“Spectres of Lenin: contemporary hauntings of a fractured Left” was first presented by Denis Bosseau at the panel discussion “Affronter les crises du 21e siècle / Facing 21st century crisis” held on 28 June 2025 during Historical Materialism’s Paris conference «Conjurer la catastrophe» (26-28 June 2025). Galip Yalman, Sam Salour, and George Sotiropoulos also took part in the discussion, chaired by Sebastian Budgen. What follows is a revised, expanded, and retitled version of the original paper.

“The contradictions and risks inherent to the process of political organisation and association cannot simply be smoothed over or exorcised like a bad curse haunting us from the depth of the past. Nor will the political, as a strategic domain of practice, simply disappear if we refuse to speak its name […] Politics is not a curse, nor is it reducible to a game only played by the powerful few to the detriment of the many, a game which one could simply choose to opt out of.”

— Denis Bosseau

 How Leninism still haunts the contemporary Left

“I think that no struggle against capitalism is possible without a powerful political proposal, that is to say, a general and articulated one, capable of countering the capitalist proposal. And I think that apologias for intransitivity are a passport to political impotence. So here is the first line of fracture on the Left. It passes between, on the one hand, the neo-Leninist position which maintains the imperative of a direction, that is to say, a proposal, as constitutive of an anti-capitalist politics, and, on the other hand, an idea of intransitivity which I fear is doomed to end up as anti-politics.”

Frédéric Lordon, “For A Neo-Leninism” (2021)[1]

 

To this day, for a broad section of the contemporary Left, any viable answers to the old question of what is to be done in response to the catastrophes of our time would have to be predicated on the exorcism of Leninism and the specters it might conjure up; namely, such political concepts and categories as those of revolutionary vanguardism, the conquest of political power, democratic centralism, the dictatorship of the proletariat and, of course, the very concept of class struggle. But with the rise of far-right populism and the intensifying brutality of a complicit neoliberal order bent on crushing all that it cannot co-opt, can we still afford not to face this haunting fear of Leninist politics? Here I propose to look at some of the most recurrent automatisms of thought and other haunted responses that still emerge from the radical Left each time the specter of Leninism is conjured up. To be more precise, I am particularly interested in confronting the limits of the “Libertarian Impulse” which came to prominence in the early 2000s, and whose influence can still be felt in many contemporary works in the Left-libertarian tradition of the past twenty-five years.[2] A tradition which, when it is not endeavoring to reduce Leninism to the ideological antechamber of totalitarianism, would seek to paint it as that which must urgently be exorcised if the Left is ever to recover the humanist undercurrents of Marxism, and with it, new possibilities of emancipatory hope. A neo-Libertarian current which has led some to argue that instead of apprehending communism as the “the real movement that abolishes the current state of things” by means of a conquest of political power by the proletariat —  we ought to rethink it as a liberating form of life, communal experiments in de-capitalised existence at a distance from the State and the corrupting influence of politics, understood as the privileged game of the powerful.[3]

In response, I wish to invite the reader to consider the following hypothesis, which is that such libertarian and anti-Statist perspectives have today led us to a highly problematic strategic impasse. One whereby any concrete proposals on how to wrest power away from those who make politics their profession are no longer entertained if not outrightly opposed. To borrow Jacques Derrida’s apt turn of phrase from Specters of Marx (1993), my contention here is that the contemporary Left —  if it is to find common ground in its struggle against Capital —  has a responsibility to correspond and have it out with its obsessive haunting (hantise) of political power and other specters of Leninism (« de correspondre et s’expliquer, sans assurance ni symétrie, avec la hantise »).[4] Crucially, I believe that coming to terms with such hauntings is a necessary step to take if we are to break with what Daniel Bensaïd once referred to as this pervasive “social illusion” that endures today according to which society can only be transformed through social institutions and platforms rather than through a strategically organised conquest of political power.[5]

 

1.

The substitution of the political by the ethical

In the past twenty-five years this hantise (haunting fear) of political power has led some to draw a line of comparison between the new breath of libertarian spirit which intensified with the emergence of new social movements and this phenomenon that Lenin once defined as Left-wing communism or Leftism. As Bruno Bosteels sought to remind us in “The Leftist Hypothesis: Communism in the Age of Terror”, Lenin explained this phenomenon as one that “involves a principled stance against any and all participation in parliamentary or bourgeois electoral politics, in unions, and even or especially in party discipline”. The upshot of this repudiation of all political compromises being interpreted by Lenin as a semi-anarchist type of radicalism, “petty bourgeois revolutionism” or “massism” attempting to purify, or at least to shield, communism against all notions that may lend themselves to authoritarian tendencies.[6] In practice, the “Leftist hypothesis” —  as Bosteels refers to it —  was seen by Lenin as most often translating into a recurrent “clamorous appeal to the direct action of the masses over and against the organisational structures of the party, unions and parliaments”.[7]

 

Times have changed, of course, and Left-libertarian thinking along with it. The question today would be to determine what exactly guides the contemporary Left-libertarian spirit before making any hasty rapprochement with what Lenin rather disparagingly called “an infantile disorder”.[8] Furthermore, it is also worth noting from the onset that while certain consistencies could surely be recovered between various Libertarian moments in the history of struggles and their interpretations, it would be highly misleading to assume there is one homogenous Libertarian tradition. For much like Marxism, there exists a rich heterogenous multiplicity of Libertarian approaches which include many blended dialogical perspectives between the two philosophical families (Marxism and Left-Libertarian thought). With that being said, it is also important to note that some contemporary Libertarian thinkers will themselves acknowledge a certain coherence and argumentative consistency in the libertarian Left of the past twenty-five years. As Saul Newman put it —  who himself identifies with this libertarian moment —  perhaps one could approach it in the following general terms: “[as] a heterodox and diffuse ensemble of ideas and theories which are nevertheless united around what might be called the libertarian impulse” characterized by “the ethical and political injunction of anti-authoritarianism, a conviction about the moral inadmissibility of state coercion, and the general idea that the less life is governed the better”.[9]

