Changes

Capitalism is not just a historical epoch among others. In a way, the once fashionable and now half-forgotten Francis Fukuyama was right: global capital is "the end of history." A certain excess which was, as it were, kept under check in previous history, perceived as a localizable perversion, as an excess, a deviation, is in capitalism elevated into the very principle of social life, in the speculative movement of money begetting more money, of a system which can survive only by constantly revolutionizing its own conditions-that is to say, in which the thing can survive only as its own excess, constantly exceeding its own "normal" constraints. And, perhaps it is only today, in global capitalism in its "postindustrial", digitalized form, that, to put it in Hegelian terms, really existing capitalism is reaching the level of its notion: perhaps, one should follow again Marx's old, antievolutionist motto (incidentally taken verbatim from Hegel) that the anatomy of man provides the key for the anatomy of the monkey-that is, in order to deploy the inherent, notional structure of a social formation, one must start with its most developed form.

To repeat Lenin is thus to accept that "Lenin is dead"-that his particular solution failed, even failed monstrously, but that there was a utopian spark in it worth saving. To repeat Lenin means that one has to distinguish between what Lenin effectively did and the field of possibilities that he opened up, the tension in Lenin between what he effectively did and another dimension, what was "in Lenin more than Lenin himself." To repeat Lenin is to repeat not what Lenin did but what he failed to do, his missed opportunities.

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