Like a Thief in the Night: The Actuality of Communism
Talk · zizekpodcast.com ·
2017-10-25 · 1:35:32 · 12,572 words
communism-socialismhegel-dialecticsideologycapitalismtechnology-ai-cyberspacehistorypsychoanalysisliberalism-political-correctnessrevolution-violencefascism-populismdemocracyphilosophy-general
Žižek delivers a lecture in St. Petersburg (Leningrad) revisiting Lenin's State and Revolution to interrogate the normative and strategic foundations of communist revolution. He ranges across the contradictions in Lenin's theory of human nature, the Soviet temptation toward post-humanism, the current impasse of the left between political correctness and right-wing social populism, and the ideological function of cynical complicity. He concludes with reflections on robotization, digital control, intellectual property as a limit of capitalism, and a defense of alienated anonymity over communitarian transparency.
every located moment in this recording, click one to read it
The ideas in it 13
in the order they first come up; click a row for what he does with the idea here
as “Zwangfreie Kommunikation (undistorted communication)”
Žižek invokes Habermas's concept to show that Lenin's normative grounding of revolution in 'elementary rules of social intercourse' effectively prefigures Habermasian communicative ethics, which Žižek finds touchingly naïve.
Implied in Žižek's discussion of money: the formal freedom of the wage relation is a real social abstraction that mediates domination, abolishing money without abolishing domination produces immediate personal domination instead.
as “techno-gnosticism”
Žižek's label for the Soviet and contemporary transhumanist ideology that seeks to overcome existing human nature through biological, genetic, or digital transformation, treating humanity as an imperfect machine to be upgraded.
Žižek's term for the emerging stage of capitalism in which states and corporations manage the biological, genetic, and digital transformation of human nature itself as a capitalist project.
as “bestimmte Negation (determinate negation)”
Žižek uses the 'coffee without cream/milk' joke to illustrate that negation is specific and constitutive of identity, what you lack matters and distinguishes you from other things that are materially identical.
as “morning after (of revolution)”
Žižek's phrase for the true test of revolution: not the carnivalesque moment of uprising but how ordinary life is reorganized once the exceptional state subsides, the phase Lenin found most difficult.
as “Wechselwirkung (mutual influence)”
Žižek cites this Hegelian category as the limit of Lenin's philosophical comprehension, Lenin could not get beyond mere reciprocal causation to the deeper speculative logic of Hegel's Science of Logic.
as “left Fukuyamaists”
Žižek's ironic label for leftists who have effectively accepted liberal democratic capitalism as a horizon, limiting themselves to incremental demands (better healthcare, more tolerance) without a structural alternative vision.
as “rent vs. profit”
Žižek distinguishes classical capitalist profit from the rent logic of platform corporations: when you buy Microsoft Word you are not paying for a commodity at production cost plus profit margin but paying access rent to a monopolized piece of general intellect.
Žižek invokes Marx's concept of the collective intellectual substance of society to argue that today's tech giants (Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon) appropriate it as private rent rather than profit from commodity production.
as “cynical ideology”
Žižek's characterization of hegemonic ideology that presents itself as critique of ideology: it concedes all problems but neutralizes action by declaring universal complicity, blocking systemic critique.
Žižek's paradoxical descriptor for Steve Bannon: someone who adopts a ruthless seizure-of-power logic and anti-bank, anti-oligarch rhetoric that the mainstream left is too timid to voice.
as “alienated autonomous state bureaucracy”
Žižek's deliberately provocative positive ideal: an impersonal, well-functioning state apparatus that delivers services anonymously, freeing individuals from constant communitarian participation, presented against the left myth of transparent local self-management.
Stories he reaches for 9
A man asks for coffee without cream; the waiter says they have no cream, only milk, so they can only offer coffee without milk. The same material absence is ontologically different depending on what negation defines it.
“Sorry, we don't have cream so I cannot give you coffee without cream. We only have milk so I can give you coffee without milk.”
Starbucks charges more for coffee that supposedly donates a percentage to Guatemalan children or forest preservation, the price of good social conscience is included in the commodity itself, so consumption already IS solidarity, eliminating any need for structural critique.
“The price for good social conscience and care, solidarity, is included into the commodity itself... Pay a little bit more and you will be—”
Politburo debates whether there will be money in communism; right-wingers say yes, leftists say no, Stalin proposes the dialectical synthesis: there will be money and there will not, some people will have money, others won't.
“There will be money and there will not be money... Some people will have money, other people will not have money.”
A customer asks the wrong shop whether they have butter; the clerk says they are the store that doesn't have toilet paper, the store that doesn't have butter is across the street. Absence is specific and classified.
“Sorry, you are in the wrong store. We are not the store which doesn't have butter, that one is across the street. We are the store which doesn't have toilet paper.”
When asked his political program on television in Poland's biggest newspaper, Kaczyński answered with an extremely vulgar military expression meaning 'it's our turn to fuck the whore', revealing the obscene underside of Catholic conservative identity.
“teraz kurwa my—'it's our turn to fuck the whore'... isn't it a little bit shocking that the guy who presents himself as the beacon of Catholic morality talks in public like this?”
After being totally despairing politically, Lenin went to Switzerland and read Hegel's Science of Logic, not historicist Hegel but the purest abstract Logic, which Hegel called 'thoughts of God before God created the world'.
“What does he do? Let's go to Switzerland and read Hegel basically. But which Hegel? Not historicist works or even phenomenology. He reads Hegel's Logic.”
Lenin's famous letter proposing to fire Stalin from General Secretary focused not on his political errors but on his coarse manners, Žižek takes this seriously as a political category relevant to today's Trump and Kaczyński.
“Lenin's basic reproach to Stalin is not a wrong politics or whatever, it's simply this guy does not have good manners.”
Experiments tracking people's attitudes found that computers predicted they should vote further left than they actually did, because humans let themselves be manipulated by fear of terrorism into conservative votes.
“The computer's decision for whom you should vote was much more to the left than of the person itself.”
A Stalinist-era biologist (follower of Bogdanov) was funded to organize sexual coupling between humans and orangutans in Congo to breed perfect workers who would not want trade unions, the project was both racist and failed, with the scientist eventually sent to the Gulag.
“Maybe through coupling, organizing sex orgies between apes or orangutans and men, we will be able to give birth to a perfect worker. They will talk, but they will not want any trade unions.”
Works invoked 14
Ninotchka film
Hollywood classic used as the source of the 'coffee without cream' joke that illustrates Hegelian determinate negation.
Philosophy of Right book
Žižek reads it against the grain: not a blueprint for the future but Hegel's analysis of a dying form of life, with a Leninist moment in Hegel's awareness that history remains open.
Elysium film
Cited alongside Hunger Games as Hollywood's obsession with dystopian scenarios of systemic collapse, used to argue that even popular culture senses the approaching crisis.
The Hunger Games film
Hollywood blockbuster cited as evidence that mainstream cinema is 'onto something' about the coming systemic crisis, the dystopian genre as unconscious anticipation of capitalism's collapse.
Science of Logic book
Žižek emphasizes Lenin read the Logic (not historicist works) and praises this as the right choice; cites Hegel's self-description of it as 'thoughts of God before God created the world.'
Atlas Shrugged book
Ayn Rand's novel cited to introduce Rand as a 'pure apologist of capitalism'; Žižek credits the underlying insight about formal freedom in money relations despite despising the overall politics.
Blade Runner film
Mentioned as interesting for opening up problems around post-human androids as workers, though Žižek says he doesn't agree with it, used to connect to Soviet ape-human hybridization project.
Left Behind book
Christian fundamentalist fiction dismissed as 'kitsch' but used intellectually to argue it encodes capitalism's own self-image: more and more people being left behind as the system accelerates.
State and Revolution book
Lenin's text is the central object of the lecture; Žižek uses it to expose internal contradictions (Habermasian normativity vs. human nature transformation), treats it as essential revolutionary document requiring critical reading.
Chevengur book
Platonov's mid-1920s novel cited as already seeing the nihilist abyssal dimension of the October Revolution from within genuine engagement, not a counter-revolutionary perspective.
TV series on the same 'rapture' theme as Left Behind; described as 'relatively solid' and 'not so terribly bad', used alongside Left Behind to illustrate the cultural fantasy of exclusion as capitalism's self-image.
Relire la Révolution book
Jean-Claude Milner's 'otherwise conservative' book cited for preserving the Saint-Just quote on revolution as navigation without a map.
Lenin's notes on reading Hegel; Žižek uses them to argue that Lenin's limit was Wechselwirkung (mutual influence) and that he nonetheless extracted from Hegel the insight into historical openness.
Platonov's novel cited alongside Chevengur for seeing the dangerous dimension of Soviet revolution with greater clarity than later liberal critics of communism.
People invoked 33
Mentioned as the intellectual patron of the ape-human hybridization project (Vasiliev's follower), attacked by Lenin; associated with the Soviet techno-gnostic tendency.
Franz Kafka positive
Named as one of the three mega writers of the 20th century alongside Beckett and Platonov.
Described as a 'pure apologist of capitalism' but credited with a specific correct insight: that abolishing money without abolishing domination produces immediate personal domination instead of mediated formal freedom.
Vladimir Lenin positive
Central figure of the lecture; Žižek admires Lenin's anti-utopian strategic pragmatism, his engagement with Hegel's Logic, his concern for good manners, and his honest confrontation of failure, while critically examining the contradictions in State and Revolution.
Mentioned briefly alongside simplified Marx as thinkers whose versions of socialist revolution as self-transparent must be revised in light of the dialectical opacity revealed by Stalinism.
Described as a 'right-wing Leninist' who called Žižek his favorite Marxist; credited with saying true things about bank bailouts as 'socialism for the rich' that the Democratic left won't say, while remaining ideologically the enemy.
Francis Fukuyama negative
Called an 'idiot' for end-of-history teleological progressivism; Žižek concedes in a debate that capitalism won but scores the point that ex-communists are its best managers.
Implicitly referenced as the 'right-wing' Politburo position favoring money in communism in the Stalin joke.
Presented as the result of Democratic left's failure rather than the primary cause of political crisis; Žižek provocatively says 'God save Trump' over Mike Pence, whom he considers worse.
Mike Pence negative
Presented as definitely worse than Trump, prompting Žižek's provocative 'God save Trump and not Mike Pence.'
Will Self negative
British liberal writer who conceded civilizational collapse within 40 years but advocated only paying taxes, being good citizens, and enjoying private life, presented as the paradigmatic case of cynical ideology deflecting systemic action.
Louis Antoine de Saint-Just positive
Quoted via Milner: to be a revolutionary is to navigate an open sea without any card, used to support the theme of revolution as uncharted territory against teleology.
Raymond Kurzweil negative
Dismissed as a 'total idiot' for the singularity thesis that humanity will merge into one unified consciousness, Žižek distinguishes his own serious concern about post-humanism from Kurzweil's naive techno-utopianism.
Antonio Negri negative
Cited 'with all respect' but criticized as an accelerationist who thinks the most speculative financial capitalists are already almost communist, Žižek rejects this strategy as wrong and misleading.
Alain Badiou negative
Described as 'my good friend' but Žižek explicitly rejects Badiou's thesis that authentic politics is outside the state and consists in islands of authentic creativity, the left must be willing to take power.
Jeff Bezos negative
Grouped with other tech magnates as organic intellectuals of corporate capital managing the transition to post-human capitalism.
Andrei Platonov positive
Named alongside Beckett and Kafka as one of the three mega writers of the 20th century; Chevengur and Kotlovan credited to him; saw the dangerous nihilist dimension of the October Revolution from within engagement with it.
Elon Musk negative
Listed among tech capitalists as agents of post-human capitalism who have their own 'creepy modernist project' backed by commercial and technological power.
Conservative author of Relire la révolution cited for quoting Saint-Just on revolution as navigating open sea without a map.
Cited as a mid-1920s subscriber to techno-gnostic post-humanism who advocated biologically changing human nature under communism ('Homo sapiens, goodbye').
Bernie Sanders positive
Žižek supports Sanders without illusions; credits him with the miracle of mobilizing small farmers and non-traditional left constituencies who might otherwise have voted for Trump.
Mark Zuckerberg negative
Described as an 'organic intellectual of corporate capital' and agent of post-human capitalism; mocked for claiming his goal is to 'create a sense of purpose' while having invented the greatest instrument of purposeless time-wasting.
Samuel Beckett positive
Named as one of three mega writers of the 20th century; his mid-1920s novels Chevengur and Kotlovan (attributed here to Platonov, see note) already saw the nihilist abyssal dimension of October Revolution.
Bill Gates negative
Cited as an example of rent-extraction capitalism rather than classical profit; wealth built on privatized general intellect via Microsoft's monopoly on shared intellectual infrastructure.
De facto boss of Poland; cited for the 'teraz kurwa my' public interview as example of Catholic conservative obscenity; paradoxically credited with imposing better welfare measures than the moderate left.
Mao Zedong negative
Cited for the Lushan conference scatological speech as an example of obscenity erupting precisely when responsibility for millions of deaths is being discussed; Žižek explicitly distances himself from Maoists.
Hillary Clinton negative
Criticized for playing an 'almost Stalinist game' of finding culprits (Putin, Russia, Bernie Sanders) rather than confronting the Democratic left's own failure as the main cause of Trump.
James Joyce negative
Dismissed curtly: 'Joyce was bluffing, I hate him', used as a contrast to underscore admiration for Beckett.
Jürgen Habermas negative
Žižek uses Habermas's communicative ethics as a foil to expose the conservative normative underside of Lenin's revolutionary program, Habermasian 'undistorted communication' is presented as naïve universal ethics.
Described sympathetically as genuinely trying experiments (worker-owned factories, combined property forms) rather than just buying social peace with oil money, but Žižek soberly notes these efforts more or less failed.
Condemned for brutality and purges, but Žižek provocatively argues Stalin's turn restored a notion of human moral responsibility against techno-gnostic amoralism; also argues the Stalinist problem was lack of good bureaucracy, not excess of it.
Karl Marx positive
Cited on money as formal freedom, on historical teleology (which Žižek says trapped him), on general intellect, and on Marx's own mistaken predictions about capitalism's limits (cotton/slavery thesis).
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel positive
Žižek reads Hegel as a thinker of radical historical openness (not teleology), argues the Owl of Minerva principle applies self-reflexively to Hegel's own system, and finds a 'Leninist moment' in the Philosophy of Right.
What it argues
Lenin's contradictions on human nature and communist normativitySoviet post-humanist temptation and its continuity with today's tech capitalismThe left's impasse between political correctness and programmatic vacuityCynical ideology: admitting problems while foreclosing systemic critiqueDigital control and the limits of private intellectual property under capitalismDialectical openness vs. historical teleologyAlienation as a positive value: anonymous bureaucracy over communitarian transparency
Dialectical moves 11
“The visionary of the October Revolution sounds, in his normative moment, exactly like Habermas—the most conservative liberal communicative theorist.”
Lenin's revolutionary normativity secretly relies on the same eternal communicative ethics that Habermas's liberal theory posits, revealing a conservative underside in the revolution's founding gesture.
“The supposed teleological Hegel is actually the thinker of radical historical openness; the supposed radical Marxists are the true teleologists.”
Hegel's Owl of Minerva principle implies that his own system is already dying, making him a thinker of openness, while pseudo-Marxist 'train of history' metaphors are the real conservative teleology.
“Stalin's purges are in a sense more humanist than the techno-gnostic program they replaced: they at least presuppose human moral responsibility.”
The Stalinist re-introduction of guilt, punishment, and family values, however brutal, restored a notion of human agency that the pre-Stalinist techno-gnostic program had dissolved by treating humans as conditioned animals.
“Far from being a utopian, Lenin was the ultimate anti-utopian—his true despair came after the revolution, in the 'morning after', not in the seizing of power.”
Lenin's decisionism in 1917 was pure strategic opportunism, not utopian faith; his disillusionment was the realist recognition that rebuilding daily life is harder than taking power.
“The true utopia today is not revolutionary communism but the left-Fukuyamaist position that incremental reforms within liberal capitalism are sufficient.”
Given the depth of ecological, biogenetic, and intellectual property crises, the reformist 'small games' position is the real fantasy, while insisting on systemic change is the sober realism.
“The light at the end of the tunnel is another train coming from the other side.”
Pseudo-Marxist optimism about the inevitable progress of history simply provides a false reassurance that forecloses the urgency of political intervention.
“Ideology today presents itself as critique of ideology—the moment you propose a structural alternative, you are called an ideologist.”