For Daniel Bensaïd, this neo-libertarian current is perhaps best understood as part of a post-Stalinist moment responding to the great disillusionment of the tragic century of extremes. A moment which sees a certain interiorisation of defeat and a questioning of the primacy of the political in matters of emancipatory struggles and movements.[10] For him, twenty-first century neo-libertarian thought would seem to correspond more to a certain “mood” than a well-defined orientation. An impulse, then, reflecting a desire to creatively respond to the aspirations (and weaknesses) of the renascent social movements of the new millennium which followed in the footsteps of Neo-Zapatismo and came to flourish after the Occupy movement which spurred what journalist Vincent Bevins called “the mass protest decade” of the 2010s (see If We Burn [2023]). The specificity of this libertarian mood, as Bensaïd suggests, is perhaps that many of the themes of the contributing authors, from Toni Negri and Michael Hardt to John Holloway and Jerome Baschet —  among others —  tend to be more inspired by Foucault as well as Deleuze and Guattari than by historic nineteenth century sources.[11] While someone like Foucault went as far as questioning the desirability of revolutionary struggle itself, what the new libertarians would rather seek to draw from is the latter’s conception of power in view of elaborating a radical re-conceptualisation of revolutionary struggle; one that could free us from the political specters of Leninism that still weighs on it.[12] In this spirit, the stakes of revolutionary struggle would no longer be that of taking power, of conquering democracy, but of developing a certain ethics of resistance that is primarily focused on becoming ungovernable, on experimenting and cultivating “lines of flight” to resist capture by the (capitalist) system.[13] In this new imaginary of the post-modern revolution, the privileged answer to the old question of what is to be done (?) is not the idea of taking power, but of rejecting and dissolving power (relations).[14] Renouncing the grand narrative of revolutionary emancipation of the twentieth century, the mood shifted towards an analysis of the micro-physics of power, an apology of micro-resistances, interstitial struggles, everyday experiments in alternative modes of living. From there a rich panoply of iterations of this newfound libertarian impulse eventually branched out. Some will present it without ambiguity as a renewed Left-communist critique of Leninism (Werner Bonefeld & Sergio Tischler,  2002), or more generally as the re-invention of a new anti-political “philosophy from below” (Gilman Opalsky, 2016) that could amplify the “true” desire of the masses, which many will come to interpret as one of insubmission and exile from the system (Paolo Virno, 2002; Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, 2017).

It would not take long for anyone familiarising themselves with contemporary neo-libertarian literature to see that much of what unites it is a certain mourning of politics, which in some cases — as we shall see — occasionally translates into an outright rejection of it. This impulse is anticipated with notable clarity in Toni Negri and Felix Guattari’s common project Communists Like Us (1990) wherein they insist that: “Politics today is nothing more than the expression of the domination of dead structures over the entire range of living production.”[15] Collective resignation to this diagnosis, would then lead to various attempts to evade this morbid reality of politics by privileging a position of exteriority from it. For Jérôme Baschet, for instance, who has been an attentive chronicler of the new social movements of the past 25 years, it is now clear that the antidotes to old political ways of thinking of the past century will have to be found within the experimental “liberated spaces” (les espaces libérés) that we have seen surging up around the globe, from the occupied squares of the Arab Spring to those of the indignados in Spain and Greece, to the assemblies of Occupy Wall Street in the US or occupied round-abouts of the Yellow Vests. Antidotes will also have to be found in the less spectacular but no less important expansion of squats, autonomous zones or ZADs, as well as in cooperatives animated by a spirit of mutual aid.[16] All such spaces wherein people actively demonstrate, in practice, that it is today possible to cultivate non-capitalist forms of life “within the limited space and time that capital leaves for free play” —  as Richard Gilman Opalsky put it.[17]

The emancipatory force of such “liberated” spaces, one is told, would lie in their reticular potentiality or network-like structure which allow people to experiment the virtues of mutual aid and to deploy a collective do-it-yourself (DIY) capacity of autonomous organisation, while freeing oneself, as much as possible, from the circuits of capitalism and from existing political institutions. In this interstitial logic, any attempt at organising politically or seeking out political representation as a movement would bring with it the risk of being dispossessed of all genuine autonomy. Most neo-libertarian advocates of such perspectives are of course far from naïve. Like Baschet, most will recognise that those who live within such “liberated spaces” or autonomous zones, cannot entirely rid themselves of the constraints of capitalism. Yet, some would insist that the spontaneous pedagogical strength of such experiences of semi-decapitalised existence is that they offer people the possibility of breaking away from the chains of our dependency on politics, the State and its institutions; something which is seen as a — if not the — precondition for true revolution, or true communism even. In this neo-libertarian perspective, this is perhaps the most important lesson that the children of State dependency are yet to learn, and most notably those — children of Lenin(ism) — still attached to what is being presented as a stubborn and morbid obsession with the idea that the world can only be changed by conquering political power. [18]

There is of course something to be learned from the neo-libertarian approach. It is certainly true, for instance, that no emancipatory struggle could ever be sustained without such a (libertarian) impulse to engage in the ruthless criticism of all instituted and institutionalised forms of knowledge, that is, without challenging the ready-made ideas and traditions of the old society, or challenging how one understands what it means to actually do politics, to organise democratically, from below, in an autonomous manner, etc. Indeed, I would see such exigencies as key requirements for the critique des armes of emancipatory struggle, a safeguard against dogmatism and authoritarian derailments both in theory and practice.[19] Moreover, and as some libertarian thinkers showed —  from Daniel Guerin to Toni Negri & Michael Hardt, Michael Löwy and David Graeber —  libertarian interpretations and analyses of the history of struggles have greatly helped to revitalise an otherwise moribund debate about strategy, offering much food for thought about the possible synthesis of anarchist and Marxist thought. Just as I think that today many on the libertarian Left would agree with Daniel Guerin that key elements of revolutionary Marxist thought should be kept and learned from, namely: the historical materialist analysis of capitalist society, but also the notion of alienation, which Guerin saw as being in accordance with the anarchist emphasis on the freedom of the individual. And perhaps above all, it would seem clear that Marx’s notion that the workers shall be emancipated by the workers themselves occupies a central place in Left-libertarian thought; a notion which has become something of a mantra for many, and for good reasons.[20]

So where might the roots of the problem lie? Where might be the main line of fracture which today still impedes collaborative dialogue between Red and Black (Marxists and Libertarians)?

