Specters of Lenin (was Re: Planning; or marx versus lenin versus lenin)

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

What's interesting is why anyone should be anxiously fearful of Leninism in
_1999_.  As far as I can see, there is no Leninist party in Australia that
has any political influence to speak of, much less power.  (It might make
sense for Angela to argue against Leninism if there were one.)  Nor is
there one in the USA & the UK.  If Rob Schaap's comments on Derrida down
under are correct, the Australian Right don't even condescend to attack
Marxists.  According to Peter Starr, the logics of "specular doubling,"
"structural repetition," and "recuperation" serve "to reenact an exorcism
that had largely taken place in fact, if not always in mind --  to
'conjure' an impasse, in the full ambivalence of that verb.  For in the
context of post-May France, the image of the revolutionary (or
revolutionary organization) as double to the powers-that-be was
increasingly that of a ghost, made to be called forth and exorcised -- or
rather, called forth precisely to be exorcised -- in the interest of a
politics of transgression" (9).  It's a bit like toppling the Soviet-era
statues in ex-socialist countries, except that such an act of symbolic
vandalism against what has vanished by ex-socialist citizens is a wee bit
more meaningful & understandable (though it still signals the continuing
alienation & political disorientation of workers under the newly-minted
capitalist economy) than an anti-Leninist e-list theorizing in the
fin-de-siecle Australia.

Yoshie