Hanzi Freinacht overestimates Leninism
In his fresh article Hanzi Freinacht tries to specify who are the metamodern aristocracy. “The metamodern aristocracy is a class of people who have a combination of factors in their psychological, existential and cognitive constitutions that allow them to play a certain role on the new historical world stage of the metamodern age. But they are also people of social, economic and cultural privilege, who have the time, energy and emotional fuel to expend for abstract endeavors such as developing the future of the world-system.
What we are looking for is a nicer, softer, more nuanced and flexible form of Leninism, an avant-garde, or vanguard, of people who recognize and align with some of the deep structures and long-term attractors of our age, and who cooperate transnationally to bring about profound changes in global society. These people have little else in common than a metamodern perspective. They find each other in a variety of settings, often through the internet.
The Leninist idea of a global, progressive movement with its own power playing, radical vanguard is not all bad. The vanguard just needs a much clearer understanding of the development of society, and of developmental psychology, than what Lenin and his contemporaries had. And we need a code of ethics that they lacked — starting with non-violence and a commitment to understand, empathize with and listen to others”.
But Leninists cannot be metamodern in any way. This idea can only be seen as a joke, because Leninism is part of the modern revolution, and its essence is to homogenize reality by force. This means that everything must be unified, according to a fictional pattern that does not exist in reality (Malevich’s Black Square, Hitler’s Jewish conspiracy, Stalin’s bloody class war). That is why modernist artists were so fascinated by fascism and communism, because it corresponded to their vision of the modern model.
Of course, metamodernism includes modernism as one of its components. But we cannot forget about the constant oscillation: now the metamodern leader is Lenin, in 15 minutes he is Hitler, in half an hour — Churchill, then — Trump, then — Putin, then — Reagan, then — Kim Il Sung. And each mode of behavior is determined only by its relevance to the situation, that is — the metamodern leader is opportunistic. He is not committed to one ideal, but to all possible ideals in turn. The Stalinists called them opportunists and shot them for treason.
Hanzi argues that the new Leninism must be more flexible. But the very essence of Leninism is that it was inflexible. In the Russian language there is even such an expression NEZGHIBAYEMYI LENINETS “inflexible Leninist”.
