The following text is a revised and expanded version of the author’s keynote of the same title delivered on 23 March 2024 as part of the international series of events Leninist days / Jornadas leninistas (27 January to 25 to May 2024), organized in commemoration of the centenary of the death of Vladimir I. Lenin.

To begin with, I must say that an instability works its way through Bensaïd’s relationship to philosophy. Since I have formulated this presentation in terms of Bensaïd, Lenin and philosophy, I signal that I underestimated the problematic nature of philosophy in its relation to militant politics. If left unspoken, unexplored, repressed, it would serve as a dogmatic presupposition. Therefore, an explanation is in order, about the philosophical and political of which I speak.

What is Philosophy?

One cannot simply lay claim to philosophy, or the philosophical, especially in its relation to Lenin, politics and Bensaïd. And, why not? To take the term for granted would limit the necessary mobility for enacting a faithful infidelity to Bensaïd’s creative thinking, and militant politics, which is about liberation and strategy; to take philosophy for granted would miss the elementary instability that marks Bensaïd’s relation to the primacy of politics, and any role of the philosophical in such a venture.

If we turn to Bensaïd’s A Slow Impatience, his itinerary of a political apprenticeship, it seems indubitable that he does not identify as a philosopher per se. At best, perhaps, he might lay claim to a ‘rustic philosopher’, or a teacher of philosophy. An activist who crafted words. To be a philosopher in the strong sense requires an event of thought, a truly new creation of thought, signed by a proper name – this much, Bensaïd acknowledges. Combined with this distance from the philosophical, Bensaïd is keenly antipathetic to the philosopher as priest or of the Master of a sovereign discourse, who – sinning by way of intellectual pride – thinks they can impose an order onto the world, imposing a power claim on all that is. The priestly scholar’s imposition of order is an injunction not to change the world, not to even dare to try; the Master discourse tends to block the way, in a pact with the customary powers that are. In the sense of my title, the philosopher creates an obstacle to the Leninist act of changing the world.

Bensaïd constantly tries to salvage, to remind those who want to share ideas with him, that contrary to the philosophical priest who orders through metaphysical-ontological command and turns to an ethics masking domination, one might do better to place some attention on how things are embodied in historically situated, politically overdetermined, concrete contexts. With an obligation to the memory of those unknown, activists who are lodged into the struggle to overturn modes of domination, politics is put into command. Politics, politics, politics.

It would, however, be lazy cogitation indeed to overlook an unfinished point about the philosophical within Bensaïd’s movement of thought, about which no last word has been, or might even be, said. The unfinished point I have in mind concerns the lack of a definitive answer about what philosophy is. Surely, this would be a condition for an articulation of its bond to militant politics. Now, I’m not interested in the disciplinary demarcations made by a bourgeois organisation of knowledge, none of which could give us what we need in terms of an answer; neither – let us be honest – has historical Marxism, let alone Lenin, really answered this question adequately, even though their approximations and effects have great value.

When Deleuze and Guattari posed the question What is Philosophy? in their clever, cunning, and imaginative book of the title, the answer was that what philosophy is can only be given at the maturity of a process, and Bensaïd preferred not to venture an answer. This skeptical, doubtful relationship of the teacher of philosophy, of the political militant, invites us to a thought experiment. If philosophy, here Deleuze’s answer, is an art of the creation of concepts on a plane of immanence, an art of invention, of new ways in which sense is made of things, then it might be possible to think Bensaïd in these terms, or at least with these terms, all the while joining it to militant politics and Lenin.

We are invited to think about Bensaïd in relation to the art of creating concepts – at certain times, Bensaïd even suggests that Marx is an exemplification of the creation of concepts in Capital. Debatable, but intriguing. When I say this, I want to reinforce the antipathy to the philosopher as priest, the philosopher as technocrat, the philosopher as a guardian of system, or as watchdogs of the established order as Paul Nizan would have said. At no point does Bensaïd seek the last word of a language game; no closure of a language game is aspired to, intended, or enacted on Bensaïd’s behalf, only distinct fragmentary interventions – tractates that have their political import. This is a decisive feature of Bensaïd’s relationship to the philosophical, which distrusts, and dislodges, the abstract, dogmatic, autarkic Concept, and constantly refrains from playing such games, while constantly folding back upon the primacy of politics. In place of a closed language game, Bensaïd is interested in that which moves, liberatory politics. And yet, none of this abolishes the specific temporality of philosophical articulation.

