24.10.1996

Mummified ideology

Phil Rudge reviews Red square, black square - Organon for revolutionary imagination by Vladislav Todorov (1995, pp200)

Vladislav Todorov is a member of the department of Slavic languages in the University of Pennsylvania. He could be characterised an academic, dada anarchist. This book is a dystopian analysis of the Soviet Union and communism - crucially, the distinction is never made clear. It follows in the (disappearing) footsteps of Jean Baudrillard and his virtual-Leninist theories of the economy of simulacra in western society. Unlike Baudrillard though, its axis does not pivot on an American-European divide, but is intent on introducing the absent other - the ‘ruins’ of communism. This makes the book fascinating.

The power of ideology is central to the book. Todorov analyses the critiques of (false) consciousness of Marx (capital), Freud (libido) and Nietzsche (will to power), and concludes that it was Lenin who was able to correct Marx,

“because he, like Nietzsche, posed the issue through the perspective of power. Lenin considered ideology as a strategic claim to power ... Ideology unites impulse and consciousness. Thus it triggers revolution.”

He quotes Lenin’s What is to be done:

“Since there can be no talk of an independent ideology being developed by the masses of the workers in the process of their movement the only choice is: either bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course, for humanity has not created a ‘third’ ideology.”

Todorov goes on to examine the underground, conspiratorial space a revolutionary ideology has to inhabit. This whole alternative space allows the Party to raise the correct consciousness that can undermine and finally demolish the bourgeois system. The problem in the Soviet Union was what happened when this conspiratorial alternative space became reality and revolutionary ideology had to construct a new world and a power of justice in it.

“Stalin’s problem was to constantly improve ideology and thus keep holding power in his hands as the next author of the teaching. Stalin had the chronic urge to repeat constantly the takeover of the power he already held ... Stalin was never in power. He was returning to power all the time and constantly trying to disperse his paranoid visions of the competing bridegrooms ... Political paranoia is a historical degeneration of ideology. The repressed one is a historically degenerate revolutionary.”

The ultimate ideological image for Todorov of this degeneration is Lenin’s mummified body exposed in a secret underground mausoleum. Lenin’s body remains intact, embalmed and safeguarded against decomposition. The ideology it testifies too can not be divorced from its substance. He quotes Stalin’s opening words at Lenin’s mourning conference: “We, the communists, are people of a special make. We are made of a special material.”

Through examining the revolutionary merger of science and art and the political and aesthetic, Todorov reveals the extent of the Soviet Union’s inability to engage with radical art or revolutionary imagination. Futurism, dadaism, constructivism, Brecht and the tragedy of Proletcult are examined to show how the party was unable to tolerate artistic independence or any form of modernist perspective.

“In defining the borders between Party and anti-Party writing the criterion must be the Party programme ... its statute” (Lenin Party organisation and Party literature Moscow 1980, p19). Todorov returns to this point again and again. He argues that the void created by the Party’s advocacy of socialist realism sent profound, committed art of the 20th century into a tail-spin. Revolutionary art was banished from ‘communism’ and capitalism alike, locking every attempt (including this book) within an exiled ideology. Until and unless revolutionary politics, science and aesthetics can engage, then revolutionary ideology will remain mummified.

Phil Rudge