The most efficient ideological move is to occupy the position of anti-ideology while foreclosing any challenge to the existing order by labeling it as naive or dangerous ideology.
“We are all complicit is the ultimate ideological move: it admits everything while making systemic critique impossible.”
Universal complicity (we all use coltan-mined phones, we all drink unethical coffee) substitutes individual moral accounting for structural analysis, converting radical critique into personal guilt management.
“Robotization, perceived as catastrophe, is objectively the best possible news—what is catastrophic is only the social system that cannot use it.”
Automation's threat of unemployment is not a problem with technology but an indictment of capitalism's inability to redistribute freed time as freedom, the catastrophe reveals the system's limit, not the technology's.
“The problem of Stalinism was not too much bureaucracy but too little—the wrong kind of bureaucracy forced permanent emergency.”
The standard left critique of Stalinist over-bureaucratization is inverted: the purge state was a substitute for proper impersonal administration, and the real failure was not having a good alienated bureaucracy.
“True anti-racism is 'I don't understand you and nonetheless I tolerate you'—not 'I must understand you'.”
Liberal multicultural demands for mutual comprehension create a permanent tribunal of adequacy; genuine coexistence requires tolerating opacity rather than demanding transparency.
Claims 20
reframes
Lenin's normative basis for revolution in 'elementary rules of social intercourse' is effectively a Habermasian communicative ethics, which is both touching and philosophically insufficient.Lenin's normative foundations in State and Revolution
asserts
Lenin grounds the difference between lower socialism and higher communism not primarily in productive forces but in the transformation of human nature itself.Lenin's theory of communism and human nature
asserts
The actual historical sequence of communist regimes reversed the Marxist schema: they began with an extreme poverty that resembled communism (war communism) and moved to a later, more commercialized 'goulash communism'.historical trajectory of communist regimes
asserts
Ayn Rand was correct that abolishing money without abolishing domination replaces formal mediated freedom with immediate personal domination—a lesson confirmed by Stalinist Soviet Union.money, formal freedom, and domination
asserts
Soviet post-humanism (Bogdanov, Trotsky, Vasiliev's ape-human hybridization project) anticipated today's tech-capitalist transhumanism, showing the idea is not new or uniquely capitalist.continuity between Soviet and contemporary post-humanism
asserts
Today capitalism itself—not socialist theory—is approaching its limits, and the proper political stance is to identify those limits (intellectual property, ecology, digital control) rather than dream of a utopian alternative.the limits of capitalism
asserts
Lenin was not a teleological Marxist but a radical strategic opportunist who saw the February Revolution as a contingent opening and seized it, learning from Hegel the openness of history against historical necessity.Lenin's political method and relation to Hegel
asserts
Hegel's Philosophy of Right is not a blueprint for the future but an autopsy of a dying form of life—Hegel himself knew his own owl-of-Minerva principle must apply to his own system.Hegel's Philosophy of Right
rejects
Fukuyama's end-of-history thesis is wrong and his teleological progressivism is precisely what Hegel's logic of historical openness refutes.Fukuyama's end of history
asserts
The hegemonic ideology today presents itself as critique of ideology: the moment you propose a structural alternative you are accused of ideologism, while admitting all problems and declaring universal complicity is ideology at its most efficient.contemporary ideological form (cynical ideology)
asserts
Liberal capitalism is no longer the optimal political form for capitalism; ethnocentric authoritarian regimes (Russia, China, Turkey, India) manage capitalism more efficiently today.capitalism and liberal democracy
asserts
Platform corporations like Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft operate through rent extraction from privatized general intellect, not classical profit—this is a qualitatively different and potentially non-integratable limit of capitalism.platform capitalism and intellectual property
asserts
The left today is politically correct on social issues but has no structural alternative vision, while the extreme right has appropriated the social-protectionist agenda the left abandoned.the contemporary political left
rejects
Universal commodification of nature or homework (counting air's value, including domestic labor in surplus value) is a false solution—more radical structural change is needed.ecological commodification and feminist Marxist strategies of inclusion
rejects
Negri and Hardt's accelerationism—the idea that the most speculative capitalists are already almost in communism—is wrong and misleading.Negri and Hardt's accelerationism
asserts
The Stalinist purge system failed not because it had too much bureaucracy but because it lacked a good bureaucracy—it needed permanent emergency and purges to function where proper impersonal administration would suffice.Stalinism and bureaucracy
reframes
True anti-racism is not mutual comprehension but tolerating the Other without needing to understand them—liberal multiculturalism's demand for understanding is itself a form of pressure that produces antagonism.anti-racism and multiculturalism
asserts
Robotization and automation are objectively good news—the problem is only that capitalism cannot distribute the freed time, which reveals something fundamentally wrong with capitalism rather than with technology.automation and unemployment
asserts
Trump is the result of the failure of the Democratic left, not primarily a product of Russian interference.Trump and the failure of the Democratic left
rejects
The left must accept taking state power with all its risks rather than retreating to 'authentic politics' outside the state as Badiou advocates.Badiou's politics of distance from the state
Quotes 18
“The true revolution happens as they say in English 'the morning after.' How do ordinary people feel the change when things return back to normal?”Slavoj Žižek · morning after of revolution
“I like to define myself as referring to Lenin without irony—a well-behaved gentle Leninist, you know, good manners, Leninist.”Slavoj Žižek · self-description as gentle Leninist
“The light at the end of the tunnel is another train coming from the other side.”Slavoj Žižek · critique of pseudo-Marxist historical optimism
“Philosophy is like the Owl of Minerva which takes off in the evening—and Hegel knew this must hold also for his own book.”Slavoj Žižek · Hegel's self-reflexive historicism
“Negation matters. We have three types of coffee: simple coffee, coffee without milk, coffee without cream. Although they are materially the same, they are not the same really.”Slavoj Žižek · determinate negation / identity constituted by absence
“I think this is the true utopia today. It is not enough to say somehow we will survive it.”Slavoj Žižek · reformism as the true utopia
“Maybe our humanity is historical. I claim quite seriously that post-humanity is not stuff of total idiots like Ray Kurzweil—that prospect nonetheless is coming close to actualization.”Slavoj Žižek · post-humanism as real historical possibility
“Usually we say capitalism is a historical phenomenon while being human is more trans-historical. Sorry, but the way things look today is almost the opposite.”Slavoj Žižek · capitalism outlasting the human
“The true optimism should be precisely paint the dark picture and then leave it open. The good news should be: how do you react to the bad news?”Slavoj Žižek · dialectical pessimism as method
“We admit everything—catastrophe is coming, up and down—just we are all complicit. This is the ultimate most efficient form of ideology today.”Slavoj Žižek · cynical ideology of universal complicity
“The greatest loss when socialism fell apart were the best political jokes.”Slavoj Žižek · political jokes as index of ideological vitality
“My ideal is not some grassroots community where every afternoon I have to go to meetings. Fuck it, I want to live a nice alienated life.”Slavoj Žižek · defense of alienation over communitarian transparency
“The true anti-racism is not 'I should understand you,' it's 'I don't understand you and nonetheless I tolerate you, I can be friendly to you.'”Slavoj Žižek · tolerance without comprehension
“In what strange epoch are we living when robotization is perceived as a problem? In a minimally normal society it means we all would have more free time.”Slavoj Žižek · automation's emancipatory potential blocked by capitalism
“If you have an information, if I give it to you, it's not less—it's maybe even more information. It's a different logic.”Slavoj Žižek · knowledge as non-rival good / limit of intellectual property
“I concede your point, global capitalism won. But will you concede my point that the best managers of global capitalism today are ex-communists in power?”Slavoj Žižek · ex-communists as most efficient capitalist managers
“Revolution is not inscribed into a series of events. It's just a matter of using an opportunity here and there.”Slavoj Žižek · revolution as contingent opportunity, not historical necessity
“The origin of human life is not that we know something better than animals. It's a failure.”Slavoj Žižek · human subjectivity as originary failure / missed aim
Transcript 30 turns
Slavoj Žižek
Just to say that I passively can follow Russian, so in debate it should be easy, maybe I will not even need a translation. Just don't be mad at me if often my answer to you would be probably what I will refer to now, it’s an older generation, when I was young they were shown on our TV old Soviet cartoons about that rabbit, you know? And like you remember that legendary answer, Nu, pogodi! So often maybe this will be my answer. Okay, thank you very much. I hope you will not be disappointed because I will try to be a little bit provocative in the sense of not just deploring the great revolutionary past but displaying some problems. First, I hope later it will get more amusing, a little bit boring introduction. In his State and Revolution, which is a kind of preparatory work for the October Revolution, Lenin as we all know outlines his vision of the workers' state where every kukharka, not simply a cook as it is usually translated, especially not a great chef, but more a modest woman servant in the kitchen of a wealthy family, where every kukharka will have to learn how to rule the state, where everyone, even the highest administrator, will be paid the same wages as ordinary workers and so on and so on. How this vision turned into its opposite soon after the October Revolution is the stuff of numerous analyses, but I would like to raise another question which as far as I know is not often confronted. The fact that when Lenin tries to justify with some normative set of, with some set of values, the revolution, he—and I mean this more in a critical way—he sounds, his utopian vision sounds very Habermasian, and by this I mean Jürgen Habermas's communicative theory. Lenin says that what the revolution should do is establish, establish a society where, I quote the English translation of course, where "the elementary rules of social intercourse that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years in all copybook maxims—these rules in communism they will finally be accepted in a non-distorted way." So you see, it's very interesting and surprising. It’s as if Lenin, in some kind of strange temporal traveling back-forth, read in advance Habermas's theory of communicative action and said, "Okay, that's my normative basis." Of course, that's not his only position, but it's interesting that this is what he mentions. He says, another quote, that "only in a communist society," I quote now Lenin again, "freed from capitalist slavery, from the untold horrors, savagery, absurdities, and infamies of capitalist exploitation, people will gradually become accustomed to observing the," again, "the elementary rules of social intercourse that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years. They will become accustomed to observing them, obeying these rules, without force, without coercion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for coercion called the state." I find this almost touching, how the normative reference of Hegel is some simple and in a very non-historical way allegedly eternal ethics of what Habermas calls Zwangfreie Kommunikation, undistorted communication. So a page or so later, Lenin again states that, quote, "We know that the fundamental social cause of excesses, which consist in the violation of the rules of social intercourse, is the exploitation of the people." Again, the idea is, and I don't agree with it, this idea is that there are some rules of social intercourse which are not in themselves immanently twisted, distorted, but that it's as it were from, for external reasons—social inequalities, domination and so on—that these rules are not obeyed. Again, does this mean that revolution is normatively grounded in some kind of universal rules which function as eternal human nature? I claim that the role of this reference is not simply negative. Don't forget that this Lenin’s preoccupation with elementary rules of social intercourse can be discerned even in his critical remarks on Stalin’s brutal manners from the last months of his life. You know that famous letter that Lenin wrote proposing to fire Stalin from the post of General Secretary. Okay, we all know this, and I don't want even to exaggerate this like, "Oh, the great genius of Lenin, he saw it." Okay, obviously he saw it a little bit too late maybe, you know. What people, at least I am not aware of anyone noticing, is that Lenin’s basic reproach to Stalin is not a wrong politics or whatever, it’s simply this guy does not have good manners. And I think that without any irony, we should take Lenin serious here today. Can you imagine Lenin’s shock at Donald Trump and so on? Like, he doesn't have, but that's another topic, let me go on. But the reference to human nature is not Lenin’s last word. In another passage of State and Revolution, it looks as if Lenin claims almost the opposite. He surprisingly grounds the famous difference between the lower and the higher stage of communism not as it's usually done in the development of productive forces—you know, when productive forces are not yet enough developed, we just have socialism where there is still money, alienation and so on and so on. No, only in the higher stage where there will be enough abundance there will be communism. No, Lenin grounds this difference in simply different relation to human nature again. In the first lower stage, we are still dealing with the human nature which we inherited from the entire history of exploitation and class struggle, while what will happen in the higher stage, communism, is that human nature itself will be changed. Another quote: "We are not utopians. We do not indulge in dreams of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination. These anarchist dreams serve only to postpone the socialist revolution until human nature has changed. No, we want the socialist revolution with human nature as it is now, with human nature that cannot dispense with subordination, control, and managers." The united workers themselves will hire their own technicians and so on and so on and so on. So Lenin’s point is that we still need domination, secret police, whatever you want, because of our imperfect human nature. And that communism does not mean, not even primarily abundance, but a change of human nature. Again, the interesting point here is that ambiguities enter here. I don't have time to go into it, but do you know that, I think Lenin should be read here against the background of a strange temptation in all revolutions—okay, all, the two big ones, Russian and Chinese—to elevate this first stage where there was a lot of poverty, despair and so on, this, so I think the term was war-time communism, you know, where to—a temptation to see already in this extreme poverty the seeds of communism. For example, this of course is cynical, but the usual development of communist regimes was from this extreme poverty of warlike communism, which was much closer to some abstract idea of communism, to a later stage so-called goulash communism where you get more, a little bit more private life, individual freedoms and so on and so on. I mean, for example, do you know that in the utmost poverty of the Great Cultural—no, not even the revolution, already before—the Great Leap Forward in China, the idea was they are already in communism because they claimed the definition of communism is "each according to his abilities or her and to each according to his or her needs." And they say that's what's happening. In a twisted way, that you are in a commune, totally enslaved there, but the boss of the commune, like I'm the boss, you are the worker, I look at you and I say, "This is what you need, a little bit of food every day." So you are provided according to your needs. And then I say, "Okay, your abilities are to work hours a day," so you know, they literally justified it as already communism. And I think that also that the actual history almost went the other way around. They began with a kind of communist utopia, "We can do it now," and then socialism, if by socialism we mean more commercialized society and so on where money matters, came as a second, as the second higher stage. And there are real problems here. Like, I think that the greatest loss of when socialism fell apart were the best political jokes. So, my favorite, one of my favorite is from mid-thirties. In Politburo they debate, maybe you know it, I'm sorry, if there will be money or not in communism. Okay, you have right-wingers, Bukharin partisans, who say, "Of course, money is natural, you need money for distributing, there will be money." Then you have leftists who say, "No, money is alienation, production will be immediately socialized, in communism there will be no money." Then Comrade Stalin intervenes and says, "No, you are rightist and leftist deviation. The truth is the dialectical synthesis. There will be money and there will not be money." And then people ask, "Oh, what a genius idea, but Comrade Stalin, tell us how this will work." Well, you can guess what Stalin answers. It’s very simple, "Some people will have money, other people will not have money." No? So I think that now it’s easy to laugh at this. But and Lenin was fully aware of these problems. Now to provoke you, especially those from the West, I would say that our greatest enemy maybe, but is your compatriot who emigrated there, Ayn Rand. You know that pure apologist of capitalism, Atlas Shrugged and so on. She nonetheless said something which was, Marx was also aware of, that in spite of all the alienation that money brings, money, money relations nonetheless imply at least a formal minimal freedom. If I pay you to work for me or vice versa, it means that at least in a formal legal way I don't exert direct domination over you. I just say, "Okay, if you want," of course you are effectively forced to work for me, but the form is that of freedom. And Ayn Rand says that if you abolish money—now, that's her wager, we if we are still in some sense communists, we don't believe this, but nonetheless there is a certain truth in it—that if situations are still socially those of domination, so if you abolish this mediated domination through money where we are at least formally free, you get immediate domination. You get direct domination. Wasn't this the lesson of Stalinist Soviet Union? Okay, money did matter there, then. But nonetheless, I don't, I think that something that was happening there, and this would be a wonderful research topic for some of you, I would like to do it, to look now what we have today, the post-postmodern tendencies and so on, to see the search for it in Soviet Union. For example, all this post-human bullshit that we are bombarded with today. But you know that in that, how should I call it even, techno-gnosticism, even Trotsky was partisan of it, in the mid-twenties we already had all that. Even Trotsky subscribed to the program that the big task of communism is to biologically, genetically change the nature of man to get a new post-human form. Trotsky says in a quote that I often refer to something like, "And then we will be able to say, Homo sapiens, goodbye. You were not a good machine, we need to move further." So again, you have this tendency, and now to provoke you again, I would say that here Stalin almost did something to, I mean this in a very provocative way, I don't in any way want to praise Stalin, but to re-humanize the dimension. Because you know the official ideology of those, how should I call them, techno-gnostic people who wanted to overcome old human nature and so on was not to talk about moral responsibility anymore. It was like we are just conditioned animals and we should be refrained—they didn't, for them this culpability and so on all that was an old category. And but Stalin's, the Stalinist turn in late twenties, early thirties brought back all this, up to family values, punishment and so on. Purges are not, they are maybe the worst thing that can happen to you, but they nonetheless rely on a notion of human responsibility. You are guilty. That's why I would say maybe it's almost more horrible to claim you are not guilty, you are just wrongly conditioned or whatever and so on and so on. So this we find there. Now, if you