Kevin has a book, "Lenin, Hegel & Western Marxism." Good read. Has written some others I should get to. "Marx on Suicide, " esp. would motivate me to read Durkheim on same.
Michael Pugliese
-----Original Message----- From: Kevin Anderson <tk0kxa1 at corn.cso.niu.edu> To: rpa-list at southwestern.edu <rpa-list at southwestern.edu>; psn <psn at csf.colorado.edu> Date: Saturday, March 03, 2001 9:20 AM Subject: On Essen Lenin Conference
>From <News & Letters>, Chicago, March 2001 <nandl at igc.org>
Retrieving Lenin for the 21st Century?
Essen, Germany -- Organized primarily by the radical philosopher Slavoj Zizek, a conference on the theme "Towards a Politics of Truth: The Retrieval of Lenin" was held February 2-4 in this small German industrial city. Some 150 people from Germany, France, Britain, Belgium, The Netherlands, Korea, Kurdistan, Austria, and elsewhere, many of them youth, heard 16 speakers. They discussed Lenin and dialectics, Lenin and colonialism, Lenin's concept of organization, and whether Lenin is relevant to today's anti-globalization movements.
Given today's political and intellectual climate, it would be an understatement to call such a conference controversial. Controversy, if not scandal, seemed to be the intent of conference organizer Zizek, whose article "Learning from Lenin" appeared in the prominent weekly <Die Zeit> on February 1, the day before the conference opened. He wrote: "Liberal society knows no radical choice. Fundamental change should not be considered. Here Lenin is actual. The alternative lies outside the system." Where Marx has been to a great extent integrated into academia, he added, speaking Lenin's name shows that one is after truly fundamental change.
In his opening and closing remarks to the conference, Zizek evoked neither Lenin's concept of the vanguard party nor the single party state, but "Lenin in becoming -- after 1914," someone who was "stranded without coordinates" after the outbreak of World War I and the collapse of the socialist movement, and who had to reinvent revolutionary theory and practice, not least in a return to Hegel.
Lenin's 1914 return to Hegel became a topic of heated debate on the first night of the conference, after the philosopher Eustache Kouvelakis and this writer spoke on Lenin's Hegel studies and his break with the crude materialism of earlier Marxists. I also developed the impact of Hegel on his view of world politics, especially the anti-colonial liberation movements, where Lenin contrasted the nationalism of imperialist powers to that of oppressed nations engaged in liberation struggles. (I used this to contrast Serbian nationalism under Milosevic to that of the Bosnians and the Kosovars.)
This writer's attack on Althusser's misreading of the relation of Marx and Lenin to Hegel prompted strong agreement from Fredric Jameson, who deplored recent attempts to portray Hegel as a static philosopher of totality. Others vehemently defended Althusser's legacy and attacked the Hegelian tradition in Marxism as extremely damaging. Zizek criticized those on the Left who had supported Milosevic and pointed out that Lenin's support of small oppressed nations was not mere benevolence, but something very concrete, as was his daring to confront Hegel's absolute.
On the second day of the conference, much of the debate was on Lenin's concept of the party, including presentations by Trotskyist theoreticians such as Daniel Bensaid and Alexander Callinicos. More thoughtful interventions that questioned received views of Lenin came from Lars Lih and Sebastian Budgen. The highlight of day two, however, was the intervention via telephone by imprisoned Italian philosopher Antonio Negri, who discussed the new global resistance to capitalism as outlined in his recent book, <Empire>. In another talk that day, Jameson deplored the attempt to reduce Lenin to the political, suggesting that he had returned to Marx's concept of capital through a reading of Hegel's Larger Logic. Revolution is the key, Jameson concluded, if we can keep it alive as process, not event.
Throughout, the conference exhibited tensions among cultural studies types, orthodox Leninists, and anti-globalization activists. These tensions came to the fore on the last day, when anti-globalization activist Doug Henwood argued that Lenin was not very relevant to today's struggles. This was followed immediately by Alain Badiou's structuralist-Maoist presentation, one that bizarrely tried to resurrect not only the mindless destructiveness of Mao's Cultural Revolution, but also his maxim that "one divides into two," which was presented as a high point of revolutionary philosophy. It was quickly pointed out that such Maoisms lead only to what Hegel called the rage and fury of destruction, a type of negativity that contains nothing of the creativity of a forward movement, which is why Hegel contrasted bare or abstract negativity to absolute negativity, the negation of the negation.
Was this conference the harbinger of a critical recovery and rethinking of the legacy of that great revolutionary thinker and leader, Lenin, who is so slandered today that few on the Left even dare to pronounce his name? Germany's liberal establishment press (<Suddeutsche Zeitung>, <Frankfurter Rundschau>, etc.), which covered the conference in great and scornful detail did not seem to think so. Even the left of center <Tagezeitung> likened the conference to resurrecting a corpse, pouring particular vitriol on "antiquated writers of history, who disputed to what extent Hegel corresponded to Marxist-Leninist doctrine and who sought to liberate the true Lenin from the Leninologists." One wonders, however, if these critics protest too much, if they do not feel the earth moving underfoot, at least to a slight degree.
Kevin Anderson