My hypothesis —  though it is admittedly not a very original one —  is that the real problem emerges from the point at which the communist idea that (i) “the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves” comes to be fetishised as an ethical principle rather than being deployed as a political one. That is to say, when it is presented as an ethical imperative that is ultimately incompatible with this other important idea: (ii) the conquest of political power.[21] Whereas Marxism —  broadly speaking —  would tend to see those two ideas (i and ii) as intimately linked —  i.e., see collective emancipation as dependent upon the process of translating raw social power into political power strong enough to shift the coordinates of a situation so that popular (democratic) will can be imposed at every level of society; it seems that the new libertarian impulse today would be to see these two important elements of revolutionary Marxism (i & ii) almost as oil and water, as somehow mutually exclusive or incompatible.

From the writings of John Holloway and those of The Invisible Committee to those of the late David Graeber and the more recent works of Jerome Baschet and Catherine Malabou, this libertarian impulse always seems to point back to this argument that, in order to move forward and truly seize and support the emancipatory potential of new social movements, a decisive break with political theories that defend the idea of an organised conquest of political power is needed.[22] As some of the writings of Tiqqun notably insist on, this break is necessary because ‘it is on (…) the ethical terrain of forms-of-life” —  rather than that of politics —  “[…] that the struggle against Empire is presently played out.”[23] In the early 2000s, David Graeber offered a similar position, placing a particular accent on the pre-figurative nature of the task. According to him, while “Marxism has tended to be a theoretical or analytical discourse about revolutionary strategy” —  the urgent matter at hand is to think of emancipation and struggles primarily in terms of “an ethics of practice”; one that “insists, before anything else, that one’s means must be consonant with one’s ends; [that] one cannot create freedom through authoritarian means; that one must embody, as much as possible, the society one wishes to create”.[24] One can indeed find this very same message permeating through much of the Left-libertarian literature of the past twenty-five years. A message which is generally punctuated by this consistent warning against the old Marxist “obsession with the political translation of [social] movements”.[25]

And here there are, the fruits of this hantise of political power and the State that have fuelled the contemporary Left-libertarian imaginary: a revisionist re-interpretation of “communism as communising” which privileges an ethics of mutual recognition rather than the elaboration of political projects.[26] It is the unchecked consumption of these fruits that feeds the phantasm of the horizontalized multitude tasked with resisting all enrolment in the politics of organisation, seen as placing itself in a fluid position of dual power against the corrupting verticality of State power, its professionals and its institutions. The tormented obsession behind this phantasm has been such that it has convinced many on the Left that revolution as it has traditionally been understood by revolutionary socialists in the twentieth century ought to be considered an impossibility for the twenty-first. By which it is implied the politics of class struggle, concerned with the slow impatient labour of conquering democracy, the labour of coalition building, moved by the idea that revolutionary struggle must imply a willingness to make use of all weapons at one’s disposal, including tactical participation in parliamentary bourgeois representative democracy. It is this tormented obsession that has led to the tenacity of this social illusion I mentioned earlier on. The question now being, what are the chief characteristics of this illusion?

 

2.

A social illusion born from hantise

The young Marx once tried to warn his contemporaries against this “political illusion” which amounts to the belief that political emancipation —  understood as the securing of civil and democratic freedoms —  was the ultimate key to the riddle of human emancipation.[27] He worried that this increasingly pervasive illusion would only help cement a climate of political resignation by supporting the idea that the current world order of capitalist expansion only needed to be perfected, reformed, rather than radically challenged. But on the eve of the twenty-first century, as Daniel Bensaïd tried to explain, a symmetrical illusion seem to have taken hold of much of the Left imaginary.[28] A “social illusion” which essentially consists in thinking that society can only be transformed through social institutions —  the sphere of work, consumer cooperatives, mutual aid associations and other self-management projects —  without having to confront the problem of political power and the modern bourgeois capitalist State.[29] At its most radical, the practical translation of this illusion can be found expressed in the principled advocacy of spontaneous, insurrectionist, direct-action responses to pressing societal issues, but always at a distance from the State and from the politics of class, that of parties, of democratic representation and of all forms of verticality or hierarchical organisation.

I would argue that the consumption and practical translation of this illusion affecting intellectuals as well as activists on the ground is symptomatic of a collective internalisation of the hantise of political power I have been discussing. To be clear, by no means am I arguing that the consumption and reproduction of this illusion is the result of naivety, pure and simple. And I am certainly not proposing that it is the symptom of “an infantile disorder” — as Lenin once qualified the Left-wing communism of his time. Rather, I believe it more appropriate, and in fact more accurate, to look at it as a collective haunted response to a brutal past which has come to shape our collective habitus —  to Borrow Bourdieu’s concept. A phenomenon born out of a dialectic of internalisation and externalisation of a tormented history of betrayed revolutions, authoritarian derailments, State violence and a long succession of political defeats. In this sense, it is clear that we are not dealing with naivety. Not at all. As a matter of fact, not being haunted by such things may very well be the real sign of an infantile disorder, so to speak. Nevertheless, when such a hantise of past defeats and betrayed revolutionary experiments extends to one’s critical appreciation of the value of political organisation or leads to a principled refusal to confront the question of political power and the State, I would argue that it can seriously impede one’s capacity to see, understand and seize the emancipatory potential of social movements and struggles. It can lead to this type of phobic response and reductive understanding of politics which to this day has perhaps been best illustrated by John Holloway’s now famous proposal to Change the World Without Taking Power (2002).