saw the film which I think it’s interesting, Blade Runner not that I agree with it, but it opens up interesting problems. This idea of post-human androids who work for us. Do you know, do you know Soviet history? There was a biologist called, Ilya, how is he called, I think Ilya Vasiliev or something like this, from late twenties, who already and was vastly financed by Stalin, had the idea—and he was the follower of Bogdanov, the one attacked by Lenin—that maybe through coupling, organizing sex orgies between apes or orangutans and men, we will be able to give birth to a perfect worker. They will talk, but they will not want any trade unions or whatever or freedom, they will just be perfect workers and in view of that hunger in late twenties also they will not mind what kind of food they are eating and so on. And a lot of money was invested. This guy was then sent—they made an expedition to Congo. Of course, this project was fully racist and male-chauvinistic because first, it was the automatic idea that human males should screw-fuck the orangutan women, no? Why not the other way around? And second, that it should be done by blacks from Congo because, you know, they are closer to apes etc., maybe to blush. But then, okay, it didn't work, the guy unfortunately ended up in Gulag for other reasons, totally human reasons, that's another story. No, but what I wanted to say is that and it’s not only that. Nazis were doing the same, giving to elite soldiers special pills. American Army, not only the American but about them we at least know, is doing the same. I read that they already made genetic also and through chemotherapy changes so that they have pilots who can fight with full mobility for hours and so on. So this idea of a, of a post-human society, I'm sorry I don't have time to go into it, but it was part of Soviet utopia, and I think that today something quite shocking is happening. That, you know, usually we say capitalism is a historical phenomenon while being human is more trans-historical. Sorry, but the way things look today is almost the opposite. It's that maybe our humanity is historical. I claim quite seriously that post-humanity is not stuff of total idiots like Ray Kurzweil and all those fake theorists of, you know, singularity as we will all become one of one entity with big consciousness. I think that that prospect nonetheless is coming close to actualization. And that the big problem of capital today is how to manage in its different aspects this passage to post-humanity. Let’s call it post-human capital. All states—United States, China and so on—are already deeply engaged in it in what sense? Two things. First, you know that with new digitalization of our entire life, soon, but in some countries now already, you have digital control which knows you better than you know yourself. And it's done to such an extent, I like to follow this, for example in United States I spoke with some researchers who told me they did this in the level of sexuality. They got couples who agreed to be controlled passively, what they think, what they say, and then they were in love. And then when they married, the digital machinery, supercomputer who controlled them, made a, made a forecast, like this couple should marry or not. They didn't tell it to the couple, they just returned to the couple two years later. Computer was always right. Now nobody says that computers are perfect. I'm just saying that they are much better than we. And they did the same thing, for example, with doctors. We know that, there are great doctors, but a computer diagnosis is much better than ordinary doctor and so on. Then they did the same with politics. We as liberal free subjects, we usually just before elections through some extreme manipulations and so on usually vote quite often against our interests. They did the same experiment. They took some ordinary people and allowed the computer to follow their complaint, their attitudes, and then—it’s a sad news for the left—the computer's decision for whom you should vote was much more to the left than of the person itself. The person itself got into some scare of terrorism, whatever bullshit, and become more conservative, while the computer—so again, I am not saying it’s not as simple as that. I am not saying should the computers run us or whatever. No, computers do have their own problems and so on. You know where I, you know what I will do? Do you have a, the list of the people here? I propose you a deal, listen carefully. I get lost in my improvisations, you stop me. But I have digitally all I wanted to say. What if I send it to you and you give it to the people? So that I don't have a bad conscience for talking here. But what if, you know when I debate with computer scientists, you know what fascinated me? There is a joke that I use quite a lot, maybe I didn't use it here the last time I was here in Leningrad. You notice, no Petersburg for me, Leningrad, then Moscow. You know from the Hollywood classic movie Ninotchka, there is a very simple story there—joke told there, okay it gets in the story more complicated, this doesn't matter for us—is that the hero stops, goes to a cafeteria and says, "Can I get a coffee without cream please?" And you must know the answer that he gets. "Sorry, we don't have cream so I cannot give you coffee without cream. We only have milk so I can give you coffee without milk." Now, if you want to understand Hegel, what Hegel thinks about by this term, big, "bestimmte Negation," determinant negation. This is it. That it matters what you are not. It’s part of so, of your identity. We have three types of coffee: simple coffee, coffee without milk, coffee without cream. Although they are materially the same, they are not the same really. Negation matters. Incidentally, there is, I don't know if you had it also from Poland, I heard it, a wonderful joke from the time of socialism, which referring to the fact that often you didn't get things in the stores, it reproduces the same joke. It’s that somebody comes to a store and says, "Do you have, let's say, whatever butter or you don't have butter?" And the, the person there selling things says, "Sorry, you are in the wrong store. We are not the store which doesn't have butter, that one is across the street. We are the store which doesn't have toilet paper" and so on. So now I don't have time to lose here, so I will just say that, and I am not bluffing here, I spoke with computer programmers, those who deal with artificial intelligence. This, can a computer make a difference between coffee and coffee without milk and coffee without cream? I doubt they also doubt that it can. You know, or to put it in this way, can, do we already have computer programs which deal with in this sense virtuality? With can it include into what you say all the, all the implied negations and so on? I already know—ah yes, the most important writer here for me for the problems already back to Leninism of early Leninism is for me and he is for me one of the three mega guys of 20th century literature, it’s Beckett—not Joyce, Joyce was bluffing, I hate him—Beckett, Samuel Beckett, Kafka, and Andrei Platonov. He is mega. And I think that the great interest of his two mid-twenties novels, Chevengur and Kotlovan, is that they already clearly see the, I don't want to use the word totalitarian, let's call it nihilist dangerous abyssal dimension of October Revolution, but not simply from a counter-revolutionary perspective. He is basically engaged in and he sees much further than later liberal critics of, critics of communism and so on and so on. But maybe I'm losing time so let's quickly go on. I have so many things to say. Next point about Lenin. Usually people like to oppose the decisionist Lenin of 1917—"this is the man, he just did it"—and then the more pragmatic Lenin of the last years of his life. I think that—and that's why I admire Lenin—it’s much more contradictory and refined. I think that precisely the Lenin of in his practice at least was not, was not a utopia. He was just an incredible strategic thinker. When he heard about February Revolution, he saw a chance there. And this wasn't any pseudo-Marxist bullshit about "eternal historical law of progress," "passing to the higher stage." He just saw an opening and he was well aware: if we miss the chance for years, nothing will happen. So Lenin was not simply a utopia. He was, in a good sense of the term, an extreme pragmatic opportunist. He saw the chance there. The true Lenin’s despair, failed utopia, I think happened later in the early twenties when the Civil War was open and then what to do then, when to how to reconstruct the habits of daily life and so on and so on. That's why I am tired with those leftists who admire this carnivalesque dreams of wonderful million people dancing on the street, all rules are suspended, the king is the beggar, the beggar is the king. That's easy. For me, a true revolution happens as they say in American or English, I think "the morning after." How do ordinary people feel the change when things return, when things return back to normal? And Lenin was aware of this problem. And that's the disillusion, late Lenin, where he mocks any idea of socialism, where he says, "We just have to bring a little bit of civilization to Russia" and so on and so on and so on. So again, this is for me the spirit there. Of course, I'm not trying to say to justify everything that Lenin did, but this utterly realist spirit. And Stalin here did a tremendous revolution. Lenin was extremely open. Jean-Claude Milner in his, otherwise conservative book, Relire la révolution, to read again revolution, quotes a wonderful passage from Saint-Just where Saint-Just says that to be a revolutionary is like to navigate an open sea without any card, in an open territory. I think that if anything, Marx was too much caught in this historical teleology. And Lenin’s actual approach was much more "revolution is an uncharted territory. We have to make," as Lenin put it, "all possible mistakes, we don't know where it will, where it will take us" and so on and so on. So to go on here, I think that maybe this is also what Lenin learned from Hegel. You know because this is for me one of the most beautiful encounters in the history of philosophy. Lenin didn't really, sorry to disappoint you, understand Hegel. If you read his philosophical notebooks, it’s clear that his limit is the category of mutual influence, Wechselwirkung. But nonetheless, I find it so nice, everything is important there. Look, Lenin was totally desperate after what does he do? Let's go to Switzerland and read Hegel basically. But which Hegel? Not as stupid historicist pseudo-Marxists would have said, some historical works or even phenomenology. He reads Hegel’s Logic, which Hegel himself designated it as, ironically of course, as "the thoughts of God before God created the world." That's a wonderful lesson. Conservative Hegelians always preferred the historicist Hegel. Another thing that maybe Lenin learned from Hegel is historical openness. Breaking out even if it's a Marxist one of this historical teleology. You know like we just have to with all complications follow the law of history and so on. You know, in later Stalinist Marxism, this metaphor they use, this metaphor of riding the train of history, you know. Now here, maybe you know my standard joke, and then based on this teleology, pseudo-Marxists often when the situation is very tragic, they like to say, "Oh, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel." My answer is—you know which one some of you probably—yes, there is a light, but usually this light at the end of the tunnel is another train coming from the other side, no? So you know, Hegel is supposed to be a conservative, but is he? There is a wonderful Leninist moment in Hegel, precisely where Hegel appears the most conservative. You know at the end of his book of political philosophy maybe, which is—but it’s very problematic to call it that—Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. In the end of the intro, not introduction, forward I think, there is that famous idea that philosophy is like the Owl of Minerva which takes off in the evening. And Hegel gives a concrete reading on this: that philosophy cannot predict the future or deal with what should be, philosophy can only analyze a form of life whose time has already passed. Now I ask you something. Hegel’s system of state, this corporate state and so on in Philosophy of Right, it’s usually taken as his vision of society. And then people claim, wasn't Hegel there almost fascist, different estates and so on. But my point is that either Hegel was a complete idiot, which nonetheless he wasn't, or he knew that this should help, should hold also for his own book. It’s clear that what he presents as a system in Philosophy of Right, it’s not his blueprint for the future. It’s just that's what we can say about the potential rationality of a system which is dying already now. And Hegel was all the time aware that something new is happening and he was totally at a loss with it. For example, the last writing, written text by Hegel was his panicky reaction to the British Reform Bill Law, which introduced a little bit more egalitarian voting. For Hegel this was catastrophe, step towards abstract universality and so on and so on. But what I'm trying to tell you is that Hegel’s idea and Hegel and in concrete predictions, Hegel was not an idiot. Look at the introduction to his lectures on Philosophy of History where, apropos, and this was—these lectures were given around or when he speaks about Russia and in different ways America, he says, "It's too early to say anything about these countries. Their century will be the next century, 20th." Not so bad, no? He wasn't an idiot. So what I'm saying is that Hegel is absolutely not this type of teleological progressist. Fukuyama is an idiot, my God, even before you will Fukuyama in my regime goes to Gulag, you know. Sorry. Point taken seriously, but just. No, seriously what I want to say is that I think that Hegel is much more open here. History is much more open. And I think that paradoxically, this is what Lenin learned from Hegel really. To this opening radical, there is no simple necessity. Revolution is not inscribed into a series of events. It's just a matter of using an opportunity here and there and so on. So how do we stand with this openness today? Now part two, reference to today. Here I'm a little bit more pessimistic. You know the standard reproach to the left in power by radical leftists is that instead of effectively socializing production and deploy actual democracy, the left in power remains within the constraints of standard leftist politics—nationalizing means of production or tolerating capitalism in a social democratic way, imposing an authoritarian dictatorship or playing the game of parliamentary democracy and so on and so on. I think the time has come, if you want to be Leninists today, to raise the brutal question: okay, but what should or could they have done? How would the authentic mode of socialist democracy have looked in practice? And this is for me the sad lesson of, for example, of Venezuela. Chávez was not just a Fidel Castro with money, in the sense of having enough money from oil and throwing it to not solve problems but like calm down the situation. My friends from Venezuela were sending me texts where it's clear how all the time—now it's over, it's another game—of Chávez rule he was desperately making, at least, you know, "let's try this combined property, let's give this factory to the workers" and so on and so on. And let's be frank, the sad thing is that more or less it all—let's be frank, more or less it all failed. So I am simply—it's very brutal what I will say now—where are we now with communist prospect? One answer is the Chinese official one. I almost laugh at it. They simply claim what we call global capitalism they call it socialism with Chinese characteristics, no? And for them the tension now between China and their friends and United States is simply the Cold War, but not war like—the it’s simply the old war competition between capitalism and socialism in new form. For them, the economic success of China is not the proof that you need capitalism, but the proof precisely of the superiority of socialist system. Of course, you have to redefine so much communism to fit it into this model that we should ask, "Is it still socialism?" But you know what is my target here, and I think Lenin with his anti-utopian spirit would have got it. You know all these complaints like Chávez was not radical enough, he should have liquidated the local oligarchs or whatever, or why didn't he move a step further and introduce actual people's democracy and all that? You know, in now the main two versions of 20th century radical politics, socialism, are dismissed. Welfare state no longer works and Stalinist state socialism no longer works. Although already with Stalinism it's a little bit more complicated. Once I had a debate years ago with Fukuyama and he laughed so much when I told him, "Okay, I concede your point, global capitalism won. But will you concede my point that the best managers of global capitalism today are ex-communists in power?" We are really I think moving to a new domain from you here, Russia, Putin's regime, to India, to Turkey, to China where it's clear that liberal democracy is no longer the best form of capitalism. Capitalism works much better with some type of ethnocentric authoritarian regime. But let's drop that. My idea is this one. I had the same idea when there was Occupy Wall Street movement and I was there talking with many of them in New York on that Zuccotti Park and asked them always the same question, like the Freudian question, "What do you want? What does the woman want? Okay, want." My question was not woman, but "What do you want?" It’s incredible that beyond this vague idea against financial capital—incidentally every fascist will agree with it, no?—and all that against corruption and so on, it was not even clear what they really want. It was more some kind of general unease, but mostly it was moderate—I call them ironically left Fukuyamaists—like they basically accepted liberal democratic capitalism but they say, "You know, we need more healthcare, more tolerance" and so on and so on. So this is the big question today. Can we even imagine—that’s what is missing for me—I think that maybe—now I'm talking not about your situation, more in United States and Western Europe—maybe this terrifying politically correct moralization of the left, you know like I use a certain word "racist," "anti-feminist," "homophobic" and so on, is precisely a reaction to the fact that you don't have a, an alternate vision. Now I'm not a utopian, I know you cannot get a vision which would be concrete and so on. But just a general vision. "Okay, we want true democracy, not alienated multi-party democracy." How would this concretely look? "We want no longer the alienated state." But everybody admits we need today global organizations to deal with, with immigrant crisis so-called, to deal with ecological crisis and so on. We—I claim—no longer can play these games of, you know, local self-management, "We live in a small community where we decide." No, what do we decide? We have to rely on larger structures to deal with ecology and so on and so on. Most of the institutional left today, unfortunately, is conservative in the sense that their main goal is protecting the old achievements of welfare state, at least in Europe, and up to a point also with Democrats in United States—up to a point, it's more complex. But what I want to say is that isn't it sad that there are people who still talk about capitalism is coming to an end, there are signs of post-capitalist order? But you know who are they? The so-called progressive postmodern capitalists themselves. And they are the true enemy today I think, even more maybe than Trump. People like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk. They are today's organic intellectuals of corporate capital. And they, all of them talk about this. Most of them even—you know, all these usual progressive causes—like they are all for LGBT+, absolutely. They are, most of them are even or practically all of them, they are even for for the minimal income—how do you call this?