Michèle said those words to me at a bar last night. She is right, the Soviet Union was not my toy to play with, indeed, it was gone long before I even came into this world. Michèle would tell me that it belonged to the people who lived there, I think it belongs to everyone.
I have been retreating into a type of socialist mysticism that rejects the material analysis of Marx for something less solid. Marx’s analysis, I’m told, has melted into air; there are certain critical parts from capital that no longer hold up and while Marx is still correct, he was not a prophet, just a very smart – but all too real – human.
I am not the first socialist to retreat into mysticism and romanticism, Marx even criticized the utopian socialists in the Manifesto. There’s a great quote from Gittlitz modernizing this very point.
… “the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Such situations, he continued, lead revolutionaries to attempt to break from the past and create radically new ways of thinking, organizing, and fighting. But they cannot escape the present… Recognizing the contradiction, the revolutionaries identity redemptive characters in history, and “anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to the their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed languages.” What might be considered cringeworthy LARPing today, Marx argued, could actually be helpful. Martin Luther LARPed as the Apostle Paul to challenge the Catholic Church, and the French Revolutionaries LARPed as the Roman Republic to deliver the bourgeois class from aristocratic domination:… The challenge, then, is neither to recreate the revolutionary movements of the past, nor to totally revise their history, but to salvage the functional truth of their mission for the struggle ahead. (198-9)
I told Michèle about my image of the 48ers. The radical possibility that broke out across Europe in 1848 is only matched by the total tragedy that followed. I am aware of the bourgeois nature of the revolutions; I do not care. The sincerity with which they recreated 1789, 91, 3, and 5 gives me an image of the future. What will happen when – should I say if? – our revolutionary moment finally arrives? Will we self-consciously recreate the Russian Revolution, searching for our own Stalins and Trotskys with which we can recapitulate the great revolutionary drama? There is a sincerity in 1848 that cannot be matched, can my generation, poisoned by years of irony, do the same?
The French Revolution did not belong to the 48ers, it had ended by the time of their births, but they consciously sought to revive it. The Soviet Union does not belong to me. In Darkness at Noon, Rubashov recapitulates his life as a revolutionary and all the pain he has had to inflict on others for the revolution, in the end, he decides that, given the choice, he would do it all again. When I gave my copy of the book to Michèle I wrote a small note on the inside of the cover:
Comrade Michèle,
This is not an anticommunist text, and I do not want you to read it as such. This is a defense of the Old Bolsheviks. This is a story without a villain.
– Comrade Pancake
Even knowing all the pain, even knowing how the story will end, I want to replay that revolutionary drama. I want the Soviet Union to be mine.
Signed,
Andrew (Pfannkuche)
Normal Thoughts 