It aims neither to nostalgically reenact the "good old revolutionary times" nor to opportunistically-pragmatically adjust the old program to "new conditions" but to repeat, in the present worldwide conditions, the Leninist gesture of initiating a political project that would undermine the totality of the global liberal-capitalist world order and unabashedly assert itself as acting on behalf of truth, intervenung in the present global situation from the standpoint of its repressed truth. As Christianity did with regard to the Roman Empire (that global "multiculturalist" polity), so we should do with regard to today's Empire (see Hardt and Negri 2000).
How, then, do things stand with freedom? Here is how Lenin states his position in a 1922 polemic against the Menshevik and Socialist-Revolutionaries' critique of Bolshevik power:
Indeed, the sermons which . . . the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries preach express their true nature: "The revolution has gone too far. What you are saying now we have been saying all the time, permit us to say it again." But we say in reply: "Permit us to put you before a firing squad for saying that. Either you refrain from expressing your views, or, if you insist on expressing your political views publicly in the present circumstances, when our position is far more difficult than it was when the white guards were directly attacking us, then you will have only yourselves to blame if we treat you as the worst and most pernicious white guard element." (Lenin 1965, 283)
This Leninist freedom of choice—not "Life or money!" but "Life or critique!"— combined with Lenin's dismissive attitude toward the "liberal" notion of freedom, accounts for his bad reputation among liberals. Their case rests largely upon their rejection of the standard Marxist-Leninist juxtaposition of "formal" and "actual" freedom. As even Leftist liberals like Claude Lefort emphasize again and again, freedom is in its very notion "formal," so that "actual freedom" equals the lack of freedom (Lefort 1988). That is to say, with regard to freedom, Lenin is best remembered for his famous retort, "Freedom—yes, but for WHOM? To do WHAT?" For him, the Mensheviks' "freedom" to criticize the Bolshevik government effectively amounted to "freedom" to undermine the workers' and peasants' government on behalf of the counterrevolution. Is it not more than obvious today, after the terrifying experience of Really Existing Socialism, wherein the fault of this Leninist reasoning resides? First, it reduces a historical constellation to a closed, fully contextualized situation in which the "objective" consequences of one's acts are fully determined ("independently of your intentions, what you are doing now objectively serves . . ."). Second, the position of enunciation of such statements usurps the right to decide what your acts "objectively mean," so that their apparent "objectivism" (the focus on "objective meaning") is the form of appearance of its opposite, a thorough subjectivism: I decide what your acts objectively mean, since I define the context of a situation (say, if I conceive of my power as the immediate expression of the power of the working class, than everyone who opposes me is "objectively" an enemy of the working class). Against this full contextualization, one should emphasize that