On Another Country "You are not a Communist because you understand Marx, you understand Marx because you are a Communist!" - that is to say, Judd und… - Slavoj Žižek

...there are always three elements [of psychoanalysis] at work: the manifest dream-text, the latent dream-content or thought and the unconscious desire articulated in the dream. This desire attaches itself to the dream, it interlaces itself in the interspace between the latent thought and the manifest text; it is therefore not 'more concealed, deeper' in relation to the latent thought, it is decidedly more 'on the surface,' consisting entirely of the signifier's mechanisms, of the treatment to which the latent content is submitted.

The criticism of ideology must therefore invert the linking of causality as perceived by the totalitarian gaze: far from being the positive cause of social antagonism, the Jew is just an embodiment of a certain blockage - of the impossibility which prevents the society from achieving its full identity as a closed, homogenous totality. Far from being the positive cause of social negativity, the Jew is a point at which social negativity as such assumes another formula of the basic procedure of the criticism of ideology, supplementing the one given above: to detect, in a given ideological edifice, the element which represents within it its own impossibility. Society is not prevented from achieving its full identity because of Jews: it is prevented by its own antagonistic nature, by its own immanent blockage, and it projects this internal negativity into the figure of the Jew. In other words, what is excluded from the Symbolic (from the frame of the corporalist socio-symbolic order) returns in the Real as a paranoid construction of the Jew.

Let's face it: today, Lenin and his legacy are perceived as hopelessly dated, belonging to a defunct 'paradigm'. Not only was Lenin understandably blind to many of the problems that are now central to contemporary life (ecology, struggle for emancipated sexuality,etc). but also his brutal political practice is totally out of sync with current democratic sensitivities, his vision of the new society as a centralised industrial system run by the state is simply irrelevant, etc. Instead of desperately attempting to salvage the authentic Leninist core from the Stalinist alluvium, would it not be more advisable to forget Lenin and return to Marx, searching in his work for the roots of what went wrong in the twentieth-century communist movements?