[Marxism] Zizek on Trotsky

[Louis Proyect]

> Hi,
> I'm interested in the opinions people might have about Slavoj Zizek's
> analysis in his introduction to Verso's newly (2007) released edition of
> Trotsky's "Terrorism and Communism", specifically his analysis of the
> relation between Trotsky and Stalinism, a topic that unfortunately most of
> the time is overtaken by passions that make any type of serious analysis
> impossible.
> 
> Ian J. Seda
> 

This might have some bearing:

http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/modernism/Zizek.htm
Zizek, Bukharin and Stalin

Part of every student's Cold War indoctrination at my high school in 
upstate New York in the 1950s was Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon." 
We were told that the novel, in which an "old Bolshevik" confesses to 
crimes he did not commit for the sake of the revolution, was based on 
the trial of Bukharin. What a terrible system Communism was. People got 
up on the witness stand and confessed to all sorts of false and 
ludicrous charges because they thought their sacrifice was necessary for 
the greater good.

The last place I expected to read such nonsense was in the pages of the 
New Left Review. In the latest issue #238, an article by Slavoj Zizek 
titled "Suicide of the Party," recycles this cold war mythology but 
under a heavy coating of postmodernist babble. Sort of like seeing 
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. with a nose-ring.

The occasion of Zizek's musings is the publication of J. Arch Getty's 
and Oleg Naumov's "The Road to Terror," a book that not only contains 
new archival material related to the trial of Bukharin, but embellishes 
them with "references to Foucault, Bourdieu, and modern linguistics in 
order to explain the functioning of the ritual of self-accusation in the 
show trials." When I read this, I slapped my forehead. Of course, what 
kind of fool had I been reading Trotsky or Stephen Cohen to understand 
the Moscow Trials? I should have been reading Bakhtin all along.

Ordinarily, Zizek's beat is the detritus of popular culture, so it sort 
of puzzled me what new insights he could possibly have, even with the 
treasure chest of archival material at his disposal. He did make one 
minor concession to past avocations, however. He likened the Khmer Rouge 
to the slogan promoting the unwatchable neo-noir, John Dahl's "The Last 
Seduction": 'Most people have a dark side...she had nothing else.' I 
will leave Sam Pawlett to deal with that.

For Zizek, the Moscow Trials are a ritual that represent the end process 
of successive drives to purge the party, which up until this point 
involved wholesale willingness to suspend ordinary standards of reason 
and morality. The proper analogy for this would be the kind of blood 
sacrifices demanded in the barbaric pre-Christian era. To drive this 
point home, Stalin is called Abraham and Bukharin Isaac. To remind all 
of you out there who were deprived of the benefits of a proper religious 
education, Yahweh commanded Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac on 
the top of a mountain. When Abraham asked why, Yahweh replied because "I 
am God." When I heard this story the first time, I promised myself to 
check out atheism.

According to Zizek, "what caused Bukharin such trauma is not the ritual 
of his public humiliation and punishment, but the possibility that 
Stalin might really believe the charges against him."

Referring to the trial transcript, Zizek is struck by the following 
testimony of Bukharin:

"There is something great and bold about the political idea of a general 
purge. I know all too well that great plans, great ideas, and great 
interests take precedence over everything, and I know that it would be 
petty for me to place the question of my own person on a par with the 
universal-historical resting, first and foremost, on your shoulders. But 
it is here that I feel my deepest agony and find myself facing my chief, 
agonizing paradox.

"[...] If I were absolutely sure that your thoughts ran precisely along 
this path, then I would feel so much more at peace with myself. Well, so 
what! If it must be, then so be it! But believe me, my heart boils over 
when I think that you might believe that I am guilty of these crimes and 
that in your heart of hearts you yourself think that I am really guilty 
of all these horrors. In that case, what would it mean?"

So obviously we are dealing with some kind of ritual here. Zizek 
explains the mysteries of the cult to the horrified reader of NLR like a 
seasoned ethnologist: "Within the standard logic of guilt and 
responsibility, Stalin could have been pardoned if he were really to 
believe in Bukharin’s guilt, while his accusation of Bukharin whilst 
being aware of his innocence would have been an unpardonable ethical 
sin." In other words, if Stalin made his accusations while being fully 
aware that the charges were false, he would be "behaving like a proper 
Bolshevik, placing the needs of the Party higher than the needs of the 
individual, which is, for Bukharin, totally unacceptable."