Throughout Bensaïd’s interpretation of Lenin, and Marx, Benjamin and others, a philosophical sensibility, a unique way of making sense that genuinely invites the bifurcated paths of thinking is present. The presence of the invention of new ideas, on the specific terrain of a Marxian critique of political economy, militant politics, and representations of history, can be discerned from Bensaïd’s tractates.

Evidently, Bensaïd is able to work between the invention of new ideas in the strong philosophical sense while being attentive to the mobility, the encounters, the decisive breakthroughs of resistance and liberatory politics that in no way depend upon the practice of the philosopher, having need only of the militant political activist who intervenes, among whom Bensaïd was at home.

It might be worthwhile thinking about metaphors for the philosophical, and how we might situate Bensaïd in their terms, specifically how they relate to militant politics. Wittgenstein wanted to show the philosopher fly the way out of the bottle; Althusser thought of boarding an already moving train without knowing where it departed or ended; and – a metaphor Bensaïd kind of imposed on Badiou – philosophy as the emptiness at the centre of the ring of bread, philosophy as the hole in a doughnut, without taste or satisfaction. For our purposes, each of these metaphors show the difficulty in handling the relations between philosophical inventions of thought, their profane illuminations, and the mobility of militant politics, where relative truths emerge, an idea to which I will return.

An elementary point should by now be clear, Bensaïd is concerned to avoid the disappearance of politics; specifically, in terms of the philosophical terrain, politics is not to be absent from the philosophical conceptual constructions and he identifies those sites at which political thinking is present in the jagged terrain of philosophical discourse. Without the philosophical being the servant of politics, of a political line, or of pragmatist politics, Stalinian tyranny, it can also not be a practice that stitches up the tears of militant politics, the impasses, aporias, and defeats; nor a passive optimistic accompaniment of precious victories seldom won. If there is a borderline between militant politics and the philosophical, it is necessary to avoid the repression of militant politics with philosophical means without also repressing the creative productions of thought that can make sense of, and even judge, what moves in militant politics, in the turns of victories and defeats.

What is to be Done with Lenin?

Hardly, have I spoken about Lenin, whom I now address specifically. Lenin is the proper name signally militant politics in its liberatory dimension. All too briefly, perhaps the essential points of Lenin’s contribution to militant politics – as Bensaïd grasps it – can be captured in the following phrases: the party that acts as a strategic operator in the multiplicity of temporalities emergent in history; the party that is implanted in resistance moving towards liberation against all forms of domination. An opposition to the disorganising confusion between the party and the class; the idea of the broken time of politics, of counter-times, clashing temporalities that require some kind of active political adjudication between the long-term and the immediate term; the primacy of the political present. The notion of revolutionary crisis, a strategic concept that above all refers to the breakdown of a system of political domination, is conjoined to a political representation of the autonomous struggle of labourers, the exploited and oppressed. Crucially, the notion of revolutionary crisis is strategic, not philosophical.

So, Lenin opens up a space in militant politics for the toleration of difference, always within certain, voluntarily agreed upon limits, the toleration of different convictions, and even the right to disobey any reigning sovereign if the situation requires it. This is important, because while trying to overcome the liberal illusions about power and toleration, the task is to construct a space in which toleration and difference can facilitate the emergence of political truths, the relatively mobile truths against the Absolute Truth, yet which move against forms of domination.

What, then, are the theoretically creative proposals that can be read through the political texture of Bensaïd’s interpretation of Lenin? Many there are, indeed, which colour Bensaïd’s interpretation of Lenin. Without being restricted to these, three texts are exemplary in this sense: his Master’s Thesis under Henri Lefebvre on the notion of revolutionary crisis, The Politics of Broken Time in Lenin and Leaps, Leaps, Leaps. We see, I think quite clearly, how the theoretically illuminating then flows through the political. For this reason, I would call Bensaïd a historically informed, theoretically creative, thinker who retains the primacy of politics in an interpretation of Lenin. Another representation of history is present, in the critique of historical reason and counter-times; doxa and truth have their stand-off too.

