Spontaneous Responses

Dana Cloud seems to be making an important point when she talks about the schism between Luxemburg and Lenin in their respective conceptions of 'freedom' as it played out amongst the Bolsheviks and in the German Socialist party. I find myself aligned to Lenin quite a bit; and I think we need to question this unproblematic term, 'freedom' which we seem to be in a rush to define, defend, illustrate and protect.

Too often is Marxist theory condemned and castigated for the excesses of Stalinism. That argument, as Deepa Kumar so eloquently puts it, is inadequate, shoddy and fundamentally reflects a refusal or an inability to engage with Marx & Engels. It's like saying that Buddhism as a philosophy is opposed to peace because Sri Lanka and Burma are in the throws of civilian struggle.

While Lenin and the democratic centralists believed that the party had a central role in mobilizing a class consciousness -something that Lukacs, a committed Leninist took to it's philosophical culmination when he spoke about the party as the vanguard-Luxemburg believed that class identity preempted the political moment. In essence, Lenin (and Lukacs) firmly believed in the fact that the proletariat was a dormant volcano which had to be catalyzed, Luxemburg believed that the continued oppression of the proletariat was enough to (eventually) lead to a revolution.

While these are two divergent views on historical materialism, I believe it is the Bolshevik perspective that has led so many of us to parrot on about our 'freedoms' because of the possibilities of state control that it engenders. Lenin believed that the proletariat-the ordinary worker was not always aware of the situation that she was in, wasn't aware of the most appropriate way to get rid of her fetters. My reading of Zizek is that his cautious defense of the Leninist dichotomy of 'formal' and 'actual' freedom is justified, and for no audience more than the group that contributes to this blog. What are our freedoms? The freedom to say 'No...'What can we say 'No' to, when we come to think of it? Is it even possible to avoid being interpellated?

For Luxemburg, this idea of a spontaneous revolution held promise, but from reading Lukacs we see that the vanguardists believe in moulding the population towards their collective emancipation (which in it's worst avatar becomes the Stalinist representative politics). Given the neoliberal bourgeois environment that we live in and create, I cannot but agree with Zizek in a desperate need to revive Lenin's conception of kinds of freedoms.

Let's look at ourselves as academic subjects as well. I've been toying with the idea of having a panel on Critical Pedagogies for NCA, and this might be a good topic to handle. What bourgeois freedoms are we granting to our students? What is this bullshit about Copyright Laws that we so mindlessly begin our COM 114 classes with? What sort of psychological subjects are we talking to? I've talked to colleagues who are proud of the fact that their students had the 'freedom' to give a speech on the legalization of marijuana (because they had the freedom to do so). Do we need to butt in here and talk about disenfranchisement and trafficking here? Does anybody else seethe as much as I do when they talk about going on 'mission trips' during their Impromptu speeches? Let's toy with secularizing these God-words (pun intended) like 'freedom'. And then let the fun begin.