overcome, that we go back to the beginning, and we don’t need to use anything that we learned in the 20th century. And other times, it seems like you’re precisely actually learning from the 20th century and using some of the writings of Lenin and the achievements and the examples from European history in the 20th century. So I’m hoping that you might clarify how you see the potential for Communist politics today — not just Communist philosophy, but Communist politics today, what kind of organizational forums you think it requires, and whether or not there really is a potential in the Communist movement. Maybe another way to say this is, how do you imagine the end of capitalism? Again, another two-hour-answer question. First, I didn’t — my God, I’m not crazy — I didn’t edit collected works of Lenin. I haven’t read them, never. What interested me is Lenin, at the very precise moment, what fascinates me in Lenin — and I said this in both of my introductions to some texts — that first, Lenin’s time is over. I don’t play the boring Trotskyite game of this crazy dream: “Oh, if only Lenin were to survive two years longer, he would have made it back to beat Trotsky. Stalin would be sidestepped,” and so on. No! The deadlock was there from the beginning. What interests me in Lenin — and maybe that’s what we need today — is this totally pragmatic voluntarist spirit. Isn’t it clear that in 1917, it was a total mess? Lenin often didn’t know what to do. Some even liberal Communists praised his state and revolution, but what he says there is something that he immediately abandoned then. What interests me is, especially Lenin in ’21, ’22 — and this was the big failure of the October Revolution. They want the civil war. And then, it would have been my moment, “Okay, now it’s everyday life, invent new forums if you can.” They failed, but Lenin was at least the one who said openly, “Our situation is totally desperate; we don’t have any formula.” He didn’t have any trust in the future. He saw this total openness. That’s what fascinates me, but I’m not preaching in any sense the return to it, so my idea — unfortunately, I’m here maybe a little bit more — let’s call it pessimist. Incidentally, in this metaphor of returning to zero level, I quote Lenin, who wrote in ’21, ’22, a wonderful text, where he said nothing worked. Then he said, “It’s not that we should stabilize our achievements, but we should return to the zero level, begin from nowhere.” And quoting that, but also you mentioned the horrible . . . the fact that the only livable Communism today — Communism in the formal sense, the Chinese one — means ecological problems, more digital control and so on, and so on. We have to begin in some sense from the zero. Lenin already did this, not just as a good direction. If you are a dogmatic Marxist, you can show that Lenin totally overturned Marx. In this sense, Lenin was not the one of the fidelity to Marx. He pretended to be, but you know how religious revolutions also work. All great revolution proclaims itself return to origins. Martin Luther, the greatest original — “Oh, we just want to return to the original Bible.” And so on. So, no. I think, again, that we have to, with all objective study and so on, see the good, bad sides. But the 20th-century Communism was ultimately a failure, an absolute failure.…

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