At the core of this proposal is what Holloway —  and others after him —  would present as the urgent need to elaborate a “anti-politics of events” which could function as an antidote to the old “politics of organisation” which has dominated the Left in the past, and remains tainted by the specters of Leninism —  i.e., vanguardism, the politics of parties, democratic centralism, and other such hauntings associated with authoritarianism and hierarchy.[30] Here is the problem of course: if not by means of political organisation, then “how do ‘we’ strike at the heartless heart of the capitalist hydra?“ – asks Holloway in his recent book Hope in Hopeless Times (2022).[31] As one discovers, it is not so much the principle of organisation per se that is being opposed here, but political organisation as understood and theorised in various ways by the “orthodox” Marxists tradition broadly defined. The philosopher blames the old Marxist’s (Leninist) State-centric views of revolution — by means of a conquest of political power — for its belligerent conception of power understood in terms of “power-over the others”. A conception which to him still impedes the Left’s ability to think through and build upon “our power-to create a different world” today, in the interstices of real existing capitalism.[32] In this optic, any conception of emancipatory practice which integrates the idea of an exercise of power-over (others) —  such as class struggle, the conquest of political power or the militaristic language of vanguardism —  comes to be consistently presented as an engine of social conflict, not of reconciliation. And as such, one is told it is something to renounce categorically, to exorcise, like a specter that has haunted the living for too long and crippled their imagination. And so, in turn, one is encouraged to adopt, or least to experiment, with what is presented as an ethics of non-identity whose primary goal is to nurture our individual and collective capacity to move against-and-beyond the constricting force of all forms of political identities.[33] This is an invitation to the great refusal, the voluntary surrender of one’s function as a political subject, this trap imposed on “us” by capital and the State-centric Marxist theorists of the past. In practice, this means that any form of emancipatory strategic thinking about organisation based on a dialectical understanding of class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat cannot do. Class identification itself is seen here as a political trap or lure, a restrictive form of identification — born of a capitalist system we have become accustomed to. Class identification must then be renounced immediately. The task is in fact to disrupt and dissolve, today, the whole grammar of class struggle as a discourse instead of waiting on some fabled revolution long promised by Leninists and other usurpers of Marx (i.e., the true, humanist Marx). For — contrary to those who sought to translate Marxian thought into practical political projects (e.g., Lenin, Trotsky etc.) — he understood that the path to human emancipation and true wealth belongs to the one that “strives not to remain something he has become, but is in the absolute movement of becoming”.[34]

In this rather selective, revisionist reading of Marx, Holloway is not just telling us that any form of organisation in pursuit of political empowerment and the confrontation of the capitalist State is doomed from the start (for it induces us into the power games of State politics), but that all forms of collective self-identification with political categories which are themselves the product of the capitalist system are bound to become an impediment to true human emancipation (e.g., class). In Holloway’s radical libertarian imaginary, what is then left is a de-politicised ethics of the “mutually recognitive” classless “rabble” whose subversive emancipatory potential lies in its capacity to resist political subjectification.[35] The assumption here being that “the only” revolutionary subject worth considering today is human “dignity” itself (rather than the proletariat, as a political class).[36]

This is of course not to say that all libertarian theorists will necessarily endorse the same level of radical rejection of political organisation and of political power that Holloway exhibits. The collaborative works of Toni Negri and Michael Hardt are a good example of a Libertarian Marxism which integrate the question of political power in its strategic discussions. And we could also think of the remarkable work of Michael Lowy and many others. Nevertheless, this type of depoliticised ethics of mutual recognition championed by Holloway endures in the overall libertarian imaginary, it has become a consistent characteristic of its “mood”. This is particularly evident as one is confronted with this generalised dissolution of classes into unformed masses, “swarms” (Negri and Hardt, 2017), “multitudes” (Virno, 2002; Baschet, 2021), and plebs.[37] A tendency which, in turn, still begs the question: If political organisation is the problem, then how are we to understand and theorise the kind of social organisation capable to bringing about revolutionary change?

New social movements certainly brought some hope that both revolutionary Marxists and Libertarians could come into greater dialogue around questions of organisation that would respond to the shared desire of many who engaged in struggles to experiment with more horizontal, more democratic forms of political engagement. But a fracture remains when instead of seizing each new cycle of social movements and struggles as an opportunity to confront our hantise of political power, some persist in seeing in each sequence of democratic effervescence but the confirmation that the old politics (of organisation) are dead and buried —  or worse, that its specters should be prevented from rising again to haunt the living. This tendency clearly appears in the haunted enthusiasm displayed by David Graeber in 2004 (in the wake of the Battle of Seattle,[38] which marked the beginning of a new cycle of social movements and planted the seeds of what will be the mass protest decade of the 2010s) when he made the following observation about what was to come:

[…] everywhere one finds the same core principles: decentralization, voluntary association, mutual aid, the network model, and above all, the rejection of any idea that the end justifies the means, let alone that the business of a revolutionary is to seize state power.[39]

In libertarian circles, this marked the beginning of a newfound impetus to paint popular experiments with leaderless-ness and calls for greater organisational horizontality as depoliticised social events rather than political struggles. From there emerged an often-repeated representation of these struggles of the early twenty-first century as “carnivals of the oppressed” wherein authentic experiments in genuinely “decapitalised” living (supposedly) occurred. These were not struggles for political power, we are told, but reconciliatory “festivals of the non-subordinate” organised around the ethical principle of mutual recognition of the dignity of all participants.[40] We were then invited to apprehend these social events as consciously moved and organised in terms of an anti-political process of “talking and listening”, of successfully communing or communising without the imposition of formal political rules or hierarchical division of organisational labour.[41] We were meant to come to the realisation that this was the central, unifying characteristic of what the late Joshua Clover called the “new age of uprising”, which he himself qualified as a new age of struggle of the multitude versus state, of the us (the multitude) against them (the children of State dependency).[42]