—basic income for everybody and so on. But it's clear what is happening there. They see very clearly that the capitalism usual one is coming to an end. And what they really try is to—they are for me the agents of what I would have called post-human capitalism. And the ironies are immense here. A month or two ago I saw a speech briefly—too boring to listen to all of it—that Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook boss, delivered to Princeton students. And he says there that his goal in life is to, our quote literal, "our job is to create a sense of purpose among the people." Now I almost died laughing. A guy who invented Facebook, which is the greatest instrument to lose time in a totally purposeless way, will now tell me this. So I claim isn't this so sad how from one side, we capitalism is in real crisis. We have ecological problems, it’s clear to everybody you cannot do this. We have even, I claim, the problem with profit extraction and private property. I buy here the theory of some leftists who claim ask yourself a simple question: how did people like how did for example Bill Gates become—although it’s problematic now he’s still the richest person in the world—it’s not classical profit. I claim it’s return to rent. What is happening today with these corporations like Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft is that it's not simply just private property. It's that what Marx called general intellect—our shared intellectual substance—is privatized and then you get rent. We are, when we buy a product for, from for example Windows whatever word from Microsoft, it’s not he produces a commodity and then adds to the production costs a profit rate. The relationship between the price of Windows word program and production costs is irrelevant. We are simply charged, we pay rent so that we can be in contact with each other, so that we get access to general intellect. It's a different, it’s a different logic. So I will approach the end so that I don't get lost. Just a one, two more points I would like to make here. One would be that another tendency which I already implicitly mentioned is that in contrast to the usual pseudo-Marxist doxa which says that today's capitalism is more and more virtual, like formally we are more and more free to do whatever you want but all the profit is generated through speculations on futures in the virtual sphere and so on. But at the same time, as some intelligent researchers demonstrated—I think it's a key tendency—that at the same time with this disappearance but retreat of direct direct wage relationship where I pay a wage and so on, relations of direct personal domination are returning. Not only in the obvious ways like refugees, slavery in third world countries and so on and so on, but even in our countries. For example, in culture and some social spheres money more and more serves as a direct tool of social or political domination. Something very complex is going on there. So to slowly come to an end, how, what's the ideological form of these new processes? Let me begin with something which again would have concerned Lenin. I already mentioned it. This—and I don't think this is a superficial phenomenon, I'm not a moralist here—this let's call it vulgarization of daily life. How what things are possible—it is possible today to state things publicly, things which years ago it would not have been possible to state them publicly. Just the most obvious example: torture. Now we can debate it, even if you are against it, but it’s like should we torture terrorists and so on. We will be productive, no. years ago it would have been unthinkable. Incidentally, that's why I like to emphasize that at a certain level I am dogmatic. In what sense? The progress if there is progress, I doubt, of society is, means precisely that certain things are considered an achievement we don't debate them. For example, would you really like to live in a society where you have to argue again and again that women shouldn't be raped? No, I would like to live in a society where when a man goes into this bullshit, you know like, "Oh but women secretly really enjoy it, they pretend not to like it," you don't even have to argue. The guy appears an idiot, you know. You laugh at him, "What are you doing? Can I buy you a drink? Whatever, idiot." And that's why, again, the true horror of the torture debate is that it takes place publicly at all. So I'm here talking not only about obvious example Donald Trump, but this is a general movement with today's conservatives. And it's maybe it gives us—I like to define myself as referring to Lenin without irony—well-behaved gentle Leninist, you know, good manners, Leninist. I was so shocked my Polish friends told me—it's not a joke, check it on Wikipedia. You know the great guy, now the de facto boss of Poland, Jarosław Kaczyński. Incidentally, I'm really evil. I will tell you, your secret services, that if they did—but I don't believe they did—if they really organized the shooting down of that plane which killed his brothers, couldn't they aim better and kill also other brothers? He was not dead. Yeah, but somehow, okay, this is a joke, I know, I know. So you know when in his party, Justice and Law whatever, won elections, he was asked not in a private cafeteria meeting where we all talk dirty, on TV and in an interview to Gazeta Wyborcza, the biggest newspaper, he was asked, "What is your program?" You know what was his answer? I repeat it literally, a very vulgar common expression in Polish, I think it is "teraz kurwa my," which to explain it means "it's our turn to fuck the whore." It’s from very vulgar low-class military circles where you know when they are free, soldiers wait in line, let's say we are soldiers, through the prostitute and you finish and then I say, "teraz kurwa my," like it's my turn to do it. But isn't it a little bit shocking that the guy who presents himself to be the beacon, the model of Catholic morality and so on and so on talks—I repeat it—in public like this? There you shouldn't—you shouldn't get confused about Trump. People always say, "But how could he be present himself as a Christian conservative when he talks in such a dirty undignified way?" But I claim this is the Christian conservative identity. Precisely this combination of public manners and this obscene dirty background which is coming back again and again. And certain forms of communism also are not, are not alien to this obscenity. I'm always interested when obscenity penetrates the public speech. It's never innocent. For example, let me take an example because Maoists now hate me, they claim I am a traitor and so on. So okay, let me go to the end in this treason. And a quote from Mao. In July when it was clear that the, the Great Leap Forward is a catastrophe—millions died and so on—Mao called a party conference in Lushan where it was—he proposed they do self-criticism. Like they admit their mistakes and—again, we are not talking about small mistakes, we are talking about responsibility for millions of dead—and Mao admits the first to admit that he is the main responsible. But then—and this is not again dirty talk, this is in the collected works of Mao, you can find it on the web—these are the final three lines of Mao's speech. I'm sorry for the use of vulgar term "fart" which means flatulence and so on. Mao concludes his speech like this: "The chaos caused was on a grand scale, millions of dead, and I take responsibility. Comrades, you must all analyze your own responsibility. If you have to shit, shit! If you have to fart, fart! You will feel much better for it." Now I just ask a simple question. I'm not making the usual case "Mao was primitive" and so on. He was not, he was highly educated in classical culture and so on. But why exactly at this point when he was talking about responsibility for millions of dead, he took recourse to this extremely vulgar, to this extremely vulgar metaphor? So again, the, the sad lesson of all this, the really sad lesson is that today, at least in the so-called developed West, we live in this tension: on the one hand, ultra-political correctness—like one word wrong, you are all that stuff, you must know it, heard about it—on the other hand, this explosion of vulgarity, of vulgarity in public speech. And this is connected with another thing which is sad for me as a Leninist, politically. If we already talk about Kaczyński, it is today as if in our crazy world, to impose minimal workers' welfare measures, you need a right populist government to do it. Like the same Kaczyński. You know that his party in Poland two years ago or when imposed, did something extraordinary. They imposed, they lowered the age of retirement, they make much better healthcare freely available—I mean more money, better conditions for student loans. No moderate leftist would dare to do this. And on the other hand, the opposite side, if you want a really efficient austerity politics, you need left, even radical left in power, as in Greece. This was an ingenious operation by EU to allow Syriza to stay in power. If conservatives were to be in power, Syriza would have organized explosive demonstrations and so on and so on. In this way, it functions. So to really conclude, who is the enemy today? Lenin would always ask, I am really concluding, don't be too nervous. Who is the enemy today? Ideology. We really live in a cynical era. Which means first, the hegemonic ideology today—at least in our half-educated circles and so on—presents itself, that's a nice paradox, as critique of ideology. The moment you propose something which, of course by the existing global capitalist criteria, is perceived as ideological—you want I don't know, more socialism or—they say, "Oh this ends, we will end up in Gulag, you are ideologist" and so on and so on. I had—and this is I think a nice conclusion if you agree—I had a couple of months ago, I was not in a good mood then, I am very self-critical sometimes, a debate with British liberal writer Will Self. A wonderful name, that’s his name, Will Self, you know. And he claims that this is his true name. Okay, comes from perverted family, whatever. But and we had the debate, and he conceded to me that we are approaching a crisis ecologically, socially, that in 20—at least maximum 40—years from now it will be a collapse crisis and so on. Then I asked him, "Okay, but but what can we do?" And he said, "Nothing. Just don't talk about any revolutionary radical act, it will end up in catastrophe. All we can do is," he said very modestly, "become aware of the dangers, pay our taxes, be good citizens—this is important—and enjoy as much private life as we can." He said the only thing to do today, he used very vulgar English words which I learned later meant basically sit down at home, drink beer and masturbate, something like that. I—so he didn't deny anything. Then when I asked him, "Why not nonetheless do something?" he did something so disgusting, he appealed to the people, there were almost a thousand of them, and said, "How do you all have cellphones?" Okay, and then that was the argument for him. "Do you know that all your cellphones use coltan which is mined under terrible conditions in Congo? So we are all complicit in it." This much more than denial of problems—liberal capitalism is wonderful and so on—this is the ultimate most efficient form of ideology today I think. You admit everything—you know, catastrophe is coming, up and down and so on—just we are all complicit. That's why incidentally I also opposed to that standard ecological politics, "We are all responsible." So instead of raising big systemic questions, the questions are, "Did you recycle all your Coca-Cola cans? Did you put aside all newspaper?" You see, this is again ideology at its purest. It admits the problem but at the same time it makes you co-responsible so that you don't blame the system and it offers you an easy way out. I saw you have here, I saw it with horror—I am not a terrorist, but if I were to be a terrorist I would bomb it—you have also here close to here Starbucks, no? You have them here, yeah. Horrible. Okay. I don't know if they play this game here, but in the West they play this ecological game. Oh they have in the West posters which say, "Okay, our cappuccino is a little bit more expensive but goes to some stupid Guatemala children, the other percent to save some forest." Isn't this wonderful? The message is we no longer have that old duality, you are a consumer but then you should also be a good citizen. No, the price for good social conscience and care, solidarity, is included into the commodity itself, you know. Pay a little bit more and you will be—so this, this immobilizing cynicism is ideology at its purest today and also unfortunately at its most efficient. And that would be for me the big, if you want, problem of Leninist politics today and insight. First, admit all these antagonisms. For example, let's take someone who—that's the irony of all ironies—calls himself a Leninist, a right-wing Leninist, Steve Bannon. You know the alt-right figure. Incidentally I have there a special attachment. Do you know he is using that once he made a statement that I'm his favorite Marxist? Sorry. But then I said this guy knows what good theory is, so let's look into this. You know, that's the tragedy of the left. He nonetheless said some things that in Democratic Party apart from some Sanders supporters they are afraid to say. You know how he, Steve Bannon, alt-right guy, you know how he reacted to to to Trump’s tax proposing? He exploded, he said, "No, the opposite! Raise the taxes for big companies over and so on." You know that he opposed saving the big banks? He said something which is simply true. He said, "This is socialism for the rich. We don't need them and so on." So this is for me the greatest tragedy today, that we have the left full of this politically correct stuff with which its goals I totally agree, I just don't like this fanatic moralizing tone, and we have then the right, even the extreme right, taking over whatever remains of of social politics and so on. That's for me that and as Leninists we would have to approach this. That's why I support Bernie Sanders. I don't have any illusions about him, but in United States, the miracle of Bernie Sanders was that he mobilized small farmers and so on exactly those who are not the usual gang of left-liberal supporters, but who would have otherwise probably voted even for Trump and so on. That would be, if you agree, I don't know how is it in your country, but at least in the so-called developed West the the leftist Leninist answer. If we don't solve this problem of how not just to castigate—okay, I hate them, they are disgusting, the radical right, although who is so disgusting it's a matter of choice. Like they say Trump is horror, I say yes, but if Trump is impeached United States will get Mike Pence who is definitely worse I think. God save Trump and not Mike Pence, you know. So maybe we should change the entire metaphor with this really conclude now just the last thought. Did you notice how in popular theological Christian fundamentalist fiction there is now a topic which is popular, those of "Left Behind"? You know, God does a—God—God takes to himself a certain percentage of people and we are those who remain to face the horrors of Armageddon. Incidentally, you don't only get kitsch here like the series Left Behind, you also get—I forgotten is it leftovers or remainders?—a relatively solid TV series which is not so terribly bad. But I claim that as often God here listened to the big capital because in a very primitive leftist reading I claim that this topic of Left Behind is the central topic of today's capitalism we know. More and more of us are Left Behind. And here, to conclude, the proper Leninist position would not have been that of Negri. With all my respect of Negri and Hardt, but they are too much accelerationists. I remember once Negri gave an interview on Italian TV standing in front—maybe you Lorenzo know it—of a I think closed factory where some workers demonstrated, and he said, "Look at them, they are dead but they don't know it." You know this idea that he even said once that the most speculative capitalists dealing with futures are almost in communism, are much more progressive than—no, I'm tempted to say that this strategy of going further in capitalism is wrong and misleading. Like you have even progressive versions, for example already years ago I remember when I was young there was a tendency among American feminists to redress the oppression of women by including somehow—it was not clear how—homework, taking care of children, home into ways that it should be counted as creating value and included in that. Or you have a crazy idea of some capitalist ecologists claiming that all natural resources on Earth should be somehow quantified—for example, all the air is worth okay, trillions whatever—and then somehow you include it into the price. I think this solution is—it may appear worthwhile at a limited level, but no, we should be more radical here. This is just universal commodification, it doesn't work. So really last some sentences. You look skeptical I think. No, now I'm—this why you have already warming the bed in Gulag for you, okay. No, but that's why I think our answer to those who claim, "But okay, I was so critical about the left today, why don't we just play the left Fukuyamaist game? Why don't we say revolution is impossible, so let's play our small games, more rights for the gay and lesbian here, a little bit better healthcare there." I think this is the true utopia today. I think that it's not enough to say somehow we will survive it. I think that at a series of levels, from ecology to biogenetics, who will control there and so on and so on, to intellectual property and so on, the system is approaching its end. And if we do nothing, it will change radically but in a way that we don't like it. If you don't believe me, believe at least Hollywood. Hollywood is almost obsessed by this idea: Hunger Games, Elysium and so on. I think Hollywood is onto something there. And that's what should be our political stance today. We are again at the time of Lenin in So my idea is even if it appears that you cannot do something now—first, you can. My advice is, you know what? I developed in some of my books—look Obama, no illusions about Obama presidency—but the way he reactualized the idea of universal healthcare was obviously something quite traumatic for the United States, he was even brought to the Supreme Court. The art is not to directly come with a utopian so-called request. The art is to find a very specific issue which in itself may appear innocent, but you know, if you really try to do it, then it leads to other issues and so on and so on. So when I say don't be afraid to help the Leninist, time is on our side, I don't mean this in an optimistic way. I mean this in a very pessimistic way. We know that the change will come and all we can do as leftists is not to bring some new world but at least to prevent the forthcoming catastrophe. I am deeply sorry for being too long. On the other way, fuck off, what can you do? You stayed. Thank you very much. Now we have several short minutes for potential questions or disagreements, but remember, you know, we may pay much, pay expensive for disagreements. Slavoj will send you to... No, just to don't be afraid, hours we are probably finished, no? Just, just to tell you something I didn't have time and didn't want to be even longer, but how much I learned from you here, from your guys, like —my good friend Artem, then of course Oksana, then of course Victor Mazin from the Freud Museum and so on. Things are happening here and I'm proud to be here. And I think that old—my God, are there some people from Moscow here? Hope not too many. Because I still believe in that old spirit that Leningrad is—they use another name here but I always forget that—Leningrad, more, more intellectually alive than than Moscow. I'm simply proud to be here. Leningrad will be intellectually alive until they close down the European University completely. I hope we will all be attentive to these processes. Any questions or we just call it a day? Slavoj, I've seen you... Yeah, Mike, take Mike. Can someone help me with the mic? Olga. Okay, I'll give him the microphone. I have a very simple question in few steps. Do you drink coffee, Slavoj? Do I? Do you drink coffee? From time to time, just for—if you ask me, I will be very aggressive, not against you, because hundreds of psychoanalysts in Argentina even developed theories of how I'm on cocaine. No, I'm an ordinary madman. I never in my life did I take any drugs, not even marijuana. That was about coffee. It’s an interesting question about coffee. Stop. Wonderful question. Okay. Even if you don't drink coffee nor nor nor neither without milk nor without cream, probably you sometimes write something—about the presentation, for example. And then you, maybe you agree with me that you are already somehow technized. And if you would drink coffee, you would even be on the chemical level changed in sense of your mind. Yeah, so and this is—this differs from some techno-gnosticism only in sense of quantity. If we are already technized and some of us who are drinking coffee already chemically changed our mind, so maybe we are not that far from some post-humanism from the very beginning of humanity as expression of some instrumental power. I know, but why do you think that, describing drinking coffee is very simple answer—Marxists, traditional will give you—why do you think that the technical chemical level is so important? What if I tell you that we don't drink coffee, I even don't believe just for some biological, organic need? We, drinking coffee is absolutely also an ideological experience. Most of my friends who drink coffee don't even like coffee, but for them the matter is that it's a social event and so on and so on. So I don't think that instead of coffee it can be, I don't know, cognac, whatever you want. Okay, thank you. But you are writing, so you use some tools. Some—and this is not only tech—and it’s not only cognitive technique, but it’s also some outer technique. Yeah, and so you include some technique in yourself. Okay, you ask the question, you got an answer. But but again, why do you think that, you know, it's a question of causality in the sense of we all know that so-called higher activities have to have a lower material basis. Like when you think, you breathe, you do and so on. The question is: can you reduce higher activities? Like it's the same as if you tell me, you are thinking now. But when you are thinking, your neurons are running there and so on and so on. Okay, but can you reduce it to that? Or I'm here, maybe even a Hegelian idealist. I think that there is an autonomous causality of higher regions. You cannot simply reduce the highest level to the lowest. Okay, thank you. Where are the other questions? Is there a question? Oksana has a point. You will also want to debate. Oksana would love to hear some optimistic still end points—like, what about the actuality of communism, which is marked in the title? Is communist also, will it be post-human or or rather human, or how do you see the our perspectives? No, no, no. I think the reason I mentioned those jerks like Zuckerberg and so on is that, you know, it's an open situation. Paradoxically, I am a pessimist and an optimist. Pessimist in the sense that there is a process of capi—there that capitalism is extremely—look, the whole history of Marxism is the history of the same mistake. They get something and then they think, "Oh, that's the limit of capitalism." But then capitalism reintegrates it. It was already Marx who for some time thought—he even gives in one of his letters this reason—capitalism is British industry, the key element of British industry is textile, they get cotton for textile from slaves South America—South of United States—so if the North wins, if slavery is abolished in the United States, it will be almost a mortal blow to capitalism. We have the last stage, then the latest stage, some of my feminist friends who say capitalism is patriarchy, which means sexual struggle for women's rights and so on means the end of capitalism. I think that capitalism has an incredible ability to reintegrate all this. Capitalism can invent its own fake figure of femininity. And so in this sense, but this process nonetheless cannot go to the end. I claim that today with again these new tendencies—I don't idealize them, so-called cooperative commons and so on—it's clearly that you look already at private intellectual property. I think capitalism will never be able fully to integrate it. People are already at the vulgar level—pirating, copying—so you cannot, you know, it doesn't work as a commodity. Knowledge is something like if we have if we have a glass of water, then if I drink it, you cannot drink it and vice versa. But if we have an information, if I give it to you, it's not a less, it's maybe even more information. It’s a different logic. And the big problem, that's what stupid dangerous capitalists, not so stupid as Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and so on, are aware of that. I see there a real limit to capitalism. Now, how to do it? I like, I hate pseudo-dialectics, I like total pessimism. I think that the true optimism should be precisely paint the dark picture and then leave it open. Leave it open like it's not for me as a theoretician to give you at the end the good news. The good news should be how do you react to the bad news? Or to answer you with a joke—I love one of the greatest contributions of American culture to world civilization I think, vulgarity I warned you, are those wonderful doctor jokes. You know like the doctor tells you I have news, do you want first bad news and then good news, no? And then of course they are
