[Marxism] Zizek responds to Laclau in current issue of _Critical Inquiry_

[Sayan Bhattacharyya]

[..]

"When, in the April Theses of 1917, Lenin discerned the *Augenblick*, the
unique chance of a revolution, his proposals were first met with stupor or
contempt by the large majority of his party colleagues. Within the Bolshevik
party, no prominent leader supported his call to revolution, and *Pravda *took
the extraordinary step of dissociating the party, and the editorial board as
a whole, from the April Theses. Far from being an opportunist flattering and
exploiting the prevailing mood of the populace, Lenin's views were highly
idiosyncratic. Bogdanov characterized the April Theses as the delirium of a
madman, and Nadezhda Krupskaya herself concluded that Lenin had gone crazy. No
wonder that, in his writings of 1917, Lenin saves his most acerbic irony for
those who engage in the endless search for some kind of guarantee for the
revolution. This guarantee assumes two main forms: either the reified notion of
social necessity (one should not risk premature revolution; one must wait for
the right moment, when the situation is mature with regard to the laws of
historical development; "it is too early for the Socialist revolution, the
working class is not yet mature") or normative (or "democratic") legitimacy
("the majority of the population is not on our side, so the revolution would
not really be democratic"), as Lenin repeatedly put it, as if before
the revolutionary
agent risks the seizure of state power it should get permission from some
figural big Other (organize a referendum that might ascertain whether or not
the majority supports the revolution). [..]

Full text: <
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/CI/journal/issues/v33n1/330108/330108.html>