Rogueish

I don’t think communism failed and I think that there are important ways that the Soviet experiment succeeded. In fact, I actually don’t think that radical leftists really think that the Soviet Union failed. I think that this language of failure, picked up from capitalist mainstream culture, covers over a more fundamental anxiety, namely, that communism succeeded. In other words, the left isn’t afraid of failure; it’s afraid of success.

Leftists really fear the bloody violence part of the Russian revolution and the Stalin period. At the Taking Control conference (and in his contribution to The Idea of Communism volume), Peter Hallward is quite great on this, emphasizing the legacy of anti-Jacobinism and the historical legacy of a preference for condemning some kinds of violence but not others. What is condemned? The violence of the people, the violence of the people fighting against those who would oppress them. State violence, the force of counter-revolution, is taken to be at some point justified and permissible. Revolutionary violence is condemned, over-condemned, infused with surplus condemnation.