Just to say that I passively can follow Russian, so in debate it should be easy, maybe I will not even need a translation. Just don't be mad at me if often my answer to you would be probably what I will refer to now, it’s an older generation, when I was young they were shown on our TV old Soviet cartoons about that rabbit, you know? And like you remember that legendary answer, Nu, pogodi! So often maybe this will be my answer. Okay, thank you very much. I hope you will not be disappointed because I will try to be a little bit provocative in the sense of not just deploring the great revolutionary past but displaying some problems. First, I hope later it will get more amusing, a little bit boring introduction. In his State and Revolution, which is a kind of preparatory work for the October Revolution, Lenin as we all know outlines his vision of the workers' state where every kukharka, not simply a cook as it is usually translated, especially not a great chef, but more a modest woman servant in the kitchen of a wealthy family, where every kukharka will have to learn how to rule the state, where everyone, even the highest administrator, will be paid the same wages as ordinary workers and so on and so on. How this vision turned into its opposite soon after the October Revolution is the stuff of numerous analyses, but I would like to raise another question which as far as I know is not often confronted. The fact that when Lenin tries to justify with some normative set of, with some set of values, the revolution, he—and I mean this more in a critical way—he sounds, his utopian vision sounds very Habermasian, and by this I mean Jürgen Habermas's communicative theory. Lenin says that what the revolution should do is establish, establish a society where, I quote the English translation of course, where "the elementary rules of social intercourse that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years in all copybook maxims—these rules in communism they will finally be accepted in a non-distorted way." So you see, it's very interesting and surprising. It’s as if Lenin, in some kind of strange temporal traveling back-forth, read in advance Habermas's theory of communicative action and said, "Okay, that's my normative basis." Of course, that's not his only position, but it's interesting that this is what he mentions. He says, another quote, that "only in a communist society," I quote now Lenin again, "freed from capitalist slavery, from the untold horrors, savagery, absurdities, and infamies of capitalist exploitation, people will gradually become accustomed to observing the," again, "the elementary rules of social intercourse that have been known for centuries and repeated for thousands of years. They will become accustomed to observing them, obeying these rules, without force, without coercion, without subordination, without the special apparatus for coercion called the state." I find this almost touching, how the normative reference of Hegel is some simple and in a very non-historical way allegedly eternal ethics of what Habermas calls Zwangfreie Kommunikation, undistorted communication. So a page or so later, Lenin again states that, quote, "We know that the fundamental social cause of excesses, which consist in the violation of the rules of social intercourse, is the exploitation of the people." Again, the idea is, and I don't agree with it, this idea is that there are some rules of social intercourse which are not in themselves immanently twisted, distorted, but that it's as it were from, for external reasons—social inequalities, domination and so on—that these rules are not obeyed. Again, does this mean that revolution is normatively grounded in some kind of universal rules which function as eternal human nature? I claim that the role of this reference is not simply negative. Don't forget that this Lenin’s preoccupation with elementary rules of social intercourse can be discerned even in his critical remarks on Stalin’s brutal manners from the last months of his life. You know that famous letter that Lenin wrote proposing to fire Stalin from the post of General Secretary. Okay, we all know this, and I don't want even to exaggerate this like, "Oh, the great genius of Lenin, he saw it." Okay, obviously he saw it a little bit too late maybe, you know. What people, at least I am not aware of anyone noticing, is that Lenin’s basic reproach to Stalin is not a wrong politics or whatever, it’s simply this guy does not have good manners. And I think that without any irony, we should take Lenin serious here today. Can you imagine Lenin’s shock at Donald Trump and so on? Like, he doesn't have, but that's another topic, let me go on. But the reference to human nature is not Lenin’s last word. In another passage of State and Revolution, it looks as if Lenin claims almost the opposite. He surprisingly grounds the famous difference between the lower and the higher stage of communism not as it's usually done in the development of productive forces—you know, when productive forces are not yet enough developed, we just have socialism where there is still money, alienation and so on and so on. No, only in the higher stage where there will be enough abundance there will be communism. No, Lenin grounds this difference in simply different relation to human nature again. In the first lower stage, we are still dealing with the human nature which we inherited from the entire history of exploitation and class struggle, while what will happen in the higher stage, communism, is that human nature itself will be changed. Another quote: "We are not utopians. We do not indulge in dreams of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination. These anarchist dreams serve only to postpone the socialist revolution until human nature has changed. No, we want the socialist revolution with human nature as it is now, with human nature that cannot dispense with subordination, control, and managers." The united workers themselves will hire their own technicians and so on and so on and so on. So Lenin’s point is that we still need domination, secret police, whatever you want, because of our imperfect human nature. And that communism does not mean, not even primarily abundance, but a change of human nature. Again, the interesting point here is that ambiguities enter here. I don't have time to go into it, but do you know that, I think Lenin should be read here against the background of a strange temptation in all revolutions—okay, all, the two big ones, Russian and Chinese—to elevate this first stage where there was a lot of poverty, despair and so on, this, so I think the term was war-time communism, you know, where to—a temptation to see already in this extreme poverty the seeds of communism. For example, this of course is cynical, but the usual development of communist regimes was from this extreme poverty of warlike communism, which was much closer to some abstract idea of communism, to a later stage so-called goulash communism where you get more, a little bit more private life, individual freedoms and so on and so on. I mean, for example, do you know that in the utmost poverty of the Great Cultural—no, not even the revolution, already before—the Great Leap Forward in China, the idea was they are already in communism because they claimed the definition of communism is "each according to his abilities or her and to each according to his or her needs." And they say that's what's happening. In a twisted way, that you are in a commune, totally enslaved there, but the boss of the commune, like I'm the boss, you are the worker, I look at you and I say, "This is what you need, a little bit of food every day." So you are provided according to your needs. And then I say, "Okay, your abilities are to work hours a day," so you know, they literally justified it as already communism. And I think that also that the actual history almost went the other way around. They began with a kind of communist utopia, "We can do it now," and then socialism, if by socialism we mean more commercialized society and so on where money matters, came as a second, as the second higher stage. And there are real problems here. Like, I think that the greatest loss of when socialism fell apart were the best political jokes. So, my favorite, one of my favorite is from mid-thirties. In Politburo they debate, maybe you know it, I'm sorry, if there will be money or not in communism. Okay, you have right-wingers, Bukharin partisans, who say, "Of course, money is natural, you need money for distributing, there will be money." Then you have leftists who say, "No, money is alienation, production will be immediately socialized, in communism there will be no money." Then Comrade Stalin intervenes and says, "No, you are rightist and leftist deviation. The truth is the dialectical synthesis. There will be money and there will not be money." And then people ask, "Oh, what a genius idea, but Comrade Stalin, tell us how this will work." Well, you can guess what Stalin answers. It’s very simple, "Some people will have money, other people will not have money." No? So I think that now it’s easy to laugh at this. But and Lenin was fully aware of these problems. Now to provoke you, especially those from the West, I would say that our greatest enemy maybe, but is your compatriot who emigrated there, Ayn Rand. You know that pure apologist of capitalism, Atlas Shrugged and so on. She nonetheless said something which was, Marx was also aware of, that in spite of all the alienation that money brings, money, money relations nonetheless imply at least a formal minimal freedom. If I pay you to work for me or vice versa, it means that at least in a formal legal way I don't exert direct domination over you. I just say, "Okay, if you want," of course you are effectively forced to work for me, but the form is that of freedom. And Ayn Rand says that if you abolish money—now, that's her wager, we if we are still in some sense communists, we don't believe this, but nonetheless there is a certain truth in it—that if situations are still socially those of domination, so if you abolish this mediated domination through money where we are at least formally free, you get immediate domination. You get direct domination. Wasn't this the lesson of Stalinist Soviet Union? Okay, money did matter there, then. But nonetheless, I don't, I think that something that was happening there, and this would be a wonderful research topic for some of you, I would like to do it, to look now what we have today, the post-postmodern tendencies and so on, to see the search for it in Soviet Union. For example, all this post-human bullshit that we are bombarded with today. But you know that in that, how should I call it even, techno-gnosticism, even Trotsky was partisan of it, in the mid-twenties we already had all that. Even Trotsky subscribed to the program that the big task of communism is to biologically, genetically change the nature of man to get a new post-human form. Trotsky says in a quote that I often refer to something like, "And then we will be able to say, Homo sapiens, goodbye. You were not a good machine, we need to move further." So again, you have this tendency, and now to provoke you again, I would say that here Stalin almost did something to, I mean this in a very provocative way, I don't in any way want to praise Stalin, but to re-humanize the dimension. Because you know the official ideology of those, how should I call them, techno-gnostic people who wanted to overcome old human nature and so on was not to talk about moral responsibility anymore. It was like we are just conditioned animals and we should be refrained—they didn't, for them this culpability and so on all that was an old category. And but Stalin's, the Stalinist turn in late twenties, early thirties brought back all this, up to family values, punishment and so on. Purges are not, they are maybe the worst thing that can happen to you, but they nonetheless rely on a notion of human responsibility. You are guilty. That's why I would say maybe it's almost more horrible to claim you are not guilty, you are just wrongly conditioned or whatever and so on and so on. So this we find there. Now, if you saw the film which I think it’s interesting, Blade Runner not that I agree with it, but it opens up interesting problems. This idea of post-human androids who work for us. Do you know, do you know Soviet history? There was a biologist called, Ilya, how is he called, I think Ilya Vasiliev or something like this, from late twenties, who already and was vastly financed by Stalin, had the idea—and he was the follower of Bogdanov, the one attacked by Lenin—that maybe through coupling, organizing sex orgies between apes or orangutans and men, we will be able to give birth to a perfect worker. They will talk, but they will not want any trade unions or whatever or freedom, they will just be perfect workers and in view of that hunger in late twenties also they will not mind what kind of food they are eating and so on. And a lot of money was invested. This guy was then sent—they made an expedition to Congo. Of course, this project was fully racist and male-chauvinistic because first, it was the automatic idea that human males should screw-fuck the orangutan women, no? Why not the other way around? And second, that it should be done by blacks from Congo because, you know, they are closer to apes etc., maybe to blush. But then, okay, it didn't work, the guy unfortunately ended up in Gulag for other reasons, totally human reasons, that's another story. No, but what I wanted to say is that and it’s not only that. Nazis were doing the same, giving to elite soldiers special pills. American Army, not only the American but about them we at least know, is doing the same. I read that they already made genetic also and through chemotherapy changes so that they have pilots who can fight with full mobility for hours and so on. So this idea of a, of a post-human society, I'm sorry I don't have time to go into it, but it was part of Soviet utopia, and I think that today something quite shocking is happening. That, you know, usually we say capitalism is a historical phenomenon while being human is more trans-historical. Sorry, but the way things look today is almost the opposite. It's that maybe our humanity is historical. I claim quite seriously that post-humanity is not stuff of total idiots like Ray Kurzweil and all those fake theorists of, you know, singularity as we will all become one of one entity with big consciousness. I think that that prospect nonetheless is coming close to actualization. And that the big problem of capital today is how to manage in its different aspects this passage to post-humanity. Let’s call it post-human capital. All states—United States, China and so on—are already deeply engaged in it in what sense? Two things. First, you know that with new digitalization of our entire life, soon, but in some countries now already, you have digital control which knows you better than you know yourself. And it's done to such an extent, I like to follow this, for example in United States I spoke with some researchers who told me they did this in the level of sexuality. They got couples who agreed to be controlled passively, what they think, what they say, and then they were in love. And then when they married, the digital machinery, supercomputer who controlled them, made a, made a forecast, like this couple should marry or not. They didn't tell it to the couple, they just returned to the couple two years later. Computer was always right. Now nobody says that computers are perfect. I'm just saying that they are much better than we. And they did the same thing, for example, with doctors. We know that, there are great doctors, but a computer diagnosis is much better than ordinary doctor and so on. Then they did the same with politics. We as liberal free subjects, we usually just before elections through some extreme manipulations and so on usually vote quite often against our interests. They did the same experiment. They took some ordinary people and allowed the computer to follow their complaint, their attitudes, and then—it’s a sad news for the left—the computer's decision for whom you should vote was much more to the left than of the person itself. The person itself got into some scare of terrorism, whatever bullshit, and become more conservative, while the computer—so again, I am not saying it’s not as simple as that. I am not saying should the computers run us or whatever. No, computers do have their own problems and so on. You know where I, you know what I will do? Do you have a, the list of the people here? I propose you a deal, listen carefully. I get lost in my improvisations, you stop me. But I have digitally all I wanted to say. What if I send it to you and you give it to the people? So that I don't have a bad conscience for talking here. But what if, you know when I debate with computer scientists, you know what fascinated me? There is a joke that I use quite a lot, maybe I didn't use it here the last time I was here in Leningrad. You notice, no Petersburg for me, Leningrad, then Moscow. You know from the Hollywood classic movie Ninotchka, there is a very simple story there—joke told there, okay it gets in the story more complicated, this doesn't matter for us—is that the hero stops, goes to a cafeteria and says, "Can I get a coffee without cream please?" And you must know the answer that he gets. "Sorry, we don't have cream so I cannot give you coffee without cream. We only have milk so I can give you coffee without milk." Now, if you want to understand Hegel, what Hegel thinks about by this term, big, "bestimmte Negation," determinant negation. This is it. That it matters what you are not. It’s part of so, of your identity. We have three types of coffee: simple coffee, coffee without milk, coffee without cream. Although they are materially the same, they are not the same really. Negation matters. Incidentally, there is, I don't know if you had it also from Poland, I heard it, a wonderful joke from the time of socialism, which referring to the fact that often you didn't get things in the stores, it reproduces the same joke. It’s that somebody comes to a store and says, "Do you have, let's say, whatever butter or you don't have butter?" And the, the person there selling things says, "Sorry, you are in the wrong store. We are not the store which doesn't have butter, that one is across the street. We are the store which doesn't have toilet paper" and so on. So now I don't have time to lose here, so I will just say that, and I am not bluffing here, I spoke with computer programmers, those who deal with artificial intelligence. This, can a computer make a difference between coffee and coffee without milk and coffee without cream? I doubt they also doubt that it can. You know, or to put it in this way, can, do we already have computer programs which deal with in this sense virtuality? With can it include into what you say all the, all the implied negations and so on? I already know—ah yes, the most important writer here for me for the problems already back to Leninism of early Leninism is for me and he is for me one of the three mega guys of 20th century literature, it’s Beckett—not Joyce, Joyce was bluffing, I hate