But is the development of the recent history of struggles as simple as these remarks suggest? I doubt it. Yes, it is true that recent movements and struggles, from the movement of the squares to Black Lives Matter and others did and still do appeal to the language of horizontality and leaderless-ness inspired by the Occupy movement. Just as it is true and important to recognise that movements like Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, and others have insisted on the need to “go beyond politics”; that they have exhibited a clear dissatisfaction and distrust of institutionalised, parliamentary politics, and political parties. But it is also important to realise that it is not politics per se that is being rejected, and certainly not the politics of organisation, but rather a certain image of bourgeois parliamentary politics; and who can blame them? [43]

 

My point here is that intellectual efforts to theorise this contemporary distrust of many a social movement or struggle —  vis-à-vis the politics of parties of political organisation and coalition building in view of conquering democracy —  in terms of a simplified us against them confrontation between the social power of the classless unformed multitude and the political power of the State and its institutions, risks greatly damaging future strategic debates about emancipatory systemic change. The contradictions and risks inherent to the process of political organisation and association cannot simply be smoothed over or exorcised like a bad curse haunting us from the depth of the past. Nor will the political, as a strategic domain of practice, simply disappear if we refuse to speak its name.[44] Risk is inherent to struggle, and one cannot do away with it by decree or by reasoning alone. Politics is not a curse, nor is it reducible to a game only played by the powerful few to the detriment of the many, a game which one could simply choose to opt out of. Furthermore, seeking to eliminate all reference to class struggle and the politics of organisation — which include the politics of parties and representative mediation — contemporary libertarian voices risk this uncomfortable association with the reactionary shadow of the new philosophers and their haunted determination to associate all Marxist politics with totalitarianism. An intellectual group who —  in rather unambiguous terms —  has repeatedly asserted that “in order for the revolt of the masses against the State to be good, it is necessary to reject the class direction of the proletariat, to stamp out Marxism, to hate the very idea of the class party.”[45] Indeed, if left unchecked, some of today’s libertarian echoes could unwittingly participate in this enterprise of methodical depoliticisation that the ruling classes have always dreamed of; i.e., no more socio-political classes, no more class antagonism, no more dispossessed nor possessors, only the great unformed masses versus the state.

Now, this is not to suggest that today’s heterogeneous libertarian imaginary has more in common with the anti-Marxism of new philosophers than with revolutionary Marxists themselves — I believe quite the opposite is true. But it is the case, however, that the haunted rejection of the political that endures today in the libertarian imaginary can still all too easily lead to, or at least reinforce, what I would argue is one of the key problems that accompanies their hantise of the specter of political power; namely, the production and reproduction of a distorted, depoliticised appreciation of the rich history of struggles and the smoothing over of the contradictions that shape its development. Like all forms of haunting obsessions, the hantise of political power risks becoming a morbid symptom as it affects collective memory and encourages a distorted, or at least myopic, appreciation of the past.[46] It runs the risk of becoming a morbid symptom as it encourages this type of reading of history whereby one avoids the confrontation of anything that could conjure up the objects of one’s hantise, while (obsessively) encouraging us to only see what we want to see, that is to say, that which can function as the antidote to that which haunts us.

 

3.

The eternal return of the political question

Speaking of haunted projections on the history of struggles, the words of David Graber from the early 2000s once again come to mind. While admitting that activists and militants involved in the newly emerging cycle of social movements did not generally refer to themselves as anarchists, he nevertheless insisted that we ought to understand the general impulse of these struggles as being of anarchist rather than Marxist or socialist ascendence. As he put it:

[…] It is becoming increasingly clear that the age of revolutions is not over. It’s becoming equally clear that the global revolutionary movement in the twenty-first century, will be one that traces its origins less to the tradition of Marxism, or even of socialism narrowly defined, but of anarchism. [47]

Graeber does have a point, of course. Increasing popular experiments with organisational horizontalism in the early 2000s and 2010s could indeed be traced back to anarchist thought more easily than to Marxist and socialist thought. But generalisations of this type can quickly become problematic. For the history of struggles is far richer in contradictions than some appear ready to admit, and that is precisely where lies its richness. My point here is that there has not been, and nor will there be, a “Marxist” or “anarchist” revolution properly speaking, only revolutions which are the work of the exploited classes. Admitting as much in no way implies that ideas and theory have no role to play in the history of struggles. But their force and function are dependent on the development of the changing material conditions of existing society and the development of struggles within it, that of classes and the relations between them. The haunted obsession —  which notably circulates in libertarian circles —  to see in contemporary struggles the unmistakable signs of the twilight of the old Marxist and Leninist notions of political organisations (e.g., revolutionary parties, vanguards, democratic centralism etc.) tells us less about the nature of these struggles than about the inability of some of us to seriously come to terms with our hantise of political power and the traumatic memory of the age of extremes. Conversely, the trauma of the past cannot be done away with by simply spitting on history as some like John Holloway seems to think:

[…] Spit on history. History, even our history, is a history in which the struggle against oppression is invaded by the categories of the oppressors, so that it too becomes the history of Heroes, of Great Men, of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao. […] Break history. Du passé faisons table rase.[48]

Here, one is simply told to “drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead”.[49] But the politics of the blank page, of the blank slate (which, incidentally, Chairman Mao was quite fond of) also evokes some rather disquieting precedents, certain hauntings which Holloway’s work could benefit from confronting anew.[50]

