Revolution, Doom, and the Right’s Appropriation of Leninism

In his “The West at War: On the Self-Enclosure of the Liberal Mind,” philosopher Boris Buden approaches the war in Ukraine through a question that may appear naïve—however, the very appearance of naivety is an effect of the ideological triumph of global capitalist liberalism:

Isn’t it ridiculous to talk about revolution today? Isn’t the concept totally discredited? Indeed, this is among the greatest ideological achievements of the liberal mind.

What is missing today in the bloody drama in Ukraine is the idea of revolution. Or more precisely: We miss Lenin—a figure who radically challenges the binary logic behind the clash between two normative identity blocs.

… our imagination must reclaim the idea of fast and radical change—as a condition for our survival.

Buden then provides an outline of what this could mean for the ongoing war in Ukraine:

What Russia needs today is not a coup d’état that supposedly returns things to normal. It needs a revolution—a Leninist one with genuine revolutionary violence that will not only remove Putin and his clique from power (he deserves the same fate as Nikolai II), but also destroy his entire system of oligarchic crony capitalism, expropriate the criminal expropriators, and call the oppressed of the world to join the struggle.

But this is exactly what the West fears most. The system of parliamentary oligarchy that upholds Putin, with its authoritarian and violent character, is not an exclusively Russian invention. It’s the system that best serves the interests of the global ruling class today. This is why there has been so much sympathy for Putin among right-wing circles around the world. If Putin dies, someone else will carry his flag onward, not only in Russia but in many other places around the world, including the West.

Buden concludes his vision with the obvious question to which he provides the only appropriate answer: “Does this sound too utopian? Perhaps, but there is no time left for anything else. Unless we reclaim the utopian vision of radical and rapid change, we are doomed.”

I think he is right on both counts, and the pessimist that I am read these lines as a syllogism: (1) the revolutionary option is utopian; (2) there is no time left for anything else; so, (3) we are doomed. The most brutal and depressing fact in recent history is that the only case of Buden’s imagined scene—a violent revolutionary crowd invading the seat of power—was on January 6, 2021. A crowd of Trump supporters, denying the results of the democratic presidential election, broke into the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C. They viewed the election as illegitimate, a theft organized by corporate elites (they were right up to a point!). Left-liberals reacted with a mix of fascination and horror. There was a bit of envy in their condemnation of “ordinary” people breaking into the sacred seat of power, creating a carnival that momentarily suspended our rules for public life.

Now, Elon Musk, a Right establishment version of Assange, is releasing “Twitter Files” in a similar way that the past popular protests transformed themselves into the Trumpian attack on Congress—we move from Assange to Musk. Here is a comment from one of Musk’s supporters: “Statues torn down. Humiliating renunciations of thought crimes real and fake. Marxism is being pushed on kids to bring back Pol Pot. And [that’s] why your work in buying Twitter may be the last way to avoid genocide and civil war.” So does this mean that the populist Right stole the Left’s resistance to the existing system through a popular attack on the seat of power? Is our only choice between parliamentary elections controlled by corrupted elites or uprisings controlled by the populist Right?

No wonder Steve Bannon, the ideologist of the new populist Right, openly declares himself as the “Right Leninist for the 21st century”:

Bannon’s White House adventure was only one stage of a long journey—the migration of revolutionary-populist language, tactics, and strategies from the left to the right. Bannon has reportedly said: “I’m a Leninist. Lenin … wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”

While Bannon derides big corporations, which, with apparatuses of the state, control and exploit ordinary working Americans, he had no problem with the Right hiring the notorious Cambridge Analytica (a data analytics firm) to use the most sophisticated AI to secure Trump’s victory in 2016. There is more than anecdotal value in this fact: It signals the vacuity of alt-Right populism, which has to rely on the latest technological advances to maintain its popular redneck appeal. But it also signals the fragility of the entire system, which needs the shocks of populist mobilization to survive. This coincidence of the opposites (technological manipulation and populism) is based on the exclusion of the third: the liberal “free” subject who decides after rational deliberation.

So yes, we are doomed. There is no clear way out, but we should always bear in mind that the global capitalist system is even more doomed, approaching its apocalyptic end. The hopelessness is not ours when we are at the mercy of an undefeatable global capitalist machine; the hopelessness is in the very heart of this machine. There is no hope for us within the coordinates of the existing global system.

So back to Buden. We have to think in terms of radical change—and to perceive the contours of such a change, we should not be afraid to re-learn the lessons of the past. Here is a surprising example: Hegel’s last published text, the 1831 essay “On the English Reform Bill,” in which he cautions about a possible socio-historical turn for the worse, at least in Britain. This text is usually perceived as Hegel’s anti-democratic warning against parliamentary elections—against the shift from corporate order, in which individuals participate in the social totality only through their role in a particular estate, to the direct access of individuals in the universal order. However, as philosopher Adrian Johnston pointed out, a closer look allows us to propose a different reading.