him—Beckett, Samuel Beckett, Kafka, and Andrei Platonov. He is mega. And I think that the great interest of his two mid-twenties novels, Chevengur and Kotlovan, is that they already clearly see the, I don't want to use the word totalitarian, let's call it nihilist dangerous abyssal dimension of October Revolution, but not simply from a counter-revolutionary perspective. He is basically engaged in and he sees much further than later liberal critics of, critics of communism and so on and so on. But maybe I'm losing time so let's quickly go on. I have so many things to say. Next point about Lenin. Usually people like to oppose the decisionist Lenin of 1917—"this is the man, he just did it"—and then the more pragmatic Lenin of the last years of his life. I think that—and that's why I admire Lenin—it’s much more contradictory and refined. I think that precisely the Lenin of in his practice at least was not, was not a utopia. He was just an incredible strategic thinker. When he heard about February Revolution, he saw a chance there. And this wasn't any pseudo-Marxist bullshit about "eternal historical law of progress," "passing to the higher stage." He just saw an opening and he was well aware: if we miss the chance for years, nothing will happen. So Lenin was not simply a utopia. He was, in a good sense of the term, an extreme pragmatic opportunist. He saw the chance there. The true Lenin’s despair, failed utopia, I think happened later in the early twenties when the Civil War was open and then what to do then, when to how to reconstruct the habits of daily life and so on and so on. That's why I am tired with those leftists who admire this carnivalesque dreams of wonderful million people dancing on the street, all rules are suspended, the king is the beggar, the beggar is the king. That's easy. For me, a true revolution happens as they say in American or English, I think "the morning after." How do ordinary people feel the change when things return, when things return back to normal? And Lenin was aware of this problem. And that's the disillusion, late Lenin, where he mocks any idea of socialism, where he says, "We just have to bring a little bit of civilization to Russia" and so on and so on and so on. So again, this is for me the spirit there. Of course, I'm not trying to say to justify everything that Lenin did, but this utterly realist spirit. And Stalin here did a tremendous revolution. Lenin was extremely open. Jean-Claude Milner in his, otherwise conservative book, Relire la révolution, to read again revolution, quotes a wonderful passage from Saint-Just where Saint-Just says that to be a revolutionary is like to navigate an open sea without any card, in an open territory. I think that if anything, Marx was too much caught in this historical teleology. And Lenin’s actual approach was much more "revolution is an uncharted territory. We have to make," as Lenin put it, "all possible mistakes, we don't know where it will, where it will take us" and so on and so on. So to go on here, I think that maybe this is also what Lenin learned from Hegel. You know because this is for me one of the most beautiful encounters in the history of philosophy. Lenin didn't really, sorry to disappoint you, understand Hegel. If you read his philosophical notebooks, it’s clear that his limit is the category of mutual influence, Wechselwirkung. But nonetheless, I find it so nice, everything is important there. Look, Lenin was totally desperate after what does he do? Let's go to Switzerland and read Hegel basically. But which Hegel? Not as stupid historicist pseudo-Marxists would have said, some historical works or even phenomenology. He reads Hegel’s Logic, which Hegel himself designated it as, ironically of course, as "the thoughts of God before God created the world." That's a wonderful lesson. Conservative Hegelians always preferred the historicist Hegel. Another thing that maybe Lenin learned from Hegel is historical openness. Breaking out even if it's a Marxist one of this historical teleology. You know like we just have to with all complications follow the law of history and so on. You know, in later Stalinist Marxism, this metaphor they use, this metaphor of riding the train of history, you know. Now here, maybe you know my standard joke, and then based on this teleology, pseudo-Marxists often when the situation is very tragic, they like to say, "Oh, but there is a light at the end of the tunnel." My answer is—you know which one some of you probably—yes, there is a light, but usually this light at the end of the tunnel is another train coming from the other side, no? So you know, Hegel is supposed to be a conservative, but is he? There is a wonderful Leninist moment in Hegel, precisely where Hegel appears the most conservative. You know at the end of his book of political philosophy maybe, which is—but it’s very problematic to call it that—Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. In the end of the intro, not introduction, forward I think, there is that famous idea that philosophy is like the Owl of Minerva which takes off in the evening. And Hegel gives a concrete reading on this: that philosophy cannot predict the future or deal with what should be, philosophy can only analyze a form of life whose time has already passed. Now I ask you something. Hegel’s system of state, this corporate state and so on in Philosophy of Right, it’s usually taken as his vision of society. And then people claim, wasn't Hegel there almost fascist, different estates and so on. But my point is that either Hegel was a complete idiot, which nonetheless he wasn't, or he knew that this should help, should hold also for his own book. It’s clear that what he presents as a system in Philosophy of Right, it’s not his blueprint for the future. It’s just that's what we can say about the potential rationality of a system which is dying already now. And Hegel was all the time aware that something new is happening and he was totally at a loss with it. For example, the last writing, written text by Hegel was his panicky reaction to the British Reform Bill Law, which introduced a little bit more egalitarian voting. For Hegel this was catastrophe, step towards abstract universality and so on and so on. But what I'm trying to tell you is that Hegel’s idea and Hegel and in concrete predictions, Hegel was not an idiot. Look at the introduction to his lectures on Philosophy of History where, apropos, and this was—these lectures were given around or when he speaks about Russia and in different ways America, he says, "It's too early to say anything about these countries. Their century will be the next century, 20th." Not so bad, no? He wasn't an idiot. So what I'm saying is that Hegel is absolutely not this type of teleological progressist. Fukuyama is an idiot, my God, even before you will Fukuyama in my regime goes to Gulag, you know. Sorry. Point taken seriously, but just. No, seriously what I want to say is that I think that Hegel is much more open here. History is much more open. And I think that paradoxically, this is what Lenin learned from Hegel really. To this opening radical, there is no simple necessity. Revolution is not inscribed into a series of events. It's just a matter of using an opportunity here and there and so on. So how do we stand with this openness today? Now part two, reference to today. Here I'm a little bit more pessimistic. You know the standard reproach to the left in power by radical leftists is that instead of effectively socializing production and deploy actual democracy, the left in power remains within the constraints of standard leftist politics—nationalizing means of production or tolerating capitalism in a social democratic way, imposing an authoritarian dictatorship or playing the game of parliamentary democracy and so on and so on. I think the time has come, if you want to be Leninists today, to raise the brutal question: okay, but what should or could they have done? How would the authentic mode of socialist democracy have looked in practice? And this is for me the sad lesson of, for example, of Venezuela. Chávez was not just a Fidel Castro with money, in the sense of having enough money from oil and throwing it to not solve problems but like calm down the situation. My friends from Venezuela were sending me texts where it's clear how all the time—now it's over, it's another game—of Chávez rule he was desperately making, at least, you know, "let's try this combined property, let's give this factory to the workers" and so on and so on. And let's be frank, the sad thing is that more or less it all—let's be frank, more or less it all failed. So I am simply—it's very brutal what I will say now—where are we now with communist prospect? One answer is the Chinese official one. I almost laugh at it. They simply claim what we call global capitalism they call it socialism with Chinese characteristics, no? And for them the tension now between China and their friends and United States is simply the Cold War, but not war like—the it’s simply the old war competition between capitalism and socialism in new form. For them, the economic success of China is not the proof that you need capitalism, but the proof precisely of the superiority of socialist system. Of course, you have to redefine so much communism to fit it into this model that we should ask, "Is it still socialism?" But you know what is my target here, and I think Lenin with his anti-utopian spirit would have got it. You know all these complaints like Chávez was not radical enough, he should have liquidated the local oligarchs or whatever, or why didn't he move a step further and introduce actual people's democracy and all that? You know, in now the main two versions of 20th century radical politics, socialism, are dismissed. Welfare state no longer works and Stalinist state socialism no longer works. Although already with Stalinism it's a little bit more complicated. Once I had a debate years ago with Fukuyama and he laughed so much when I told him, "Okay, I concede your point, global capitalism won. But will you concede my point that the best managers of global capitalism today are ex-communists in power?" We are really I think moving to a new domain from you here, Russia, Putin's regime, to India, to Turkey, to China where it's clear that liberal democracy is no longer the best form of capitalism. Capitalism works much better with some type of ethnocentric authoritarian regime. But let's drop that. My idea is this one. I had the same idea when there was Occupy Wall Street movement and I was there talking with many of them in New York on that Zuccotti Park and asked them always the same question, like the Freudian question, "What do you want? What does the woman want? Okay, want." My question was not woman, but "What do you want?" It’s incredible that beyond this vague idea against financial capital—incidentally every fascist will agree with it, no?—and all that against corruption and so on, it was not even clear what they really want. It was more some kind of general unease, but mostly it was moderate—I call them ironically left Fukuyamaists—like they basically accepted liberal democratic capitalism but they say, "You know, we need more healthcare, more tolerance" and so on and so on. So this is the big question today. Can we even imagine—that’s what is missing for me—I think that maybe—now I'm talking not about your situation, more in United States and Western Europe—maybe this terrifying politically correct moralization of the left, you know like I use a certain word "racist," "anti-feminist," "homophobic" and so on, is precisely a reaction to the fact that you don't have a, an alternate vision. Now I'm not a utopian, I know you cannot get a vision which would be concrete and so on. But just a general vision. "Okay, we want true democracy, not alienated multi-party democracy." How would this concretely look? "We want no longer the alienated state." But everybody admits we need today global organizations to deal with, with immigrant crisis so-called, to deal with ecological crisis and so on. We—I claim—no longer can play these games of, you know, local self-management, "We live in a small community where we decide." No, what do we decide? We have to rely on larger structures to deal with ecology and so on and so on. Most of the institutional left today, unfortunately, is conservative in the sense that their main goal is protecting the old achievements of welfare state, at least in Europe, and up to a point also with Democrats in United States—up to a point, it's more complex. But what I want to say is that isn't it sad that there are people who still talk about capitalism is coming to an end, there are signs of post-capitalist order? But you know who are they? The so-called progressive postmodern capitalists themselves. And they are the true enemy today I think, even more maybe than Trump. People like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk. They are today's organic intellectuals of corporate capital. And they, all of them talk about this. Most of them even—you know, all these usual progressive causes—like they are all for LGBT+, absolutely. They are, most of them are even or practically all of them, they are even for for the minimal income—how do you call this?—basic income for everybody and so on. But it's clear what is happening there. They see very clearly that the capitalism usual one is coming to an end. And what they really try is to—they are for me the agents of what I would have called post-human capitalism. And the ironies are immense here. A month or two ago I saw a speech briefly—too boring to listen to all of it—that Mark Zuckerberg, the Facebook boss, delivered to Princeton students. And he says there that his goal in life is to, our quote literal, "our job is to create a sense of purpose among the people." Now I almost died laughing. A guy who invented Facebook, which is the greatest instrument to lose time in a totally purposeless way, will now tell me this. So I claim isn't this so sad how from one side, we capitalism is in real crisis. We have ecological problems, it’s clear to everybody you cannot do this. We have even, I claim, the problem with profit extraction and private property. I buy here the theory of some leftists who claim ask yourself a simple question: how did people like how did for example Bill Gates become—although it’s problematic now he’s still the richest person in the world—it’s not classical profit. I claim it’s return to rent. What is happening today with these corporations like Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft is that it's not simply just private property. It's that what Marx called general intellect—our shared intellectual substance—is privatized and then you get rent. We are, when we buy a product for, from for example Windows whatever word from Microsoft, it’s not he produces a commodity and then adds to the production costs a profit rate. The relationship between the price of Windows word program and production costs is irrelevant. We are simply charged, we pay rent so that we can be in contact with each other, so that we get access to general intellect. It's a different, it’s a different logic. So I will approach the end so that I don't get lost. Just a one, two more points I would like to make here. One would be that another tendency which I already implicitly mentioned is that in contrast to the usual pseudo-Marxist doxa which says that today's capitalism is more and more virtual, like formally we are more and more free to do whatever you want but all the profit is generated through speculations on futures in the virtual sphere and so on. But at the same time, as some intelligent researchers demonstrated—I think it's a key tendency—that at the same time with this disappearance but retreat of direct direct wage relationship where I pay a wage and so on, relations of direct personal domination are returning. Not only in the obvious ways like refugees, slavery in third world countries and so on and so on, but even in our countries. For example, in culture and some social spheres money more and more serves as a direct tool of social or political domination. Something very complex is going on there. So to slowly come to an end, how, what's the ideological form of these new processes? Let me begin with something which again would have concerned Lenin. I already mentioned it. This—and I don't think this is a superficial phenomenon, I'm not a moralist here—this let's call it vulgarization of daily life. How what things are possible—it is possible today to state things publicly, things which years ago it would not have been possible to state them publicly. Just the most obvious example: torture. Now we can debate it, even if you are against it, but it’s like should we torture terrorists and so on. We will be productive, no. years ago it would have been unthinkable. Incidentally, that's why I like to emphasize that at a certain level I am dogmatic. In what sense? The progress if there is progress, I doubt, of society is, means precisely that certain things are considered an achievement we don't debate them. For example, would you really like to live in a society where you have to argue again and again that women shouldn't be raped? No, I would like to live in a society where when a man goes into this bullshit, you know like, "Oh but women secretly really enjoy it, they pretend not to like it," you don't even have to argue. The guy appears an idiot, you know. You laugh at him, "What are you doing? Can I buy you a drink? Whatever, idiot." And that's why, again, the true horror of the torture debate is that it takes place publicly at all. So I'm here talking not only about obvious example Donald Trump, but this is a general movement with today's conservatives. And it's maybe it gives us—I like to define myself as referring to Lenin without irony—well-behaved gentle Leninist, you know, good manners, Leninist. I was so shocked my Polish friends told me—it's not a joke, check it on Wikipedia. You know the great guy, now the de facto boss of Poland, Jarosław Kaczyński. Incidentally, I'm really evil. I will tell you, your secret services, that if they did—but I don't believe they did—if they really organized the shooting down of that plane which killed his brothers, couldn't they aim better and kill also other brothers? He was not dead. Yeah, but somehow, okay, this is a joke, I know, I know. So you know when in his party, Justice and Law whatever, won elections, he was asked not in a private cafeteria meeting where we all talk dirty, on TV and in an interview to Gazeta Wyborcza, the biggest newspaper, he was asked, "What is your program?" You know what was his answer? I repeat it literally, a very vulgar common expression in Polish, I think it is "teraz kurwa my," which to explain it means "it's our turn to fuck the whore." It’s from very vulgar low-class military circles where you know when they are free, soldiers wait in line, let's say we are soldiers, through the prostitute and you finish and then I say, "teraz kurwa my," like it's my turn to do it. But isn't it a little bit shocking that the guy who presents himself to be the beacon, the model of Catholic morality and so on and so on talks—I repeat it—in public like this? There you shouldn't—you shouldn't get confused about Trump. People always say, "But how could he be present himself as a Christian conservative when he talks in such a dirty undignified way?" But I claim this is the Christian conservative identity. Precisely this combination of public manners and this obscene dirty background which is coming back again and again. And certain forms of communism also are not, are not alien to this obscenity. I'm always interested when obscenity penetrates the public speech. It's never innocent. For example, let me take an example because Maoists now hate me, they claim I am a traitor and so on. So okay, let me go to the end in this treason. And a quote from Mao. In July when it was clear that the, the Great Leap Forward is a catastrophe—millions died and so on—Mao called a party conference in Lushan where it was—he proposed they do self-criticism. Like they admit their mistakes and—again, we are not talking about small mistakes, we are talking about responsibility for millions of dead—and Mao admits the first to admit that he is the main responsible. But then—and this is not again dirty talk, this is in the collected works of Mao, you can find it on the web—these are the final three lines of Mao's speech. I'm sorry for the use of vulgar term "fart" which means flatulence and so on. Mao concludes his speech like this: "The chaos caused was on a grand scale, millions of dead, and I take responsibility. Comrades, you must all analyze your own responsibility. If you have to shit, shit! If you have to fart, fart! You will feel much better for it." Now I just ask a simple question. I'm not making the usual case "Mao was primitive" and so on. He was not, he was highly educated in classical culture and so on. But why exactly at this point when he was talking about responsibility for millions of dead, he took recourse to this extremely vulgar, to this extremely vulgar metaphor? So again, the, the sad lesson of all this, the really sad lesson is that today, at least in the so-called developed West, we live in this tension: on the one hand, ultra-political correctness—like one word wrong, you are all that stuff, you must know it, heard about it—on the other hand, this explosion of vulgarity, of vulgarity in public speech. And this is connected with another thing which is sad for me as a Leninist, politically. If we already talk about Kaczyński, it is today as if in our crazy world, to impose minimal workers' welfare measures, you need a right populist government to do it. Like the same Kaczyński. You know that his party in Poland two years ago or when