I will answer this unconscionable slander against Bukharin after placing 
his struggle with Stalin in proper context. Please excuse me, dear 
reader, for resorting to the aid of the oppressive and phallic 
metanarrative called History.

Bukharin was deeply opposed to Stalin's forced collectivization, which 
began in the late 1920s. He thought that a more measured pace toward 
agricultural modernization would be better. At first, what remained of 
the Bolshevik Party gave Stalin the benefit of the doubt, since he 
seemed to be carrying out a socialist agenda, no matter how crude. Even 
Trotsky gave critical support to Stalin, whom he regarded (wrongfully) 
as a lesser evil to Bukharin.

Stalin's policies were a complete disaster. In order to break the back 
of peasant resistance, he used the political weapon of an artificially 
created famine. The war against the peasantry eventually had its impact 
on the cities, where per capita consumption of meat, lard and poultry 
was only a third of what it had been in 1928. (Stephen Cohen, "Bukharin 
and the Bolshevik Revolution")

There was a backlash against Stalin and Bukharin became its most 
articulate spokesman. Throwing off the political isolation imposed by 
Stalin, Bukharin became editor of Izvetsia and used it to promote a 
"humanist socialism." This vision had nothing in common with Zizek's 
[and Koestler's] portrait of a fanatic willingly assenting to his own 
sacrifice. Bukharin's "humanist socialism" included realism and 
moderation in the five-year plans, a stress on the importance of science 
and technology, resistance to fascism in Europe, and, most importantly, 
the need for socialist legality. He was responsible for drafting the 
first Soviet Constitution, which included provisions for secret ballot, 
universal suffrage and the possibility of multi-candidate elections. In 
obvious contradistinction to Stalin's repression, it outlined explicit 
civil rights for Soviet citizens. This Constitution is the best case for 
Bukharin's true beliefs, rather than the grotesque portrait drawn by 
Zizek and Koestler.

So why did Bukharin confess to crimes he did not commit? For an 
explanation of this, we have to turn to historians like Stephen Cohen, 
rather than psychoanalysts like Lacan, whom Zizek cites approvingly in 
the final sentence of his NLR article.

Why Bukharin confessed is no mystery. It has nothing to do with 
fanatical beliefs in the Revolution. Rather it is explicable in mundane 
terms of physical torture, continual interrogation for weeks on end and 
summary executions. For surviving Bolsheviks, the account provided in 
"Darkness at Noon" "would have been the subject of a gay mockery," 
according to Cohen.

More to the point, Bukharin held out against these threats inside prison 
"with remarkable vigor" for 3 months. On around June 2, 1937 he finally 
relented, "only after the investigators threatened to kill his wife and 
newborn son." (Roy Medvedev, "Let History Judge)

Once Bukharin had made the decision to confess, he decided to make a 
mockery of the proceedings by using all sorts of bizarre rhetorical 
devices. He would confess that he was "politically responsible" for 
everything, so as to save his wife and child, but at the same time 
flatly deny any complicity in an actual crime. As Vishinsky and Stalin 
grow increasingly impatient with this tactic, they begin to harangue 
Bukharin. The gullible Zizek cites their remonstrations, but does not 
have a clue as to their significance:

Bukharin: I won't shoot myself because then people will say that I 
killed myself so as to harm the party. But if I die, as it were, from an 
illness, then what will you lose by it? [Laughter]

Voices: Blackmailer!

Vorishilov: You scoundrel! Keep your trap shut! How vile! How dare you 
speak like that!

Bukharin: But you must understand--it's very hard for me to go on living.

Perhaps the best way to understand this exchange is in terms of the 
scene in Costa-Gavras's wonderful 1970 film "The Confession", based on 
the Slansky show trials in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s. During the 
testimony of one old Communist, who speaks while standing as is 
customary, he begins to recite a long, obviously rehearsed confession to 
a number of trumped-up charges. All of a sudden, the courtroom begins to 
erupt in laughter. During his confession, the old Communist has 
unbuckled his pants and they have dropped to his ankles. This was his 
way of saying that the trial was a farce. Bukharin was doing something 
similar when he made ironic quips like, " But if I die, as it were, from 
an illness, then what will you lose by it?"

In order to understand this, you have to read history, not the Old 
Testament--or worse--Lacan.