On the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s death: In short, Vladimir Ilyich is a comrade

On the 150th anniversary of Lenin’s birth, they published a volume with contributions by renowned scientists, including the French philosopher Alain Badiou and his German colleague Michael Brie, but also by activists and contemporaries of Lenin, such as Leon Trotsky and Bert Brecht. Now another volume is being published under your editorship, this time on the 100th anniversary of Lenin’s death on January 21st. Do you want to resurrect the founder of the Soviet state?

I don’t think Lenin needs to be resurrected. In many regions of the world, for example in Latin America, it has never been gone and continues to be a reference point in a wide variety of social struggles. On the other hand, it is certainly true that Lenin’s revolutionary work not only no longer plays a role among much of the Western left today, but is actively denied. This is a mistake. One may not agree with everything Vladimir Ilyich has said and done, but not engaging with him, learning from his successes and mistakes, will in no way improve our chances of changing the system. An author in our new Lenin volume put this very well: We neglect Lenin’s voice at our peril.

In your first Lenin volume you describe the impressions you gathered in Kyrgyzstan: You were downright delighted that statues, monuments and memorial plaques there still commemorate Lenin in the first decade of the new millennium. Such veneration is now a thing of the past, in former Soviet republics and Russia itself.

Reverence is saying too much, but in a world in which the majority of people more or less willingly come to terms with the absolutely unacceptable status quo and are content to plant capitalism with, at best, not particularly nice-smelling flowers, Lenin does indeed remain Monument that calls on us to try again as quickly as possible, not only to interpret the world in Marx’s sense, but also to finally change it once and for all. Lenin believed in this possibility and gave his life for it. We should do it too.

Are you a Leninist?

I agree with Brecht’s “Remember us with leniency.” The ignorance that parts of the left today practice so self-righteously and sometimes downright celebrate about the first successful socialist revolution, its global significance and the people who made it, including Lenin, goes completely against the grain for me. I originally come from the theater of the oppressed, where we talk about internalized mechanisms of oppression, the so-called police officers in the head. Undoubtedly, for many leftists in German-speaking countries, and not only there, the “wall in the head” still exists. That means, at best, many people simply don’t care about the October Revolution, Lenin, the GDR and the K-word. At worst, anti-Lenin cult and Cold War propaganda are parroted without ever having read a single word by Lenin; without ever having dealt with him and the Russian Revolution, its achievements and challenges, from a left-wing perspective, i.e. from a solidarity perspective. Lenin himself would have described this action as “left-wing childishness”. For him, a constant confrontation with everything that came before him was an indispensable necessity for his concrete analysis of the concrete situation and the resulting actions. In short, Lenin is a comrade.

You have also published on Rosa Luxemburg – with “letters” from those born after her to her. Lenin and Rosa valued each other and yet were also at odds. Can one be equally enthusiastic about both without “betraying” one or the other?

Absolutely. Rosa Luxemburg is also a comrade who sits on the Central Committee of our champions, from whom we can only learn what to do or sometimes what not to do. In my opinion, it is precisely the actually existing contradictions in the thoughts and actions of our revolutionary ancestors that should generate the greatest enthusiasm in us towards a critical and solidarity-based re-appropriation in the context of current states of emergency. To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, one could say that no one who fought for a socialist world should be lost to those born after them.

Your new Lenin volume brings together 100 authors – impressive. Who is underneath? How is this different from the first? What are the priority issues? And why is there a word in brackets in the title: Don’t?

Both books are anniversary volumes, one on the 150th anniversary of Lenin’s birth and the soon-to-be-published one on this year’s 100th anniversary of his death. They are conceptually similar in that they are both consciously internationalist in nature, contain different formats and writing styles – scientific, journalistic, artistic, personal-political – and have an activist claim that is reflected in the multitude of different topics. In both volumes, comrades from all continents write based on their concrete experiences of political struggle in their respective contexts. And it’s not just a matter of dealing with Lenin purely academically or historically, but rather of working out which of his thoughts and actions can be of use to us today. The title of the new volume should also be understood in this sense, inspired by Lenin’s text from 1897: “What heritage do we renounce?” The message of the more than 100 authors from over 50 countries – from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe – is Clearly, we are not prepared to renounce Lenin’s legacy. He left us the legacy of socialist revolution, and it is up to us to put it into practice again in the 21st century, despite everything.

At the beginning of the 90s, a well-known, now deceased CDU politician, Norbert Blüm, announced: “Marx is dead, long live Jesus!” Lenin is even deader than Marx in Germany. And you still hope to find a publisher who will bring your new book into translation onto the German book market? Are you an incorrigible optimist?

More of a tragic, stubborn optimist. It’s not that easy for me to be hopeful about the future, given all the shit around us. On the contrary. But the fight must and will continue, and if you look around the world, there is not only exploitation, war, climate catastrophe and right-wing populism, but also countless people who struggle to get out of bed every day, no matter how humble, and together stand up to the system with others.

Resignation is completely understandable individually, but collectively it is not an option. By the way, we should remember Lenin, who, shortly before the February revolution in exile in Switzerland, also had his doubts as to whether he would live to see the revolution, but continued to dig around, and then all of a sudden things went off. Perhaps doubt and hope must always be thought together so that constant mobilization in political action and thus revolution become and remain possible, at least during the reign of the “dark times” so poignantly described by Brecht.

Lenin himself once said: “It is not difficult to be a revolutionary when the revolution has already broken out and flared up… What is much more difficult – and much more valuable – is to understand how to be a revolutionary when the conditions for a direct, open, truly mass-supported, truly revolutionary struggle.” He is right. And in this sense, Lenin was, is and remains a source of encouragement and hope for a future society whose flag will read: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs!”