Jameson Fredric
Abstract: In the article, the attempt is made to substantiate Lenin’s status as a political thinker. In doing so, the author seeks for Lenin’s philosophical concept, which could be regarded as essential to his political thought. Consecutively analyzing his ideas of party, socialism, and communism, as well as their place in his theory, the author concludes that the meaning of the political in Lenin’s theory as Marxist thinker is completely different from its meaning in traditional political philosophy. However, it does not mean that Lenin is not a political thinker. It is argued that Lenin’s political theory is characterized by the combination of the political and the economic, which becomes indistinguishable. The elimination of the opposition of the political and the economic in Lenin’s theory is fully embodied in his concept of revolution, which is therefore considered as the very core of Lenin’s political thought. Here, revolution is described as a unity of the event and the process where individual events and crises become the components of an immense historical dialectics, which is invisible and absent for the empirical perception in each of its moments, but whose overall movement alone gives them meaning. Underlining that revolution is the lengthy and contradictory process of systemic transformation that can ends at any moment, the author concludes that the true significance of Lenin is connected with his legacy to keep the revolution alive as a possibility before it takes place; to keep it alive as a process when it is threatened by defeat, routinization, compromise or forgetfulness. In this sense, according to the author, the idea that “Lenin is still alive” is identical to the appeal to keep alive the very idea of revolution, which today becomes particularly important.
Keywords: Lenin, Marxism, political, economic, party, revolution, Lacan.