In 1914, an entire world disappeared, taking with it not only the bourgeois faith in progress, but the socialist movement that accompanied it. Lenin (the Lenin of What Is to Be Done?) felt the ground fall away from beneath his feet - there was, in his desperate reaction, no sense of satisfaction, no desire to say “I told you so.” At the same time, the catastrophe made possible the key Leninist Event: the overcoming of the evolutionary historicism of the Second International. The kernel of the Leninist ‘utopia’ - the radical imperative to smash the bourgeois state and invent a new communal social form without a standing army, police force or bureaucracy, in which all could take part in the administration of social matters - arises directly from the ashes of . It wasn’t a theoretical project for some distant future: in October , Lenin claimed that “we can at once set in motion a state apparatus

Seize the day Lenins legacy - The Guardian - SLAVOJ ZIZEK http://ift.tt/2bKy1Tc