Joseph Stalin

Joseph Stalin is treated as a political figure whose authority is bound to the transformation of ordinary people into bearers of revolutionary truth. The book links his claim that communists are made of “special stuff” to a broader account of how a political movement can recast the empirical body as the medium of an impersonal Truth; it then places the Stalinist regime within a dispute over whether revolutionary transformation has fulfilled or betrayed its promise.

The Revolutionary Body

At Lenin’s funeral, Stalin described communists as unlike other people and as made of a “special stuff.” The book reads this claim not simply as praise of a party elite but as an image of the body transubstantiated into a body of truth. In this account, the communist’s physical existence is made to serve as the vehicle of a historical mission that exceeds private personality.

That interpretation is set beside the book’s discussion of hysteria, in which physical symptoms turn the body into a surface on which unconscious truth is inscribed. The comparison is structural, not a claim that Stalin’s words concern hysteria: in both cases, the immediate body is treated as secondary to the truth it carries. Stalin’s formulation thus gives political expression to the idea that a person’s authority can derive from serving as the medium of an impersonal truth rather than from individual qualities.

The People as a Political Project

The book develops the political stakes of this transformation through Bertolt Brecht’s poem “The Solution,” written in response to the workers’ uprising of June 17. Brecht mocks a Communist nomenklatura that, faced with revolt, appears to propose dissolving the people and electing another. The book also recalls Brecht’s public letter of solidarity with the East German Communist regime, reading the poem and the letter together as an attempt to cover both political sides.

The author nevertheless rejects the poem’s implication that remaking the people is necessarily an illegitimate response. In the book’s argument, a revolutionary party has the difficult task of transforming an inert, opportunistic crowd into a revolutionary body conscious of its historical task. Stalin’s “special stuff” remark resonates with this account of political remaking: the issue is not only who speaks for the people, but how a collective is constituted as the bearer of a claimed historical truth.

Stalinism and Thermidor

The book turns from this image of revolutionary constitution to the later fate of the revolution. It reads a text by Georg Lukács as an allegorical intervention written a couple of months after Leon Trotsky advanced the thesis that Stalinism was the Thermidor of the October Revolution. Lukács accepts the characterization of Stalin’s regime as Thermidorian but gives it a positive inflection: rather than lamenting the loss of revolutionary utopian energy, he urges acceptance of the resulting social reality as the only actual space for progress.

The book distinguishes this position from the Marxist meaning of the revolutionary “day after.” For Karl Marx, the sobering aftermath of revolutionary enthusiasm exposes the limits of a bourgeois project whose promise of universal freedom gives way to the rights of commerce and private property. Applied to the proletarian revolution, the same pattern yields a bleak implication: its universal claim to freedom may also be followed by new relations of domination and exploitation. The author argues that Lukács’s endorsement of Stalinist Thermidor therefore implies, perhaps against Lukács’s conscious intention, that the Communist project of realizing actual freedom has failed.

Political Significance

Stalin’s place in this discussion is therefore interpretive rather than biographical. The funeral remark condenses one possibility of revolutionary politics: a collective can claim authority by presenting itself as a body devoted to an impersonal Truth. The Thermidor debate exposes the danger contained in that claim. The remaking of the people may be defended as necessary to revolutionary transformation, yet the regime that emerges can also be understood as a new order of domination, marking a gap between the revolution’s universal promise and its historical outcome.