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Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism: A CRITICAL STUDY

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After reading a biography of Pol Pot I was struck by the need to grapple with the thinking of revolutionaries at the time of their crucial decision making periods, an obvious point in one way, yet crucial to any consideration of social change. There have been one too many disasters here, and the reason is defunct or dysfunctional theory. This work throws a good deal of light on the Lenin sequence, in the period just before he became such a powerful, and unexpectedly ruthless, leader.
A strong case can be made that the dialectic inherited from Hegel was the theoretical 'tragic flaw' of the Marxist left, such is the unending confusion over its usage, meaning, and significance. Correctly grasping Hegel is one thing, assessing Marx's version another, the rendition of Engels still further complicates the question. The dialectic of subjectivity versus the dialectic as natural process in Engels generates confused discourse that goes on an on. In this context Lenin is ambiguous, and the story retold here of his sudden interest in Hegel's Logic in the Swiss exile period is an important tale, for anyone trying to get to the bottom of his views, which underwent a sudden metamorphosis visible in his notes, which were not published until much later. The book makes the strong claim that Lenin was really the first of the Western Marxists, which is quite a revision of standard accounts. In any case, this history is important documentation of this quagmire subject, where a sense of profundity mixed with rank idiocy has too often vitiated leftist praxis. To posit dialectical negation in relation to revolution, with 'dialectical leaps' thrown in to give the subject a naturalistic or evolutionary justification, has always been dubious theory. This history, whatever its limits, fills an important gap in the record, although it is good to proceed with caution in this field, for there is a good chance the whole subject needs to be written off as terminal philosophic muddle.