If I were to choose the most pivotal of Lenin’s arguments that intersect with Bensaïd’s creative theoretical proposals, I would opt for Lenin’s statement in Left-Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder, where he speaks of the entrance of the masses into revolutionary struggles. I quote it here:

History as a whole, and the history of revolutions in particular, is always richer in content, more varied, more multiform, more lively and ingenious than is imagined by even the best parties, the most class-conscious vanguards of the most advanced classes. This can readily be understood, because even the finest of vanguards express the class consciousness, will, passion and imagination of tens of thousands, whereas at moments of great upsurge and the exertion of all human capacities, revolutions are made by the class consciousness, will, passion and imagination of tens of millions, spurred on by a most acute struggle of classes.[1]

It is a very rich passage and continually gives to anyone who pays it the attention it deserves. The passage has a direct connection to what I call Bensaïd’s thinking otherwise about a representation of history. Of course, different threads combine in Lenin’s well-known passage: he suggests that in general history and more particularly the history of revolutions, is always richer in content, more varied and multiform, more living and ingenious, than the best parties, vanguards and the most conscious elements of the of the labouring classes can ever know, conceive of, or imagine. Lenin’s insistence on the living, multiform, emergent content of history is really the starting point of Bensaïd’s other representation of historical materialism. Or, at least, I propose to think it in these terms of alterity. That revolutionary time – or a revolution – is a time of exaltation, specifically tying together the discoveries, the creations, in which all the human faculties are at work: those of consciousness, of will, passion, imagination, the passions of millions involved in class struggles. On such terrain, political knowledge is produced. It is precisely for such revolutionary time that Bensaïd reformulates the very idea of historical materialism.

Through another representation of historical materialism – inclusive of the critique of Analytic Marxism, the schemas of base and superstructure, and unilinear history that is indiscriminately imposed onto the concrete singularities of history – Bensaïd thinks something important for a return to Lenin. So, while I don’t have much time to go into the details about the different representations of historical materialism, suffice to say that historical materialism is not a homogenous theoretical substance. I think the way Bensaïd presents Marx’s theoretical revolution – transitional in the Grundrisse and largely executed in Capital – comprising the temporalities of capital as a historically specific form of social organisation, indeed constitutes something decisive if folded back onto Lenin because, to quote Bensaïd, “The mechanical time of production, the chemical time of circulation, and the organic time of reproduction are thus coiled and slotted inside one another, like circles within circles, determining the enigmatic patterns of historical time, which is the time of politics”.

Pay attention to the metaphor invoking the multiplicity of circles coiled and slotted in each other; not only is it the complexity of the circular meanderings that politics attends to, it is also the effort to break the reproduction of the circles.

More than a theoretical revolution at the level of Capital, Bensaïd also shows how to approach a reading of history that combines bifurcations and historical possibilities. This is a reading of history concentrated on the strategic elements of historical intelligibility. Bensaïd makes the case for a combination of Marx’s theoretical revolution for a new writing of history, which articulates the content of history, and an appreciation of history based upon its strategic intelligibility and lateral possibilities. This makes for a unique representation of the materialities of history.

Specifically, the theme of counter-times became an essential feature of Bensaïd’s interpretation of Lenin by the mid-1980s. From there, I believe it informed Bensaïd’s thinking about the new writing of history based on the overlapped, contradictory nature of Capital’s temporalities. In turn, it invokes the nature of the present time of politics; Bensaïd effectively articulated an epistemic approach to the present in which politics attained primacy over history, which he found explicitly formulated in Benjamin. This approach to the present is exemplified in St. Augustine’s dictum that there are three forms of the present in presence: the present of the past, present of the present, and the present of the future. Political temporality has a presence of political possibilities; three modalities of the present attain political importance in any effort to think, and intervene, with sedimentations of the past, and projections into the future innocently flashing past one another. To think the present in spatial terms, inadequate though informative, it is far from being flat. Elements of the past protrude up like rocks, breaking the surface of a calm, settled ocean, with a tempestuous future already beckoning along the skyline, in which present navigations need to sail, for which a good compass is needed.

