Slavoj Žižek first really grabbed my attention with his cameo in a BBC programme Terror! Robespierre and the French Revolution. You had the usual procession of hand wringing liberal imperialists like Simon Schama doing a compare and contrast between the French use of revolutionary violence and the contemporary American moderation in that department. Then Žižek burst onto the screen in a manner reminiscent of Dr Marvin Munroe saying that Robespierre had been right to try to get rid of the old ruling class. His robust and unapologetic approach was refreshing.
If anyone was better suited to write a book called In Defence of Lost Causes Žižek is your man. It ranges from family and ideology, Mao’s terror and Alain Badiou. Half way through comes a section with the intriguing title “Stalinism Revisited, or, How Stalin Saved the Humanity of Man”. Now we’ve all played that light hearted bantering game where you riff about Girls Aloud being more important than Mozart or Kraftwerk, what Margaret Thatcher got right or the merits of infanticide – absurd propositions that get a few laughs. It’s not always clear how seriously we are expected to take Žižek’s ideas.
“A consistent conservative case can be made that, far from being the greatest catastrophe that could have befallen Russia, Stalinism effectively saved what we understand as the humanity of man.” Eh? We know that we are on shifting sands with this writer. His opening dedication is to Badiou who interrupted one of Žižek’s lectures to take a call on his mobile. Most would say “you ignorant prick!”. Žižek, in some way that is not obvious sees this as proof of great friendship. So when he elides a passage by Trotsky which points out that the human body is a product of evolutionary luck and not without its problems which a higher civilisation might be able to amelioriate with one by Alexei Gastev who had a bonkers version of Taylorism which would replace people with proletarian units to take the place of the individual personality you can’t, at first, be sure that he means it. If anything Trotsky was a bit of a sentimentalist with a penchant for French novels, a deep affection for his family and a love of life that suffuses his testament. Neither he, nor anyone familiar with his work can seriously see him as the herald of the human android age.
Unless you are Slavoj Žižek. For Žižek both Gastev and Trotsky were expressing the revolutionary movement in art, psychology and science and in his view it was a jolly good thing that the Stalinist reaction against the revolution won out in art and morality. In art because it meant that more people could enjoy socialist realism and the Russian classics and in morality because when you are the defendant in a show trial you are an “autonomous ethical subject“. That’s probably what Zinoviev was thinking too.
Jumping to the end of the section he briefly contrasts the Stalinist liquidation of the kulaks with the Holocaust. He uses a very challenging formula to deal with the distinction: “the thin difference between the Stalinist gulag and the Nazi annihilation camp was also, at that historical moment, the difference between civilization and barbarism.” The idea that this expresses is true. There was a difference between Stalinism and Fascism and Germany was defeated by the Soviet Union. But Žižek bends too far in his defence of that lost cause, not just in lumping together all the strands in the intellectual ferment of the 1920s but in the subtlety of his apologia for the impact of Stalinism. You can’t help feeling that he means it.
Dave has more on Žižek here.
Liam redux 
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