imposed, did something extraordinary. They imposed, they lowered the age of retirement, they make much better healthcare freely available—I mean more money, better conditions for student loans. No moderate leftist would dare to do this. And on the other hand, the opposite side, if you want a really efficient austerity politics, you need left, even radical left in power, as in Greece. This was an ingenious operation by EU to allow Syriza to stay in power. If conservatives were to be in power, Syriza would have organized explosive demonstrations and so on and so on. In this way, it functions. So to really conclude, who is the enemy today? Lenin would always ask, I am really concluding, don't be too nervous. Who is the enemy today? Ideology. We really live in a cynical era. Which means first, the hegemonic ideology today—at least in our half-educated circles and so on—presents itself, that's a nice paradox, as critique of ideology. The moment you propose something which, of course by the existing global capitalist criteria, is perceived as ideological—you want I don't know, more socialism or—they say, "Oh this ends, we will end up in Gulag, you are ideologist" and so on and so on. I had—and this is I think a nice conclusion if you agree—I had a couple of months ago, I was not in a good mood then, I am very self-critical sometimes, a debate with British liberal writer Will Self. A wonderful name, that’s his name, Will Self, you know. And he claims that this is his true name. Okay, comes from perverted family, whatever. But and we had the debate, and he conceded to me that we are approaching a crisis ecologically, socially, that in 20—at least maximum 40—years from now it will be a collapse crisis and so on. Then I asked him, "Okay, but but what can we do?" And he said, "Nothing. Just don't talk about any revolutionary radical act, it will end up in catastrophe. All we can do is," he said very modestly, "become aware of the dangers, pay our taxes, be good citizens—this is important—and enjoy as much private life as we can." He said the only thing to do today, he used very vulgar English words which I learned later meant basically sit down at home, drink beer and masturbate, something like that. I—so he didn't deny anything. Then when I asked him, "Why not nonetheless do something?" he did something so disgusting, he appealed to the people, there were almost a thousand of them, and said, "How do you all have cellphones?" Okay, and then that was the argument for him. "Do you know that all your cellphones use coltan which is mined under terrible conditions in Congo? So we are all complicit in it." This much more than denial of problems—liberal capitalism is wonderful and so on—this is the ultimate most efficient form of ideology today I think. You admit everything—you know, catastrophe is coming, up and down and so on—just we are all complicit. That's why incidentally I also opposed to that standard ecological politics, "We are all responsible." So instead of raising big systemic questions, the questions are, "Did you recycle all your Coca-Cola cans? Did you put aside all newspaper?" You see, this is again ideology at its purest. It admits the problem but at the same time it makes you co-responsible so that you don't blame the system and it offers you an easy way out. I saw you have here, I saw it with horror—I am not a terrorist, but if I were to be a terrorist I would bomb it—you have also here close to here Starbucks, no? You have them here, yeah. Horrible. Okay. I don't know if they play this game here, but in the West they play this ecological game. Oh they have in the West posters which say, "Okay, our cappuccino is a little bit more expensive but goes to some stupid Guatemala children, the other percent to save some forest." Isn't this wonderful? The message is we no longer have that old duality, you are a consumer but then you should also be a good citizen. No, the price for good social conscience and care, solidarity, is included into the commodity itself, you know. Pay a little bit more and you will be—so this, this immobilizing cynicism is ideology at its purest today and also unfortunately at its most efficient. And that would be for me the big, if you want, problem of Leninist politics today and insight. First, admit all these antagonisms. For example, let's take someone who—that's the irony of all ironies—calls himself a Leninist, a right-wing Leninist, Steve Bannon. You know the alt-right figure. Incidentally I have there a special attachment. Do you know he is using that once he made a statement that I'm his favorite Marxist? Sorry. But then I said this guy knows what good theory is, so let's look into this. You know, that's the tragedy of the left. He nonetheless said some things that in Democratic Party apart from some Sanders supporters they are afraid to say. You know how he, Steve Bannon, alt-right guy, you know how he reacted to to to Trump’s tax proposing? He exploded, he said, "No, the opposite! Raise the taxes for big companies over and so on." You know that he opposed saving the big banks? He said something which is simply true. He said, "This is socialism for the rich. We don't need them and so on." So this is for me the greatest tragedy today, that we have the left full of this politically correct stuff with which its goals I totally agree, I just don't like this fanatic moralizing tone, and we have then the right, even the extreme right, taking over whatever remains of of social politics and so on. That's for me that and as Leninists we would have to approach this. That's why I support Bernie Sanders. I don't have any illusions about him, but in United States, the miracle of Bernie Sanders was that he mobilized small farmers and so on exactly those who are not the usual gang of left-liberal supporters, but who would have otherwise probably voted even for Trump and so on. That would be, if you agree, I don't know how is it in your country, but at least in the so-called developed West the the leftist Leninist answer. If we don't solve this problem of how not just to castigate—okay, I hate them, they are disgusting, the radical right, although who is so disgusting it's a matter of choice. Like they say Trump is horror, I say yes, but if Trump is impeached United States will get Mike Pence who is definitely worse I think. God save Trump and not Mike Pence, you know. So maybe we should change the entire metaphor with this really conclude now just the last thought. Did you notice how in popular theological Christian fundamentalist fiction there is now a topic which is popular, those of "Left Behind"? You know, God does a—God—God takes to himself a certain percentage of people and we are those who remain to face the horrors of Armageddon. Incidentally, you don't only get kitsch here like the series Left Behind, you also get—I forgotten is it leftovers or remainders?—a relatively solid TV series which is not so terribly bad. But I claim that as often God here listened to the big capital because in a very primitive leftist reading I claim that this topic of Left Behind is the central topic of today's capitalism we know. More and more of us are Left Behind. And here, to conclude, the proper Leninist position would not have been that of Negri. With all my respect of Negri and Hardt, but they are too much accelerationists. I remember once Negri gave an interview on Italian TV standing in front—maybe you Lorenzo know it—of a I think closed factory where some workers demonstrated, and he said, "Look at them, they are dead but they don't know it." You know this idea that he even said once that the most speculative capitalists dealing with futures are almost in communism, are much more progressive than—no, I'm tempted to say that this strategy of going further in capitalism is wrong and misleading. Like you have even progressive versions, for example already years ago I remember when I was young there was a tendency among American feminists to redress the oppression of women by including somehow—it was not clear how—homework, taking care of children, home into ways that it should be counted as creating value and included in that. Or you have a crazy idea of some capitalist ecologists claiming that all natural resources on Earth should be somehow quantified—for example, all the air is worth okay, trillions whatever—and then somehow you include it into the price. I think this solution is—it may appear worthwhile at a limited level, but no, we should be more radical here. This is just universal commodification, it doesn't work. So really last some sentences. You look skeptical I think. No, now I'm—this why you have already warming the bed in Gulag for you, okay. No, but that's why I think our answer to those who claim, "But okay, I was so critical about the left today, why don't we just play the left Fukuyamaist game? Why don't we say revolution is impossible, so let's play our small games, more rights for the gay and lesbian here, a little bit better healthcare there." I think this is the true utopia today. I think that it's not enough to say somehow we will survive it. I think that at a series of levels, from ecology to biogenetics, who will control there and so on and so on, to intellectual property and so on, the system is approaching its end. And if we do nothing, it will change radically but in a way that we don't like it. If you don't believe me, believe at least Hollywood. Hollywood is almost obsessed by this idea: Hunger Games, Elysium and so on. I think Hollywood is onto something there. And that's what should be our political stance today. We are again at the time of Lenin in So my idea is even if it appears that you cannot do something now—first, you can. My advice is, you know what? I developed in some of my books—look Obama, no illusions about Obama presidency—but the way he reactualized the idea of universal healthcare was obviously something quite traumatic for the United States, he was even brought to the Supreme Court. The art is not to directly come with a utopian so-called request. The art is to find a very specific issue which in itself may appear innocent, but you know, if you really try to do it, then it leads to other issues and so on and so on. So when I say don't be afraid to help the Leninist, time is on our side, I don't mean this in an optimistic way. I mean this in a very pessimistic way. We know that the change will come and all we can do as leftists is not to bring some new world but at least to prevent the forthcoming catastrophe. I am deeply sorry for being too long. On the other way, fuck off, what can you do? You stayed. Thank you very much. Now we have several short minutes for potential questions or disagreements, but remember, you know, we may pay much, pay expensive for disagreements. Slavoj will send you to... No, just to don't be afraid, hours we are probably finished, no? Just, just to tell you something I didn't have time and didn't want to be even longer, but how much I learned from you here, from your guys, like —my good friend Artem, then of course Oksana, then of course Victor Mazin from the Freud Museum and so on. Things are happening here and I'm proud to be here. And I think that old—my God, are there some people from Moscow here? Hope not too many. Because I still believe in that old spirit that Leningrad is—they use another name here but I always forget that—Leningrad, more, more intellectually alive than than Moscow. I'm simply proud to be here. Leningrad will be intellectually alive until they close down the European University completely. I hope we will all be attentive to these processes. Any questions or we just call it a day? Slavoj, I've seen you... Yeah, Mike, take Mike. Can someone help me with the mic? Olga. Okay, I'll give him the microphone. I have a very simple question in few steps. Do you drink coffee, Slavoj? Do I? Do you drink coffee? From time to time, just for—if you ask me, I will be very aggressive, not against you, because hundreds of psychoanalysts in Argentina even developed theories of how I'm on cocaine. No, I'm an ordinary madman. I never in my life did I take any drugs, not even marijuana. That was about coffee. It’s an interesting question about coffee. Stop. Wonderful question. Okay. Even if you don't drink coffee nor nor nor neither without milk nor without cream, probably you sometimes write something—about the presentation, for example. And then you, maybe you agree with me that you are already somehow technized. And if you would drink coffee, you would even be on the chemical level changed in sense of your mind. Yeah, so and this is—this differs from some techno-gnosticism only in sense of quantity. If we are already technized and some of us who are drinking coffee already chemically changed our mind, so maybe we are not that far from some post-humanism from the very beginning of humanity as expression of some instrumental power. I know, but why do you think that, describing drinking coffee is very simple answer—Marxists, traditional will give you—why do you think that the technical chemical level is so important? What if I tell you that we don't drink coffee, I even don't believe just for some biological, organic need? We, drinking coffee is absolutely also an ideological experience. Most of my friends who drink coffee don't even like coffee, but for them the matter is that it's a social event and so on and so on. So I don't think that instead of coffee it can be, I don't know, cognac, whatever you want. Okay, thank you. But you are writing, so you use some tools. Some—and this is not only tech—and it’s not only cognitive technique, but it’s also some outer technique. Yeah, and so you include some technique in yourself. Okay, you ask the question, you got an answer. But but again, why do you think that, you know, it's a question of causality in the sense of we all know that so-called higher activities have to have a lower material basis. Like when you think, you breathe, you do and so on. The question is: can you reduce higher activities? Like it's the same as if you tell me, you are thinking now. But when you are thinking, your neurons are running there and so on and so on. Okay, but can you reduce it to that? Or I'm here, maybe even a Hegelian idealist. I think that there is an autonomous causality of higher regions. You cannot simply reduce the highest level to the lowest. Okay, thank you. Where are the other questions? Is there a question? Oksana has a point. You will also want to debate. Oksana would love to hear some optimistic still end points—like, what about the actuality of communism, which is marked in the title? Is communist also, will it be post-human or or rather human, or how do you see the our perspectives? No, no, no. I think the reason I mentioned those jerks like Zuckerberg and so on is that, you know, it's an open situation. Paradoxically, I am a pessimist and an optimist. Pessimist in the sense that there is a process of capi—there that capitalism is extremely—look, the whole history of Marxism is the history of the same mistake. They get something and then they think, "Oh, that's the limit of capitalism." But then capitalism reintegrates it. It was already Marx who for some time thought—he even gives in one of his letters this reason—capitalism is British industry, the key element of British industry is textile, they get cotton for textile from slaves South America—South of United States—so if the North wins, if slavery is abolished in the United States, it will be almost a mortal blow to capitalism. We have the last stage, then the latest stage, some of my feminist friends who say capitalism is patriarchy, which means sexual struggle for women's rights and so on means the end of capitalism. I think that capitalism has an incredible ability to reintegrate all this. Capitalism can invent its own fake figure of femininity. And so in this sense, but this process nonetheless cannot go to the end. I claim that today with again these new tendencies—I don't idealize them, so-called cooperative commons and so on—it's clearly that you look already at private intellectual property. I think capitalism will never be able fully to integrate it. People are already at the vulgar level—pirating, copying—so you cannot, you know, it doesn't work as a commodity. Knowledge is something like if we have if we have a glass of water, then if I drink it, you cannot drink it and vice versa. But if we have an information, if I give it to you, it's not a less, it's maybe even more information. It’s a different logic. And the big problem, that's what stupid dangerous capitalists, not so stupid as Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and so on, are aware of that. I see there a real limit to capitalism. Now, how to do it? I like, I hate pseudo-dialectics, I like total pessimism. I think that the true optimism should be precisely paint the dark picture and then leave it open. Leave it open like it's not for me as a theoretician to give you at the end the good news. The good news should be how do you react to the bad news? Or to answer you with a joke—I love one of the greatest contributions of American culture to world civilization I think, vulgarity I warned you, are those wonderful doctor jokes. You know like the doctor tells you I have news, do you want first bad news and then good news, no? And then of course they are
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jokes like like I'm your doctor, you come to me, I tell you, "Okay, first the bad news. We discovered you have cancer, you will be dead in two months."
jokes like like I'm your doctor, you come to me, I tell you, "Okay, first the bad news. We discovered you have cancer, you will be dead in two months."
Slavoj Žižek
Then you ask me for "What can be the good news then?" And I tell you, "The good news is that when we were investigating you, we also discovered you have Alzheimer's, so you will forget the bad news before you come home." So what I'm saying is that the trick, the trick is the first thing is not to bring some optimistic picture but to discern emancipatory potential in bad news themselves. So where is the emancipatory potential? I didn't hear it. I will—when you are in prison there is this—sorry. No seriously, okay I will give you another example. When we talk about robotization, automation of production. In
Then you ask me for "What can be the good news then?" And I tell you, "The good news is that when we were investigating you, we also discovered you have Alzheimer's, so you will forget the bad news before you come home." So what I'm saying is that the trick, the trick is the first thing is not to bring some optimistic picture but to discern emancipatory potential in bad news themselves. So where is the emancipatory potential? I didn't hear it. I will—when you are in prison there is this—sorry. No seriously, okay I will give you another example. When we talk about robotization, automation of production. In
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what strange epoch are we living when this is perceived as a problem? Oh, many unemployed people. Can you imagine a better news than robotization? In a minimally normal society, it means we all would have more free time and so on and so on. Isn't something fundamentally wrong with our society
what strange epoch are we living when this is perceived as a problem? Oh, many unemployed people. Can you imagine a better news than robotization? In a minimally normal society, it means we all would have more free time and so on and so on. Isn't something fundamentally wrong with our society
Slavoj Žižek
when
when
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we perceive something which could be a great contribution to our freedom as
we perceive something which could be a great contribution to our freedom as
Slavoj Žižek
catastrophic bad news and so on? In this sense, I go to all of it, the pessimist picture that I paint. You know all that mind control, digitalization and so on. It's all very ambiguous. So it's for me not so much of telling
catastrophic bad news and so on? In this sense, I go to all of it, the pessimist picture that I paint. You know all that mind control, digitalization and so on. It's all very ambiguous. So it's for me not so much of telling
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another story—"There's an open... but to see from a different perspective the very processes that I was describing, to see a potential emancipatory dimension in them." You will have to pay me more if you want to... I'll still your mic for a second. My was taken, but I just to follow up then—I think the only emancipatory potential in everything you said is that you
another story—"There's an open... but to see from a different perspective the very processes that I was describing, to see a potential emancipatory dimension in them." You will have to pay me more if you want to... I'll still your mic for a second. My was taken, but I just to follow up then—I think the only emancipatory potential in everything you said is that you
Slavoj Žižek
know
know
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it and you disclose it to us, so that we have this superior knowledge which we... Oh, I mean of these ambiguities and of these—this negativity. But but this means that you have to come to come to power in order for for there to be a hope. So when will you come to power? No, the problem is not just to come to power. Look what
it and you disclose it to us, so that we have this superior knowledge which we... Oh, I mean of these ambiguities and of these—this negativity. But but this means that you have to come to come to power in order for for there to be a hope. So when will you come to power? No, the problem is not just to come to power. Look what
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happens to Syriza when it came to power.
happens to Syriza when it came to power.