The invocation of the political present points to a problem, at least if we want to take up the question of the philosophical and Lenin; the question of the conflict between opinion and truth. Via Bensaïd, I want to resolve it in the direction of political truths. Of course, the conflict between an opinion and truth has a long history, from antiquity – in the confrontations of the polis and philosophy, between the rhetoricians-Sophists and Plato’s Forms. Thinking through truth and opinion, especially as it pertains to Lenin, concerns the political deliberations of singular concrete situations, the veritable domain of militant politics that require politically deliberative, constitutive democratic, struggles for conviction. Such struggles of conviction, for conviction, cannot be reduced to the imposition of a Platonic Form of thought, or an imposition of a truth that decides against the deliberative political democratic space. At stake is a conception of militant politics against the priestly Master thinker. Only from the militant, egalitarian and democratic political space does there emerge forms of thinking and perspectives that can participate in the pass to a liberatory communist horizon.

Here, a subtle, but consequential point. In the tracks of Lenin, Bensaïd distinguishes between absolute truths and relative truths. If we want to think against the sharp divide between doxa and truth, a Platonic Form of politics imposed from without against its Sophisticated form of the relativised democratic space, then the mobilisation of relative truths that are not imposed from outside, but are relative to situations, all the while having a truth content, is necessary. This is not a regression to relativism, or a reduction to the Sophist without truth. Relative truths are contingent. That is to say, they depend upon the historical-political conjuncture, which is itself surprising, unforeseen. To turn relative truths dependent on the conjuncture into absolute truths makes them independent of all politics and history, independent of any concretely situated conjunctures. Therefore, it means turning them into floating abstractions, which void them of political truth. Effectively, they have no adequate relevance to the translation of theory into strategy, nor of a strategic intelligibility of history.

Relative truths require their declination of distinction from truth without qualification. Relative truths are historically anchored in becoming, and for Bensaïd, this means they are no longer truths of Hegelian essence, but of relation. Contrary to the classical model of truth without history, now truth historically becomes; Bensaïd gave the example of Marx’s theory, which is not a revelation or even a discovery of a truth already-there, but a case of theory producing the truth of its own object. Specifically, Bensaïd is moving against the antinomical binary, the false either-or, of absolute rationalism and hazardous irrationalism. No less in the trappings of a skepticism that no longer delivers, on account of its pact with commodified power, indifferent as it is; and, if skepticism is exhausted, absolute certitudes have collapsed, Bensaïd suggests that the detours by way of relative certitudes and truths can still be ventured. Why? Relative truths, and the certitudes accompanying them, can be judged by their ability to make the world to be changed intelligible. Hence, there is an opposition to irrationalism thought with the recognition of the rationality of the irrational object that is capital. Particularly, Bensaïd thinks, ‘to conceive of truth as process, relation or constellation, without giving into mocking relativism, in turn obliges the renunciation of the concept of truth as correspondence or as copy’. Truths are no longer mirrored; truths are pluralised. And yet, they remain true.

Of course, a classical problem of the relation theory has to practice, of philosophy to politics, is posed here. When Bensaïd makes an argument that theory and practice are tied together, it concerns theory’s translation into strategy, hence a close relationship between the becoming political of philosophy, and the becoming philosophical of the political, formulated early enough by Marx. The convergent becomings of philosophy and politics are inherently limited because of the respective specificities of political time and theoretical times, their own distinct planes of immanence. Essentially, Bensaïd wants more than a simple pragmatist, or empiricist, conception of theory and practice – he does not think theory and practice are to be understood based on some kind of application of a pre-existing theory to a given situation; this naïve application of theory to practice is something that Bensaïd rules out of order. Out of order, then, is the application of an already existing doctrine to concrete singularities. Bensaïd does not take the Althusserian line of theoretical practice understood as self-referential; rather, Bensaïd concentrated on the non-guarantee, or the non-preformed schema between theory and practice, an important part of his move away from the reduction of theory to pragmatics and empiricism.