Clearly, a new world can only be constructed with the help of the foundations laid by the people and ideas of the old world, by taking lessons from the tradition of the oppressed past, the (mis)-adventures of political theory and the hazards of its translation into practice. The past is full of specters which are bound to haunt the living, to torment them. It guides our actions and reactions to the present. As Daniel Bensaïd aptly put it: “How can a social class, subject to economic, political and cultural domination claim to build a new world without being overwhelmed by all the shit of the old one?” —  It cannot![51] The way forward is thus dependent upon our solidary collective ability to face and have it with the specters of the past that haunt us. A movement or struggle that suffers from too deep a “lack of historical knowledge” — as Guy Debord insisted — “cannot be conducted strategically” — nor politically in fact. [52] Now of course, the benefits of this lesson can only properly be appreciated as we come to terms with what exactly is meant by politics. And it may just be that the principal obstacle which exacerbates the fractures of the contemporary Left is not exactly where we think it is. Indeed, perhaps the problem is not that the political concepts and categories of the twentieth century are no longer fit for the twenty-first, but that we still seem unable to come to a commonly workable understanding of what the sense of the word “politics” implies. As Frédéric Lordon remarked in a recent intervention, the problem might be that, much too often, some of us only seem to approach politics as journalists do, relying on a truncated understanding whereby politics is reduced to: “elections, political parties, members of parliament, summary motions, choreographed rounds of debates, voting booths, ministerial offices and refreshment at the bar of the Assembly [or house of commons]”.[53] But politics is more than this. Just as the idea of a conquest of political power shouldn’t be amalgamated with the replacement of one governing elite by another, either via the polling booth or by revolutionary means. Such oversimplifications of politics will never be helpful.

With that in mind, taking a page from Daniel Bensaïd (once again), I would argue that perhaps a good first step in confronting one’s hantise of politics and of political power might be, at the very least, to understand that politics “[…] is neither a science of administration nor an institutional technique, but an art of opportune moments and of the spaces of decision making” (e.g., parties, assemblies, councils etc.). It is a “strategic art”, the privileged art in the dramaturgy of struggles. In this sense, politics always places itself from the viewpoint of its actors, on the ground. But as Bensaïd also pointed out, this viewpoint is not always easy to seize. For that requires being immersed in the heart of the fray, a careful analysis of the concrete situation, in all its nuances and contradictions.

Consider the following, though simplified and non-exhaustive, example: Extinction Rebellion’s recurrent insistence on the need to “Go Beyond Politics”. At first glance, some may be tempted to see in such slogans the tentative sign of an overall rejection of the old politics of organisation that many libertarians have been quick to diagnose. And there is a part of truth here, but it is very partial. In reality, one only needs to visit XR’s website to realise that far from renouncing politics, one of the primary demands of the movement is for governments to form citizens’ assemblies and for them to act on the recommendations of the said assemblies. Nothing in such demands actually indicates a fundamental refusal to actually do politics or to be politically engaged. Quite the contrary. The groups’ chapters, their militant workshop on community organising, their experiments with direct action and mass protest, are all within the embryonic political scope of the movement. Pressing for the formation of citizens’ assemblies is a political decision, oriented by a political line, which has long been debated, crafted by its activists. Ultimately, the aim of the citizens’ assembly demanded by the movement’s representatives, “is to give greater political power to citizens” when it comes to ecological action and policy. Again, there is clearly nothing inherently anti-political here. Similar observations could be made regarding the political development of the Yellow Vests in France, from its insurrectionary push in 2019 to the formulation of its demands for the institution of a Citizens’ initiative referendum (RIC- Référendum d’initiative citoyenne). The translation of popular anger, of raw social power into organised political experiments is a key element of the great pedagogy of struggles that Rosa Luxemburg wrote about so well, and Paulo Freire after her. Recognising this is essential to encourage strategic debates, learning from the successes and failures of each new cycle of movements and struggle. Intellectuals can and certainly ought to learn from the history of struggles. At the very least to realise that organised struggle requires that permanent work of preparation, and that this preparation is political.

Learning from each cycle of struggles thus demands a return of the question of politics, from which arises the following pedagogical imperative: to stand ready, for each minute is a narrow door from where the possible can emerge. As Bensaïd would often put it, there lies not only the messianic quality of politics, but its strategic dimension as an art of conjuncture, of broken time, of the opportune moment.[54] A dimension which Antonio Gramsci discussed with notably clarity in his Prison Notebooks:

In analysing […] the system of relations of force which exists in a given situation, one may usefully have recourse to the concept which in military science is called the “strategic conjuncture” — of rather, more precisely, the level of strategic preparation of the theatre of struggles. One of the principal factors of this “strategic conjuncture” consists in the qualitative condition of the leading personnel, or of what may be called the “front line” […] forces. The level of strategic preparation can give victory to forces which are “apparently” […] inferior to those of the enemy.[55]

Of course, this does not mean that the emancipatory outcome of such a crisis — as described by Gramsci — will solely depend on the degree of preparation and training of some “front line” or “leading personnel” (i.e., politically organised vanguard). Above all, it will always depend on the degree of preparation of a network of militants (i.e., activists, grassroot movements) whose activity and democratic effervescence irrigates the whole of society. And so, in the end, the political development of struggles and their emancipatory capabilities must be apprehended as part of a complex political ecology, as Rodrigo Nunes rather brilliantly explained in his recent work.[56] Because there is no magic formula for revolution, nor supreme solution or recipe for emancipation, and because there is no way to determine in advance from where the sparks of revolts will arise that could propel radical social change; political engagement means working for the uncertain. It means acting with the knowledge that there is no perfect moment to await that could finally deliver us to salvation. Hence the need for sustained vigilance. Or as Lenin put it, to stand ready to engage with “every manifestation of discontent, and to gather and turn to the best account every protest, however small”.[57]

Now, where does all this leave us in terms of future efforts to mend the fractures what divide the contemporary left? Perhaps one of the great lessons of libertarian thought has been to show that the path to emancipation (to communism) is more a matter of asking questions rather than finding answers. In that spirit, it is worth recognising the wisdom of John Holloway’s insistence on the fact that while the politics of organisation that have dominated the left in the twentieth century desperately strove for answers to the riddle of emancipation and the meaning of revolution, “we” —  today —  should embrace “the openness of uncertainty” that “is central to revolution” and understand that “asking the way is part of the revolutionary process itself”.[58] So, in acknowledgement of this idea that the path to emancipation is more a matter of asking questions rather than finding answers, and in the in the spirit of facing what collectively haunts us, let us then conjure up, together, the ghost of Lenin and pose what is perhaps the most crucial question of all: what is to be done? But it is also important to address the veritable sense of the question, at least in Leninist terms to start with.