Slavoj Žižek
Although as a Leninist I must say, now come the bad totalitarian news, what I still admire in Lenin—although for most liberals this is horror—it's his absolutely ruthless decision "We have to take power." And I think the left has to accept this game. I'm sick and tired of those soft leftists who say, "You know it's better to be in opposition" or as even my good friend Alain Badiou says, you know "Authentic politics is outside state, you know, you have to have your islands of authentic creativity,
Although as a Leninist I must say, now come the bad totalitarian news, what I still admire in Lenin—although for most liberals this is horror—it's his absolutely ruthless decision "We have to take power." And I think the left has to accept this game. I'm sick and tired of those soft leftists who say, "You know it's better to be in opposition" or as even my good friend Alain Badiou says, you know "Authentic politics is outside state, you know, you have to have your islands of authentic creativity,
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whatever."
whatever."
Slavoj Žižek
No! A true leftist should say with all the risks and so on, I—if possible—I take power. Okay, maybe I will fail, but through this failure something new may emerge and so on. I think that—and against some simplified versions of Marx and Lukács—we should again return to Hegel. And this is clear from Stalinism and so on that socialist communist revolutions are not self-transparent. They are also caught in this dialectic: you want one thing, the result is the opposite one and so on and so on. And I think that we should risk and accept these dialectics. That, you know, it will—you you
No! A true leftist should say with all the risks and so on, I—if possible—I take power. Okay, maybe I will fail, but through this failure something new may emerge and so on. I think that—and against some simplified versions of Marx and Lukács—we should again return to Hegel. And this is clear from Stalinism and so on that socialist communist revolutions are not self-transparent. They are also caught in this dialectic: you want one thing, the result is the opposite one and so on and so on. And I think that we should risk and accept these dialectics. That, you know, it will—you you
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must try and fail and try and fail before maybe something new will emerge. But but but but but—don't be on the other hand too much a pessimist. Look, let me tell you something. Who would have thought years ago even possible for something like Syriza to happen? Who for something
must try and fail and try and fail before maybe something new will emerge. But but but but but—don't be on the other hand too much a pessimist. Look, let me tell you something. Who would have thought years ago even possible for something like Syriza to happen? Who for something
Slavoj Žižek
like Podemos to happen? For something like the Arab Spring to happen? Of course, we immediately see the limits, but we should ruthlessly, or not so much—I think the true result of Occupy Wall Street was then Bernie Sanders and so on. And not Trump? Sorry. I think that was Trump. It was a reaction. This is the problem with you Russians, you like this paradoxes and so on and so on. But to some sense you are right. You know in what sense you are right? That I really think that Trump is the result of the failure of the Democratic left. Yes, absolutely. He opened up the space for it. That's why I don't like the way Hillary Clinton now is playing this almost Stalinist game: find the culprit. You know it's Bernie Sanders or you, you, Putin, Russia and so on. Now I don't know, maybe you did what Americans are doing all the time—hehe—and also tried to interfere. But that's clearly not the main cause. The main cause was the way Hillary totally tried to sidetrack Trump to avoid—and that and then all those of course not all—okay, not many of them did actually vote for Trump, but they abstained from voting then in the elections. You had a question there? The gentleman here. Yeah, yeah, you want for a long time. What is the meaning of life for you? Oh! Very short question, great. Everyone should imitate. First, no, I would be a Hegelian here. First, I think life is just a biochemical phenomenon, it doesn't have in itself meaning. You mean human spiritual life. Human spiritual life has—I wouldn't say meaning, but it’s a much more—it’s a beautiful question if I were time to dwell—I can show you. No, I what I would have said is that is that the origin of human life is not that we know something better, more than animals. It's a failure. And the, for example, for me if you want a minimal technical metaphor for human life, it’s boomerang. Because, you know, officially it’s to hit whatever a kangaroo or whatever. But then it’s clear that the whole point is to miss the kangaroo and catch it when it comes back. And I think that for something to have meaning doesn't mean it serves a higher cause. It precisely means even the opposite that something which first in the stupid animal kingdom serves a cause becomes a goal in itself. Let's take a very concrete example: sex. If you just make love for for procreation, reproduction, you are following apes. It’s nothing. True love is when you say, "No, when I make love to you or we make love or whatever is an achievement in itself." It becomes, and that's when it becomes meaningful, even absolute. So for me the human basis of human creativity is not that we are more complex, we do something to achieve something else, something else. It's on the contrary that we take something which originally was just an instrument and make it a goal in itself. And we say, "That's already it." I know this didn't satisfy you, but you caught me unprepared with. Last question. Andrey. Thank you. For from what you have said today I have an impression that things are set up this way that first you have to have to acquire a political power and then you can elaborate on some progressive modernist or whatever you call it project. So it seems a situation of some kind of a dead end, that all leftist projects seem to be doomed because Lenin had this modernist project because he had this Bolshevik party and had power. Elon
like Podemos to happen? For something like the Arab Spring to happen? Of course, we immediately see the limits, but we should ruthlessly, or not so much—I think the true result of Occupy Wall Street was then Bernie Sanders and so on. And not Trump? Sorry. I think that was Trump. It was a reaction. This is the problem with you Russians, you like this paradoxes and so on and so on. But to some sense you are right. You know in what sense you are right? That I really think that Trump is the result of the failure of the Democratic left. Yes, absolutely. He opened up the space for it. That's why I don't like the way Hillary Clinton now is playing this almost Stalinist game: find the culprit. You know it's Bernie Sanders or you, you, Putin, Russia and so on. Now I don't know, maybe you did what Americans are doing all the time—hehe—and also tried to interfere. But that's clearly not the main cause. The main cause was the way Hillary totally tried to sidetrack Trump to avoid—and that and then all those of course not all—okay, not many of them did actually vote for Trump, but they abstained from voting then in the elections. You had a question there? The gentleman here. Yeah, yeah, you want for a long time. What is the meaning of life for you? Oh! Very short question, great. Everyone should imitate. First, no, I would be a Hegelian here. First, I think life is just a biochemical phenomenon, it doesn't have in itself meaning. You mean human spiritual life. Human spiritual life has—I wouldn't say meaning, but it’s a much more—it’s a beautiful question if I were time to dwell—I can show you. No, I what I would have said is that is that the origin of human life is not that we know something better, more than animals. It's a failure. And the, for example, for me if you want a minimal technical metaphor for human life, it’s boomerang. Because, you know, officially it’s to hit whatever a kangaroo or whatever. But then it’s clear that the whole point is to miss the kangaroo and catch it when it comes back. And I think that for something to have meaning doesn't mean it serves a higher cause. It precisely means even the opposite that something which first in the stupid animal kingdom serves a cause becomes a goal in itself. Let's take a very concrete example: sex. If you just make love for for procreation, reproduction, you are following apes. It’s nothing. True love is when you say, "No, when I make love to you or we make love or whatever is an achievement in itself." It becomes, and that's when it becomes meaningful, even absolute. So for me the human basis of human creativity is not that we are more complex, we do something to achieve something else, something else. It's on the contrary that we take something which originally was just an instrument and make it a goal in itself. And we say, "That's already it." I know this didn't satisfy you, but you caught me unprepared with. Last question. Andrey. Thank you. For from what you have said today I have an impression that things are set up this way that first you have to have to acquire a political power and then you can elaborate on some progressive modernist or whatever you call it project. So it seems a situation of some kind of a dead end, that all leftist projects seem to be doomed because Lenin had this modernist project because he had this Bolshevik party and had power. Elon
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Musk has his own, a little bit creepy, modernist project because he also has a
Musk has his own, a little bit creepy, modernist project because he also has a
Slavoj Žižek
great commercial and technological power. So do you think it’s it’s really a dead end for like grounded grassroots activism? Thank you. The art is good that you pronounced the words at the end. No, I have nothing against grassroots—this was not my words—yeah, but my problem—my problem with grassroots activism is that nonetheless I don't think—I think that the—for example, in Greece, the great reproach to Syriza was you become just a ruling party like another, you betrayed your grassroots connections and so on. But for me, the true challenge of the left is not to keep the links with grassroots alive, but to build a better—I use on purpose this horrible word—to build a better alienated autonomous state bureaucracy. For me, the big problem of Stalinism is not is not too much bureaucracy. Stalinism—the problem of Stalinism was that it didn't have a good bureaucracy. That's why it needed all the time an emergency state, one purge after the other, to make things function. My—now this is horrible for most of you and I'm trying to provoke you—but in my ideal place to live, it wouldn't be some grassroots community where every afternoon I would have to go to some meetings how we educate our children, how we do this, that. Fuck it, I want to live a nice alienated life. Some anonymous mechanisms provide school, hospital, water, whatever, and I can read my books
great commercial and technological power. So do you think it’s it’s really a dead end for like grounded grassroots activism? Thank you. The art is good that you pronounced the words at the end. No, I have nothing against grassroots—this was not my words—yeah, but my problem—my problem with grassroots activism is that nonetheless I don't think—I think that the—for example, in Greece, the great reproach to Syriza was you become just a ruling party like another, you betrayed your grassroots connections and so on. But for me, the true challenge of the left is not to keep the links with grassroots alive, but to build a better—I use on purpose this horrible word—to build a better alienated autonomous state bureaucracy. For me, the big problem of Stalinism is not is not too much bureaucracy. Stalinism—the problem of Stalinism was that it didn't have a good bureaucracy. That's why it needed all the time an emergency state, one purge after the other, to make things function. My—now this is horrible for most of you and I'm trying to provoke you—but in my ideal place to live, it wouldn't be some grassroots community where every afternoon I would have to go to some meetings how we educate our children, how we do this, that. Fuck it, I want to live a nice alienated life. Some anonymous mechanisms provide school, hospital, water, whatever, and I can read my books
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and watch my films and write
and watch my films and write
Slavoj Žižek
my books and so on. And that's my totally crazy solution: that the myth to be abandoned is this myth of local or whatever transparency. The and even—even with—now I will provoke you even more—even with reference to refugees and other immigrants, like shock of cultures. I hate this liberal dogma that we should get to know them, understand them. No! We should learn—it's wonderful if you get to know some of them. But you will never understand them because we don't understand ourselves even, my God. I would like to live in a society where, let's say, a big house, apartment block—like those wonderful, they have them in Moscow, you know those imitations
my books and so on. And that's my totally crazy solution: that the myth to be abandoned is this myth of local or whatever transparency. The and even—even with—now I will provoke you even more—even with reference to refugees and other immigrants, like shock of cultures. I hate this liberal dogma that we should get to know them, understand them. No! We should learn—it's wonderful if you get to know some of them. But you will never understand them because we don't understand ourselves even, my God. I would like to live in a society where, let's say, a big house, apartment block—like those wonderful, they have them in Moscow, you know those imitations
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of Stalinist baroque,
of Stalinist baroque,
Slavoj Žižek
you know, all
you know, all
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those Lomonosov University—I
those Lomonosov University—I
Slavoj Žižek
live in one apartment, near me is a is a Jew, then an Arab, then a black guy, and we mostly politely ignore each other. From time to time I meet one guy or the other, maybe we become friends, but why this eternal pressure, "I should understand you, I should understand you"? Give me some breathing space. If we will not do this, we will get caught into this eternal liberal dynamics of "did you do enough to understand me?" and so on and so on. The true anti-racism is not "I should understand you," it’s "I don't understand you and nonetheless I tolerate you, I can be friendly to you" and so on and so on. I know this is not popular what I said now, but you know what? I'm have heart problems, so who cares. I will soon join, not God, now. You sound very utopian. Why do you think this is utopian? My God, ignoring each other, is this utopian for you? In what sense? In what sense is this utopian for you? I try to live like this. In my apartment block where I live—I mean this is
live in one apartment, near me is a is a Jew, then an Arab, then a black guy, and we mostly politely ignore each other. From time to time I meet one guy or the other, maybe we become friends, but why this eternal pressure, "I should understand you, I should understand you"? Give me some breathing space. If we will not do this, we will get caught into this eternal liberal dynamics of "did you do enough to understand me?" and so on and so on. The true anti-racism is not "I should understand you," it’s "I don't understand you and nonetheless I tolerate you, I can be friendly to you" and so on and so on. I know this is not popular what I said now, but you know what? I'm have heart problems, so who cares. I will soon join, not God, now. You sound very utopian. Why do you think this is utopian? My God, ignoring each other, is this utopian for you? In what sense? In what sense is this utopian for you? I try to live like this. In my apartment block where I live—I mean this is
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exactly what you have said about—about—those left. I mean, this sounds exactly like you, the things you said about those left activists that strive for more rights for LGBT+ or for some more healthcare. So it's like—it's like—but sorry, I am not against—I am sorry if we don't have time. If you have the mild utopia like the one... No, oh wait a minute, wait a minute. I didn't say this is all we do, my program is not just let's ignore each other. My problem is precisely that in order to have a true and very much old-fashioned Enlightenment universalism, but what I'm
exactly what you have said about—about—those left. I mean, this sounds exactly like you, the things you said about those left activists that strive for more rights for LGBT+ or for some more healthcare. So it's like—it's like—but sorry, I am not against—I am sorry if we don't have time. If you have the mild utopia like the one... No, oh wait a minute, wait a minute. I didn't say this is all we do, my program is not just let's ignore each other. My problem is precisely that in order to have a true and very much old-fashioned Enlightenment universalism, but what I'm
Slavoj Žižek
saying is that to have a true
saying is that to have a true
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universalism it
universalism it
Slavoj Žižek
should be a limited on political causes and so on, not this type of deep engagement or whatever. I like alienation. I like to have a political—like my this is also it's obscene maybe to talk about this, but that's why if there was—it looked as if there was—a love affair between Lenin and Inessa Armand, yes? That's what I like about that, they kept it out. It was even—it looks tolerated by Nadezhda Krupskaya—but it wasn't none of that—none of that early European avant-garde bullshit, you know like, "sexual will be political, political will be sexual" and so on all together. It was made in a discreet way, maybe not even discreet but people polite, people didn't talk about it and so on. That's what I mean. And of course this is not my political activity. Although you almost seduced me into it would be nice to make a political party for more ignorance, more alienation. Yeah, you know this politeness kind of where you started with it and and we end on this—now know that even if you do a revolution or a war, always try to do it politely, like Lenin. No, but Lenin knew where to be
should be a limited on political causes and so on, not this type of deep engagement or whatever. I like alienation. I like to have a political—like my this is also it's obscene maybe to talk about this, but that's why if there was—it looked as if there was—a love affair between Lenin and Inessa Armand, yes? That's what I like about that, they kept it out. It was even—it looks tolerated by Nadezhda Krupskaya—but it wasn't none of that—none of that early European avant-garde bullshit, you know like, "sexual will be political, political will be sexual" and so on all together. It was made in a discreet way, maybe not even discreet but people polite, people didn't talk about it and so on. That's what I mean. And of course this is not my political activity. Although you almost seduced me into it would be nice to make a political party for more ignorance, more alienation. Yeah, you know this politeness kind of where you started with it and and we end on this—now know that even if you do a revolution or a war, always try to do it politely, like Lenin. No, but Lenin knew where to be
unknown
polite, you know. But nonetheless to come back to
polite, you know. But nonetheless to come back to
Slavoj Žižek
the beginning, so my I confess that you confused me and my ultimate answer to you is Nu, pogodi! Too bad.
the beginning, so my I confess that you confused me and my ultimate answer to you is Nu, pogodi! Too bad.