The Philosophy of Claude Lefort: Interpreting the Political

10. Totalitarianism as “ Measures Taken”

In this section, I will first consider Lefort’s early writings on the nature of totalitarianism and then study his later work on totalitarianism as found in his 1999 book La Complication. In this book he elaborates his conception of totalitarianism in terms of its difference from the positions of Martin Malia in The Soviet Tragedy, of François Furet in The Passing of an Illusion , and of Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism.1 I begin with his article “Novelty and the Appeal of Repetition,” which was published as a postscript to a re-edition in 1971 of a collection of his articles entitled Elements d’une Critique de la Bureaucratie.2 This article is the occasion for a self-reflection on his own intellectual and political itinerary; in it his self-reflection is mainly political, whereas in another essay , to which I will repair presently, it takes a more philosophical turn. These early essays were written at a time when Lefort considered himself a Marxist. He broke with the Trotskyists in 1948 in order to establish, with Cornelius Castoriadis and others, the group Socialisme ou Barbarie; at issue was the nature of Soviet society. Rejecting the Trotskyist conception of the Soviet Union as a workers’ state with a bureaucratic deformation, the group analyzed the Soviet Union as a new form of society characterized by the dominance of a bureaucratic stratum. Lefort never subscribed to the Leninist illusion that the problems of bureaucracy were primarily the “remnants of the Russian Czarist past.” Rather he viewed bureaucracy as a self-expansive system rooted in the position of a new social stratum whose power derived from its position within a political configuration; he contrasted this with the bourgeoisie, who form a social class on the basis of the private ownership of the means of production. A bourgeois is, first, one who extracts surplus value because of his or her relationship to the means of production, and second, a member of the bourgeois class. The bureaucrat, on the other hand, is one who extracts surplus value solely in Totalitarianism as “Measures Taken” 10 195 virtue of his or her being a member of the bureaucratic stratum. One can see that the essays written in Éléments d’une Critique de la Bureaucratie were written under the influence of Marxism, but a Marxism of a heterodox order, in the sense that the extraction of surplus value is based on a political relationship and not primarily on a relationship to the means of production . In his essay “The Contradiction of Trotsky,” Lefort detects in Trotsky ’s early positions a “fetishism of the Party.” Trotsky wrote, “None of us desires or is able to dispute the will of the Party. Clearly, the Party is always right. . . . We can only be right with and by the Party, for history has provided no other way of being in the right” (PFM, 40). In his later writings, Trotsky extracts himself from this fetishism. In his 1940 book Stalin, in clear contradiction to the above position Trotsky writes, “A political party is neither a ‘homogenous entity,’ nor an omnipotent historical factor, but ‘only a temporary historical instrument, one of very many instruments and schools of history’” (PFM, 40). The “contradiction” of Trotsky is that he never, before being forced into exile, elaborated a revolutionary position against the party bureaucracy. Why not? Because, even after disabusing himself of the party ideology, until the end of his life he continued to believe that the October Revolution had given birth to the first “workers’ state,” a state in which the bureaucracy was a temporary aberration, namely, a “bureaucratic deformation.” He never recognized that bureaucracy is a system of exploitation and not simply a parasitic caste. Against Trotsky’s views, Lefort proposed a revolutionary position. He argued that the result of the October Revolution was not a workers’ state but a new system of exploitation against which the working class should, and will, rise. This was Lefort’s position in 1948 when he was twenty-four years old. Of course it was no longer his position in 1971, when he was writing the postscript in which he reflects on his earlier position. Commenting on his erstwhile political stance, he writes, “Even those who see how the party separates itself from the exploited strata, detaching itself and constituting the core of a new social formation, may end up by transferring onto the Class as such the sacredness which was previously invested in an...