To think the relation between philosophy and politics, theory and strategy in light of practice means to move against the Stalinian-Maoist efforts to fuse them according to the model of homogeneity, identity and the One, in which political imperatives serve as the impoverished pretext for impoverishing thought. Bensaïd did not take vowels of intellectual chastity, and it is for this reason that we still read him with such delight. We owe him a debt of gratitude for not having given in to such self-denial. Decisively, here, Bensaïd suggests an alternative way of conceiving the relationship of politics to philosophy: neither one of dependence or absorption, ‘but of tension and mutual critique, of heterogeneity, of non-contemporaneity, and of multiplicity. Because theory never resolves itself into politics. When it claims to formulate a “line”, it degrades itself into an ideology of legitimation’. At stake is an attention to the respective conceptual temporalities of philosophy and politics, without treating them as absolutely contingent, and cynically unrelated.

The Dreams of Militant Politics and the Withering Away of the State

In this last part of my presentation, I want to explore the nature of dreaming, so integral, yet often repressed, in the revolutionary experience. Dreaming can be approached perhaps from four distinct points, the need for dreams for the revolutionary imagination, the abolition of alienated fetishism, the withering away of the state as examples of forward projective dreaming, and finally, the specificity of the political field as modelled on the interpretation of dreams.

We could take dreams in a twofold sense. The dream can be taken seriously as a site in which an artistic, joyful, liberatory horizon – the dreamscape – emerges not as a distant yonder, but as a call immanent to the nights of resistance, a call of the present, inherently political. And, distinct from this, but with indubitable connections to it, politics condenses and displaces the social conflicts, the class antagonisms, of the social formation, which requires analysis like any dream might, to discern the need, the desires, that emerge in the overdetermined the social whole.

No doubt, dreaming was dear to Lenin. Without dreams, the revolutionary imagination atrophies; What is to Be Done concludes with an imperative to dream, the imperative to close the gap between dreams and reality; Lenin’s imperative takes dream seriously, takes the cultivation of imagination seriously. I quote Lenin’s use of Pisarev, and excuse the outdated gendered use of ‘man’:

“There are rifts and rifts … My dream may run ahead of the natural march of events or may fly off at a tangent in a direction in which no natural march of events will ever proceed. In the first case my dream will not cause any harm; it may even support and augment the energy of the working men…. There is nothing in such dreams that would distort or paralyse labour-power. On the contrary, if man were completely deprived of the ability to dream in this way, if he could not from time to time run ahead and mentally conceive, in an entire and completed picture, the product to which his hands are only just beginning to lend shape, then I cannot at all imagine what stimulus there would be to induce man to undertake and complete extensive and strenuous work in the sphere of art, science, and practical endeavour…. The rift between dreams and reality causes no harm if only the person dreaming believes seriously in his dream, if he attentively observes life, compares his observations with his castles in the air, and if, generally speaking, he works conscientiously for the achievement of his fantasies. If there is some connection between dreams and life then all is well.”[2]

The dream as substantive, and dreaming as activity, with all of the colours and mixed representations the dreamscape has on offer to power imagination’s ideation, are vital to a politics of the oppressed that points towards spaces of liberation, albeit in a historically immanent and earthly, this-sided context. The dream is projective, and dreams call on us to a journey to spaces of liberation.

The formula of the politics of the oppressed is recurrent throughout Bensaïd’s work, and it is an important line of orientation. Tentatively, Marx – in dialogue with the strivings for proletarian liberation he witnessed – invented the problematic of a politics of the oppressed, at least he formulates it in an explicit way. It takes place, of course, with a confrontation with Hegel’s philosophy of the State; and with the politics of the oppressed, Marx begins to think – to dream of – a political practice of, and for, those who are excluded from the state machine. Lenin pursues this question. Provisionally, not definitively, he pursues it in the direction of articulating the politics of the oppressed and the withering away the state – a metaphor that condenses in the dream the language of state domination withdrawing from the world. Indeed, the dream reveals a truth of sorts, a point of support for militant politics and for philosophical articulation. Even if the state condenses a plurality of powers, a plurality of modes of domination, certain nodal relations of power are more important than others. The dream, I think, entails the passage beyond the modes of domination, through the withering away of the state machinery. Of course, this is where the rift between the dream and reality of State and Revolution was lodged. It is up to those who come after to decide, to wager, how the rift is to be handled.

