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March 2001
Retrieving Lenin in the 21st century?
Essen, Germany--A conference, organized primarily by the radical philosopher
Slavoj Zizek on the theme "Towards a Politics of Truth: The Retrieval of
Lenin," was held Feb. 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
Feb. 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 I
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 Alex 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 SCIENCE OF LOGIC. Revolution is the
key, Jameson concluded, if we can keep it alive as process, not event.
Throughout, the conference exhibited tensions between 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 Mao's maxim that "one divides into two," which was presented as a high point of revolutionary phil
osophy. 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
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