Dissolve the people and elect another

“Dissolve the people and elect another” is the closing provocation of Bertolt Brecht’s “The Solution,” written in the aftermath of the East German uprising of June 17. Slavoj Žižek reverses the phrase’s apparent meaning: what reads as an indictment of a government that blames its people becomes a difficult question about how a people might be transformed into a political subject. The expression names neither a simple replacement of one electorate by another nor a return to some lost unity; its force lies in the tension between political accusation and revolutionary possibility.

The poem’s irony

Brecht’s poem stages the question after the uprising, with the Secretary of the Writers’ Union addressing the government. The imagined solution is to dissolve the people and choose another. In the poem’s immediate political register, the line exposes the absurdity and arrogance of a regime that responds to popular revolt by treating the people themselves as the problem.

Žižek complicates this reading by placing the poem beside Brecht’s published letter of solidarity with the East German Communist regime in Neues Deutschland. He describes the combination as politically opportunistic: the poem hints at solidarity with the workers while the letter supports the regime, allowing Brecht to cover both sides. Yet Žižek argues that the poem is not only compromised by this positioning; its political logic is also mistaken if it treats the idea of dissolving the people as nothing more than the government’s cynical evasion of responsibility.

From accusation to political thesis

Žižek recasts the phrase as a claim about the task of a revolutionary party. The existing people, in this argument, are not already a unified political subject simply by virtue of being a population. They may remain an inert crowd, organized by opportunism rather than by an awareness of a historical task. “Dissolving” them would mean transforming that empirical collectivity into a revolutionary body capable of acting in common—not dismissing people and selecting a more convenient electorate.

The distinction matters because the transformation is not presented as easy or automatic. Žižek calls it the most difficult task of all: a party must bring about a change in the political character of the people, not merely claim to represent a group that already exists in finished form. The phrase therefore retains its satirical edge even as it becomes a serious theoretical proposition. Its provocation depends on the gap between a government’s contemptuous wish to replace an inconvenient population and the arduous work of forming a new political subject.

Dialectic and the meaning of “the people”

The argument draws on Žižek’s account of dialectical change. In his reading of Hegel, the point is not to overcome a division by recovering an original organic unity or by reconciling opposites in a higher synthesis. The division itself must be grasped as constitutive: recognizing and holding it in view can accomplish what the imagined reconciliation promises. Applied to the phrase, this means that “the people” is not a stable, self-identical substance waiting to be represented. Political transformation changes both the collectivity and the standard by which it is understood as a people.

This account connects the expression to concrete universality. A universal political identity does not simply contain a settled collection of particular interests; it emerges through their conflict and the movement from one political formation to another. In Žižek’s formulation, the excluded exception can come to stand for the universal dimension: Christ, the outcast, figures humanity as such, while democracy at its most consequential is associated with those who have no proper place in the social order. The people, on this account, become universal not by erasing their divisions but through a political struggle that gives those divisions a new form.

Historical stakes and limits

The book’s discussion of the October Revolution gives this argument a severe historical context. Drawing on Sheila Fitzpatrick, Žižek describes the years from 1928 to 1933 as a radical reshaping of Soviet society through collectivization and rapid industrialization. He contrasts that transformation with the earlier revolutionary years of 1917–1921 and the New Economic Policy period, which left much of the social texture comparatively intact. Fitzpatrick’s example makes the change concrete: someone who had left Moscow in 1914 and returned in 1924 could still recognize its shops, offices, theaters, and many of the people in charge; by 1934, the city’s social world had changed so extensively that it would no longer have been recognizable in the same way.

Žižek places this transformation within a double account of revolutionary history. The task is to acknowledge the October Revolution’s emancipatory potential while also confronting the historical emergence of Stalinism. He rejects both the view that Stalinism was simply a contingent deviation from the revolution and the claim that the Communist project was totalitarian at its core. Drawing on Isaac Deutscher, he interprets forced collectivization and industrialization as energy turned inward when revolution failed to expand beyond the Soviet Union: domestic transformation became a substitute for revolutionary spread abroad. These historical claims do not make the phrase a direct description of any one policy. They show instead why the proposed transformation of a people cannot be treated as an innocent metaphor: the effort to remake a social body can carry emancipatory aspirations and devastating consequences together.

Significance

The expression’s enduring force comes from its unstable speaker and its reversal of political perspective. In Brecht’s poem, the question exposes a regime’s failure by making the people appear disposable. In Žižek’s interpretation, it also asks what would have to change for an existing population to become an agent of collective politics. The answer is not that a leader may simply discard a people and appoint a preferred substitute. It is that political universality has to be made through conflict and transformation—and that this difficult process must be judged by both its emancipatory claim and its historical costs.