If the theoretical space of the philosophical has a determinate relationship to militant politics – and I argue it does – then the question of the state machinery needs to be posed, because it concerns the prospects and nature of human liberation, which – if taken seriously – is about the abolition of capital, masculine domination, the robbery of ecology, and imperialist relations but also the liberation of democratic liberated societies that know no state machinery. This might be a new condition for the consolidated emergence of liberatory politics. The modalities of philosophical thinking must take their stand in relation to this political problem.

Conjoined to the withering away of the State, the other dimension of the dream towards the future concerns alienated fetishism, the confrontation with which Bensaïd left his final, unfinished research project. Again, this concerns Lenin’s place, because militant politics – according to Bensaïd – makes it possible to confront the world of the commodity, of alienation, reification and fetishism; indeed, the political innovations made by Lenin, which Bensaïd takes to be a whole apparatus of thinking of party politics in terms of a strategic operator, is addressed to the problem of breaking the closed circle of the reproduction of commodity fetishism. We could take a few steps back and think about the role of the critique of everyday life in Henri Lefebvre, where the critique criticises fetishism, with modern bourgeois societies in which the everyday is experienced in its reified, fetishistic form subject to transformation; revolutionary historical exceptions can break down this structure of the reified everyday, the fetishistic character of the lived experience of workers and the oppressed are like shells that break upon the emergence of new passion, new movement, new content in history. And it is in these moments of the breakdown of the reified everyday, the breakdown of fetishism, that the liberatory possibilities emerge in history, which a politics of the oppressed, adjoined to Lenin’s name, hope to consolidate to achieve decisive breakthroughs for liberation.

Concluding Comments

To bring this to a conclusion. I have not been interested in Lenin’s philosophy as such, and I have hardly paid attention – honourable it is – to Bensaïd’s interest in Lenin’s philosophical works. More essential, to my mind, is Lenin’s primacy of politics, and the way in which Lenin’s breakthrough for a primacy of politics, the innovations he makes for the political, had certain reverberating effects on the creative theoretical-philosophical interventions that Bensaïd made, and how these in turn fold back upon a thinking of Lenin. Thus, two threads are woven together, the primacy of politics, always of the oppressed, and the creative theoretical endeavours of profane illumination, targeting the complexity of thinking ways of changing the world, of finishing with all forms of domination, in which this-sided practice is the militant testing ground for any idea. In this spirit, I leave the last word to Daniel, from The Melancholic Wager:

If it is impossible to predict the forms that the next century will invent, what the barricades and insurrections of the future will resemble, what exact mix of peaceful and violent resistance will be seen to accomplish it, what really matters, is to affirm, intransigently, that the vicious circle of fetishism and the infernal round of the commodity can be broken; that terrestrial eternity does not exist any more than celestial eternity, that there is necessarily a resolution, an escape, an exit, and that we will end up finding it. This northeastern passage to spaces of justice and liberation will be made, certainly and without any doubt, by a radical transformation of forms of property and power, between humans, between the sexes, between the generations. We do not know for certain how this passage will be crossed, or if it will ever be crossed, but we know for sure that it is possible, since the question is human, that it depends on us, without any transcendence; since the economy, money, history, science, the state and other idols are our creatures and not godly authorities ruling over us.[3]

 

Notes

[1] V. I. Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism, an Infantile Disorder, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch10.htm.

[2] V. I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/v.htm

[3] Daniel Bensaïd, Le pari mélancolique, Fayard, 1997, pp. 290–1. Translation is mine.

 

Featured image: Daniel Bensaïd speaks. Courtesy of Contretemps.

Darren Roso