The indelible lightness of Bannon’s Leninism (and Other Tales of Concepts That Aren’t Sticky Anymore)
“How could you be upset?! He’s a Leninist! Like you Mr. Professor,” Ford said with a sly smile. “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said as he put down his beer, raising an imaginary monocle to his eye and puffing out his chest. With a stuffy British accent, feigning deference with a bow, he finishes: “Doctor Professor.”
We of course both laughed.
“That’s sir doctor professor, esquire to you my good man,” I replied, nose turned up in the air with half a glass of PBR in my hand.
“We’s rich fuckers,” he said. We clinked glasses as we laughed.
Our conversation was a metaphor for the strange and messy political qua conceptual landscape unfolding in front of us in the United States (although friends discuss similar problems elsewhere). As I’ve discussed before, Ford is a Black republican white nationalist. And, while I’m murky at best about my political beliefs at rallies and the like— I’ve claimed agnosticism for all of my ethnographic friends, although my commitments to feminist anti-racism are more than clear — the white nationalists that know me (beyond surface interactions) just assume that I’m a Marxist. That, for them, is synonymous with leftist and communist and socialist and democrat. Those are all the same to them. And Leftist seems to strangely resonate with a new word that has entered their lexicon: Leninist. But somehow now they’re leftist? Or am I a conservative?
Lenin’s entrance onto the political stage is of course the product of Steve Bannon’s strange political beliefs. Repeatedly claiming affinity to Lenin, he is committed to what he calls an assault on “the administrative state.” Bannon supposedly told one reporter that “Lenin wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
But that’s not what Lenin argued, and Lenin’s goal for razing the state was not to return to a type of “economic nationalism” that used capital and consumerism to define the contours of citizenship and political power. Lenin in fact addressed Bannon in the beginning of his essays on The State and Revolution:
What is now happening to Marx’s doctrine has, in the course of history, often happened to the doctrines of other revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes struggling for emancipation. […] After their death, attempts are made to turn them into harmless icons, canonize them, and susrround their names with a certain halo for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the objective of duping them, while at the same time emasculating and vulgarizing the real essence of their revolutionary edge. At the present time, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labour movement are co-operating in this work of adulterating Marxism. They omit, obliterate, and distort the revolutionary side of its teaching… they push to the foreground and extol what is, or seems, acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social -chauvinists are now “Marxists” — joking aside! And more and more do German bourgeois professors, erstwhile specialists in the demolition of Marx, spak now to the “national-German” Marx, who, they aver, has educated the labour unions which are so splendidly organized for conducting the present predatory war!
Lenin wrote, watching the seeds of American economic nationalism grow responsible for driving the United States into the Great Depression, which required the US to make grabs for the economic aid it had given post-World War I Germany, which then paved the way for other forms of fascist faux-Socialism in the guise of the National Socialists. What type of Leninist is Steve Bannon? Who knows — Lenin the theorist would certainly be skeptical of ontologizing the political. But Bannon is a thoroughly historical actor, not unlike those that Lenin discusses with regards to un-mooring and abusing Marx.
But Lenin was also describing something more prescient and beyond Bannon…
Standing in a run-down bar on the outskirts of Washington DC after a pro-Trump Rally, Ford continued with the thread. “You wanted a revolution comrade, now you have one. But it’s not the one you wanted snowflake. I guess that means the Marxists were right,” he said with a haughty laugh. People around us were clearly staring, whether it was Ford’s Confederate Flag shirt with Confederate Flag denim jacket against his dark black skin that caused the attention, or our conversation about American politics will go unknown. But people were clearly uncomfortable in a myriad of ways. And it was something that Ford finds entertaining. “Yeah, I’m black,” he says to white woman in her 20’s whose stare is lingering for just too long. She stood there, it seemed for a few seconds, with her NOT MY PRESIDENT shirt on from the previous weeks’ protests in DC. “Black lives matter, right? Trying to figure out if all of ’em matter?” He asks her. She simply walks away.
There’s something strange and metaphysical afoot at the moment, in which the critiques of the left and the right — or at very least the forms of critique and the parts of critique — are traversing the categories that we had socially agreed were not porous. Are political genres truly sticky as Lila Ellen Gray argues, referencing Sarah Ahmed’s work? For these two authors, concepts are attached to “an accretion of memory and affect” where “unofficial histories, rituals, sounds, styles, affects, memories, and biographies attach to [them] circulate, morph.” Or, following Mary Douglas’ structural anthropology, are these concepts actually dangerous because of the very ways they move between walls between categories like specters without bodies, politics without commitments?
Standing in the Trump crowd earlier that day, I watched as cops quickly surrounded Antifa protesters who had provoked a man by pointing at him and chanting “Snowflake” — an epithet commonly used by the Right to describe young Leftists as feminized, weak, and sheltered. Once the guy had calmed down, the cops moved out of the crowd, they provoked him again: “Triggered! Triggered! Triggered!” Again, the police moved in as he threatened to attack them. Of all the chants, this was the only way in which activists provoked physical confrontations. And it was a tactic they returned to frequently throughout the rally, chanting “Safe Spaces for Trump! Safe Spaces for Trump!” to piss off Trump advocates who claimed to be oppressed. It seems the concepts might not be sticky.
But…
Perhaps what these vignettes tell us is why we are all so exhausted. Cognitive dissonance — as concepts move outside and among ideological spaces where they do not belong, as Leftist activists call Trump Supporters sheltered feminized snowflakes, as Right-leaning conservative activists ask “leftists” if ALL Black Lives Matter, as President Trump attempts to make America a “safe space” for Christianity… We’re exhausted by trying to shore up conceptual boundaries, to constantly tell ourselves about a stickiness that has all but disappeared, requiring all of our energy to pretend things are still sticky.
Perhaps what we’re talking about, in our strange and exhausting and emotional and dizzying political moment, is a type of structural gaslighting — a gendered form of symbolic violence that leaves us all at odds with the material conditions that are slowly killing us together… even as they appear to be uniting some folks.
