Further to my comments on Rimbaud below, I was reading Walter Benjamin’s Conversations With Brecht today, and notice that Brecht sees, shining through Le Bateau Ivre, ‘the great historical movement of which it is the expression. [..] It describes not an eccentric poet going for a walk but the flight, the escape of a man who cannot bear to live anymore inside the barriers of a class which [] was then beginning to open up even the more exotic continents to its mercantile interests.’
These conversations divulge a Brecht who is avuncular, humorous, sly, evasive, and nonchalantly insightful; a 'plumpen denker' farting and quiping and never quite revealing all. Now, although you will hear Brecht occasionally referred to as a ‘Stalinist’, we also find in these diaristic reports the playwright's comment that ‘In Russia there is a dictatorship over the proletariat’ and other such critical remarks. It should perhaps be born in mind that figures such as Brecht, charged with ‘supporting’ the Soviet Union were, firstly, in private of course much more candid and critical. Public statements were strategic. But the other key point is that it was not so much the Soviet Union they supported; rather, they were tenaciously holding onto the space they assumed it had opened up. The Russian revolution had burned a hole in the global fabric of capitalism. The fidelity of intellectuals such as Brecht was not to the Soviet Union as such but to this hole.
Of course, many would dismissively repy, as it were, 'the hole was false', no emancipatory 'space' was opened up. Consider, though, the following little example, as it appears in Zizek:
John Berger recently wrote about a French advert for an internet broker called Selftrade. Under an image of a solid gold hammer and sickle studded with diamonds, the caption reads: "And if the stock market profited everybody?" The strategy is obvious: today, the stock market fulfils the egalitarian communist agenda — everybody can participate in it. Berger proposes a comparison: "Imagine a communications campaign today using an image of a swastika cast in solid gold and embedded with diamonds! It would, of course, not work. Why? The swastika addressed potential victors, not the defeated. It invoked domination not justice." In contrast, the hammer and sickle invokes the hope that "history would eventually be on the side of those struggling for fraternal justice". At the very moment this hope is proclaimed dead according to the hegemonic ideology of the "end of ideologies", a paradigmatic post-industrial enterprise (is there anything more post-industrial than dealing in stocks on the internet?) mobilises it once more. The hope continues to haunt us.