As Althusser sought to explain, the question is a political question: “What is to be done to help to orient and organize the workers’ and the people’s class struggle” From the moment the question is posed, one can see that the matter of orientation, which can be referred to as the political line, comes before that of organisation. As Althusser observed, in Lenin’s mind, “this is to affirm the primacy of the political line over the party, and the construction and organization of the party as a function of the political line”.[59] So, contrary to what is often believed, and indeed often asserted in much of the libertarian literature, the shape and structure of any revolutionary political organisation must be understood as dependent upon the articulation of a clear political line from below, and in observance of the guiding Marxian principal that the emancipation of the oppressed classes must be conquered by the oppressed classes themselves. Indeed, one must remember that Lenin conceived of the question, first and foremost, as a political problem expressed from below rather than a question to be imposed from above. It must be apprehended as that which marks — so to speak — that moment of interruption whereby a spark of revolt, of raw social power, comes to be placed under questioning, opening itself to the path of political translation (Who is this we? How do we organise? How do we get where we want to be?). Lenin understood that such hauntings emanate from those engaged in struggle themselves as they attempt to get to grips with the concrete and most immediate challenges and obstacles to emancipation that their situation presents. In turn, when a theorist (like Lenin — who had expert knowledge of revolutionary politics and history) eventually comes to appropriate the question, all it entails is a solidary attempt at giving added political intelligibility to the existing hauntings that are already being expressed by the people, in their own words, who already engaged in struggle. With that in mind, my contention here is that getting to better understand the sense of Lenin’s old question could very well be an effective propaedeutic step to take in order to mend some of the most enduring fractures that still divide the contemporary Left. I do believe it could function as a valuable starting point of shared understanding for the benefit of greater dialogue and strategic discussion, opening up that path of learning together by walking together with those engaged in struggle today.

 

*****

 

The present situation is no longer that of a landscape blocked by the social-democratic or Stalinist parties in the face of which revolutionaries would only see their future in the form of martyrs or charismatic resistance fighters. To move forward, the Left, and particularly its intellectuals, will have “to correspond and have it out with its obsessive haunting” —  face the specter of political power (and its conquest).[60] It will have to re-learn to disabuse itself of some of the prejudices about political organization and representation that are bound to creep back after every political defeat. For there is nothing inherently good or bad about either of these, though it is certain that “[they] can be and often are misused” as Jo Freeman once put it. But we must also understand that “to reject them out of hand because they are misused is to deny ourselves the necessary tools to further development”.[61] Of course, as I have tried to suggest in this paper, it is not a question of now simply asking “what kind of political organisation must one build” or of seeking readymade organisational solutions. It is rather a matter of rethinking what doing-politics implies. There is an issue of power, of political overthrow, which today presses us to ask the question of the practical possibility of another organization of society, not just in local or municipal scales or in terms of autonomous enclaves. The mere logic of counter-powers is no longer enough today. Engaging with the specter of political power in revolutionary thought does not mean abiding to a preconceived model of action, or singular rule of the revolutionary. Quite on the contrary. Yes, it implies learning from the past, but only to pose anew the problem of strategic orientation on a confrontational path vis-à-vis concrete targets and clearly identifiable goals. This political path begins at the grass roots level of ongoing struggles, where it resonates with the question of what is to be done. If something is to haunt us today, let it be this warning given to us by the history of the oppressed past, which is that refusing all ambition to power, to conquering democracy, means tacitly agreeing to leave political power in the hands of those few who make politics their profession.

Notes

[1] Frédéric Lordon, “For a Neo-Leninism”, Verso Blog (10 September 2021).

[2] Cf. Saul Newman “The Libertarian Impulse”, The Journal of Political Ideologies, Vol. 16 (3) (Oct. 2011), 239-244.

[3] Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology [1846], marxists.org.

[4] Hantise (French) – An obsessive, haunting fear or torment affecting both thought and action. It points to the obsessive character of a thought or memory. As a concept deployed by Derrida in his Spectres de Marx (Galilée, 1993), p. 177), the phenomenon of hantise can amplify a certain reactive posture and reinforce automatisms of thought, whereby it becomes an impediment to reflexivity.. Cf. Specters of Marx (Routledge, 1994), 136.

[5] Daniel Bensaïd, « Du pouvoir et de l’État », Revue Ballast, 29 avril 2015.

[6] Bruno Bosteels, “The Leftist Hypothesis: Communism in the Age of Terror”, in Costas Douzinas & Slavoj Žižek, The Idea of Communism (Vol.1) (Verso, 2010), 33- 66.

[7] Douzinas & Žižek 2010, 33-66.

[8] V. I. Lenin, “’Left-Wing’ Communism: An Infantile Disorder” (1920), in Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 31 (Progress Publishers, 1964).

[9] Saul Newman, “The Libertarian Impulse”, The Journal of Political Ideologies, Vol. 16 (3) (Oct. 2011), 239-244. (My emphasis.) See also Saul Newman, “Postanarchism: a politics of anti-politics”, The Journal of Political Ideologies, 16:3 (Oct. 2011), 313-327.

[10] Daniel Bensaïd, « La Révolution sans prendre le pouvoir ?  À propos d’un récent livre de John Holloway » Contretemps, numéro 6, Février 2003. See also Bosteels 2010, 53.

[11] It is however worth noting that the Bakunian language of “non-political or anti-political social power” remains embedded in the works of many Libertarian theorists, chief among them John Holloway. See Bakunin “The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State” [1871], Marxists.org; and  in Bakunin on Anarchy, edited, translated and with an introduction by Sam Dolgoff (Vintage Books, 1971).

[12] See Michel Foucault, « Inutile de se soulever », Le Monde, 11 mai 1979, in Dits et Ecrits II (Quarto Gallimard, 2001), 790.

[13] See Michel Foucault, The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982-1983, translated by Graham Burchell (Picador, 2011); as well as Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Continuum Press,1988).

[14] John Holloway, Crack Capitalism (Pluto Press, 2010), 253-262; see also Holloway 2002, 20.

