My ❤️ will go on: Indispensable though Lenin’s personal intervention was, the story of the October Revolution should not be turned into the myth of a lone genius.

Lenin succeeded because his appeal, while bypassing the party nomenklatura, was understood at the level of revolutionary micropolitics: local committees were set up throughout Russia’s big cities, determined to ignore the authority of the ‘legitimate’ government and to take things into their own hands.

In the spring of 1917, Lenin was fully aware of the paradox of the situation: now that the February Revolution had toppled the tsarist regime, Russia was the most democratic country in Europe, with an unprecedented degree of mass mobilisation, and freedom of organisation and of the press – and yet this freedom made everything ambiguous. If there is a common thread running through everything Lenin wrote between the February and October Revolutions, it is his insistence on the gap that separates the political struggle from its definable goals: immediate peace, the redistribution of land and, of course, the giving over of ‘all power to the soviets’, that is, the dismantling of existing state apparatuses and their replacement with new commune-like forms of social management. This is the gap between revolution in the sense of the imaginary explosion of freedom at the sublime moment of universal solidarity when ‘everything seems possible,’ and the hard work of social reconstruction which must be performed if this explosion is to leave any traces in the social edifice.

Slavoj Zizek, Revolution must strike twice

politics was

Slavoj Zizek, Revolution must strike twice

Slavoj Zizek, Revolution must strike twice

~~ZIZEK BOOKS~~