[15] Toni Negri & Felix Guattari, Communists Like Us: New Spaces of Liberty, New Lines of Alliance, translated by Michael Ryan (Semiotextes, 1990), 30.

[16] Jérôme Baschet, Basculements : Mondes émergents, possibles désirables (La Découverte, 2021).

[17] Richard Gilman-Opalsky, Spectres of Revolt: On the Intellect of Insurrection and Philosophy from Below (Repeater Press, 2016), 110.

[18] Baschet 2021, 112.

[19] Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right” [1844], marxists.org. (My emphasis.)

[20] Daniel Guerin, « Anarchisme et Marxisme » in L’Anarchisme (Gallimard, 2009), 252.

[21] Philippe Gottraux et Bernard Voutat, « Anarchisme et marxisme : vrai contentieux et faux clivage » in Changer le monde sans prendre le pouvoir ? Nouveaux libertaires, nouveaux communistes, Contretemps, numéro 6 (février 2003), 176-177.

[22] Cf. Comité Invisible, L’Insurrection qui vient (La Fabrique, 2007); À nos amis (La Fabrique, 2014); Maintenant (La Fabrique, 2017). See also Catherine Malabou, Au voleur ! Anarchisme et philosophie, (PUF, 2022).

[23] Tiqqun, Tout a failli, vive le communisme ! (La Fabrique, 2009). (My translation and emphasis.)

[24] David Graeber, “The Twilight of Vanguardism”, delivered at “History Matters: Social Movements Past, Present, and Future”, a 2003 conference at the New School for Social Research.

[25] Philippe Gottraux et Bernard Voutat, « Anarchisme et marxisme : vrai contentieux et faux clivage » in Changer le monde sans prendre le pouvoir ? Nouveaux libertaires, nouveaux communistes, Contretemps, numéro 6, (février 2003), 182.

[26] Werner Bonefeld & John Holloway, «Commune, Movement, Negation: Notes from Tomorrow», South Atlantic Quarterly 113 (2) (2014): 213–215.

[27] Karl Marx, “On The Jewish Question” [February 1844] in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, marxists.org.

[28] Daniel Bensaïd, « Sur le retour de la question politico-stratégique » [2006], in Contretemps (11 January 2020).

[29] Bensaïd, « Du pouvoir et de l’État », cit.

[30] John Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power (Pluto Press, 2002), 215.

[31] John Holloway, Hope in Hopeless Times (Pluto Press, 2022), 248-252. (My emphasis.)

[32] John Holloway, « Douze Theses sur l’Anti-pouvoir », in Changer le monde sans prendre le pouvoir ? Nouveaux libertaires, nouveaux communistes, Contretemps, numéro 6 (février 2003), 38-44.

[33] Holloway, Hope in Hopeless Times, cit., 19, 41.

[34] Ibid, 250.

[35] Ibid, 252.

[36] Cf. Werner Bonefeld, Kosmas Psychopedis (eds.), Human Dignity Social Autonomy and the Critique of Capitalism (Routledge, 2017).

[37] Michael Hardt & Tony Negri, Assembly (OUP, 2017); Paolo Virno, “General Intellect, Exodus, Multitude”, Archipélago, number 54 (June 2002); see also Baschet 2021.

[38] See 1999 Seattle WTO protests.

[39] David Graeber, “Anarchism, Or the Revolutionary Movement Of The Twenty-first Century” published online in the Anarchist Library (2004).

[40] Holloway, Change the World Without Taking Power, cit., 21, 215.

[41] John Holloway, “Can we change the world without taking power? A debate between John Holloway and Alex Callinicos World Social Forum”, International Socialism 2: 106 (Spring 2005).

[42] See Joshua Clover, Riot. Strike. Riot: The New Era of Uprisings (Verso, 2019).

[43] See Neil Simpson, “XR Fundamentals: Go Beyond Politics”, XR, 5 January 2021.

[44] On the issue of “massist ideology” and the “flattening out of dialectical analysis”, see Alain Badiou, Theorie de la Contradiction (François Maspero, 1975), 69.

[45] Quoted by Bruno Bosteels in Douzinas & Žižek 2010, 42.

[46] Paul Ricœur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (Seuil, 2000), 65.

[47] Graeber 2004.

[48] John Holloway, “Drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead”, Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières, 2005.

[49] Ibid. See John Holloway quoting William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

[50] “[…] the outstanding thing about China’s 600 million people is that they are ‘poor and blank’. This may seem a bad thing, but in reality it is a good thing […] On a blank sheet of paper free from any mark, the freshest and most beautiful characters can be written, the freshest and most beautiful pictures can be painted”, SeeMao Tse Tung, “Introducing a Co-operative” (April 15, 1958) in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, marxists.org.

[51] Daniel Bensaïd, « La politique comme art stratégique », Archives personnelles (Août 2007), www.danielbensaid.org.

[52] Guy Debord, Œuvres (Quarto Gallimard, 2006), 1804.

[53] Frédéric Lordon, « L’union ? Quelle union ? », Les blogs du Diplo, 30 june 2025.

[54] Cf. Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (Black Classic Press, 1990 [1970]).

[55] Antonio Gramsci, “Political parties in Periods of Organic Crisis”, in Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (International Publishers,1971), 217. Also quoted in Bensaïd 2007. (My emphasis.)

[56] Rodrigo Nunes, Neither Vertical nor Horizontal (Verso, 2021).

[57] V. I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? (Penguin Classics,1988 [1902]), 151.

[58] Holloway 2002, 215.

[59] Louis Althusser, Que Faire ? (PUF, 1978). See a recent translation by G. M. Goshgarian in What Is to Be Done? (Polity Press, 2020), 1-2.

[60] Derrida 1993, 177.

[61] Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness” [1970] in Women’s Studies Quarterly 41:3 & 4 (2013), 232.

Featured image: Lenin by Warhol at Galerie Klüser (Munich). Courtesy of Galerie Klüser.

Denis Bosseau