Customer Reviews

Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth (Series: SIC 7)

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If you're looking for relevant analysis of Marx in the universities (or the complexity of Marx's works being limited to mid-century "cultural Marxism" ), if you're interested in understanding the nature of populism, of political motion, of the sticky issues and controversies surrounding the deployment of the dialectic in actual "real life" situations, then this is the book for you. This book will also help political practitioners understand the academic debates within Marxist philosophy and practice.

The notion that the contributors to this book other than Zizek are unknowns by the "low star reviewers" is ludicrous: Alain Badiou? Antonio Negri? Terry Eagleton? Fredric Jameson? Etienne Balibar? Other names in the book (Callinicos, Kouvelakis, Lazarus, Anderson, and Lih) have had either massive influence in Marxist studies in Europe or in political organizing. This is an all-star team. Anyone who doesn't know these names simply isn't qualified to discuss the book. These are simply the biggest names in the field. I'd read the reviews with a grain of salt: they are little more than political attacks by people who have never read past the title.

This book is meant to have narrow appeal. Those who follow the work of Badiou, Zizek, Negri, Jameson, and Balibar are bound to find it enlightening and important. Those who are political activists in the Marxist tradition might also find it useful. If you are in neither of those camps, or the very idea of talking about Lenin sends you into a rage, then--you know--you're obviously not the intended audience here.

Personally, I couldn't put the book down.

It is unfortunate that such an important political figure in the history of socialism as Lenin is so often outside the realm of academic discussion, and therefore the reasoning behind having a collection of academic writers discuss Lenin specifically is a good one. However, the result, "Lenin Reloaded: Towards a Politics of Truth" is astoundingly mediocre.

The great majority of the articles are incomprehensible pseudo-philosophical ramblings, either by professional dilettantes like Zizek, Jameson, and Balibar, or by people who do have something to say but are incapable of expressing themselves clearly, like Badiou and Callinicos. The greater part of this book is dedicated to essays musing on Lenin's relation to Lacan, the "Situation", "Leninist gestures", "the dialectic today", and so on and so forth. Even a normally engaging writer like Terry Eagleton comes off poorly when forced to write on such an infertile ground, although he at least has the advantage of being a skilled writer. It is unfortunate, but it is safe to say that almost all the articles in this collection can be skipped without any loss to the reader.

I say skipped, however, because there are a few contributions that at least redeem this book a little bit, although to strain the reader's patience they are all put at the back of the book (perhaps nobody can be enticed to actually read the likes of Zizek or Kouvelakis otherwise). Georges Labica has a strong and interesting piece comparing Lenin's view of imperialism to global capitalism today. Also of interest is a perhaps somewhat far-fetched, but nevertheless very original and intriguing view of Lenin as a socialist missionary by Lars Lih, who incidentally is also the only author in the collection to not express support for Lenin. This is best read in combination with the article by Alan Shandro on Lenin's idea of vanguard politics and its relation to hegemony in politics, an essay surprisingly free of Gramscian jargon. But the best contribution in the collection is probably by Domenico Losurdo, who uses Lenin to mount a very strong and rhetorically effective, almost Mike Davis-like, attack on liberalism's hypocrisy and pretense about democracy and 'human rights', both in the past and today. This article and that of Lih are certainly must reads. Borrow this book from a university library to read those, and so spare yourself the expense of money for a whole pile of nothing.

In any period where uncertainty dominates, and even more so in periods that seems terribly bleak, intellectuals commonly reach for prior "success stories" to buttress their hope for the future. Lenin's popularity today, thanks in no small part to Slavoj Zizek, the only name here that most people will have any familiarity with, reflects the claim to success of the seizure of power in 1917 and Lenin's early death which allows many people to dissociate him from Stalinism (not that Zizek, however, does so, not to mention the number of Maoist creeps writing in this book.)

Some will recover Lenin as the politicizer of Marx, the man who translated Marx from theorist into political force (itself a deep falsification of Marx as political man and Lenin as theoretician.) Others will see in him the first to 'return to Hegel', and therefore the first Hegelian Marxist (thanks in no small part to the raw and obscure nature of Lenin's notebooks on Hegel's Logic, allowing for all kinds of fantastic nonsense.) Still others see in 'State & Revolution' and 'Imperialism' high works of Marxist theory. And others will praise Lenin's internationalism. Still others will praise his defense of national liberation.

I am against demonizing Lenin. He was a part of the left-wing in social democracy, including Rosa Luxemburg, Anton Pannekoek, Herman Gorter, the Bremen Left, the German left communists, Lukacs and Korsch. Nonetheless, it is not clear that there is anything worth reclaiming from Lenin (his revolutionary defeatism is the only thing that comes to mind.)

His theory of imperialism betrays much confusion regarding Marx's critique of political economy (for example, his confusion over the concentration of capital and the centralization of capital, his mistaken notions of money, the absence of a notion of value, his treatment of competition, etc.)

His theory of the state is the typical instrumental treatment of the state as a vessel which can be filled with any content.

His policies undermined the factory councils, soviets, and in fact everything tending to transform daily life in Russia, in favor of modernization along typically capitalist lines: reinforcement of wage labor, piece wages, forced overtime, etc.

His theory of the party, whose highest theoretical formation was actually Lukacs' work on imputed class consciousness, made the party the brain and the class the body, thereby simply reproducing the mental-manual dichotomy of class society anyway, and begging the question of who educates the educator.

Lenin at least had the decency to call the Soviet Union what it was: state capitalism. Contrary to the Trotskyist fantasy, Lenin never abandoned his earlier conceptions of a workers and peasants' state over a capitalist economy. The problem is that it was then and is even more so today a recipe for capitalist development and takes us not one inch close to the abolition of capitalism.

The support for nationalist struggles, for a politics of anti-imperialism, has been the basis for selling out to one nationalist i.e. capitalist, leadership after another, whether in the Pop Fronts of 1925-7 in China, in 1935 in France, in 1936-7 in Spain or after WWII under the rubric of "left-wing" national independence in Vietnam, Algeria, Iran, Nicaragua or in Iraq today as they bow and scrape before Islamicist "right-wing" politics. All nationalist politics is anti-proletarian, all of it is predicated on the unity of labor and capital.

Lenin believed he was carrying out a communist politics when he brought his Lassallean politics to power in 1917. He was wrong. In fact, it was evident to many already in 1920. But there will always be an academic cottage industry for the left-wing of capitalism and a politics of untruth. Lenin is the symbol that marks a moment in time and gives a name to the limits of a certain constellation of class struggle and theoretical consciousness, one which can tell us a lot about how we got into the mess we are in but which has nothing to say about how to get out.

This is an awful book, full of elliptical jargon that exemplifies the piteous state left wing theory has stumbled into. The basic problem seems to be the capture of Marxism by an exclusively university-based contingent of professional obscurantists and windbags. Since the demise of communist states marxism lost any semblance of a connection to lived experience and the lives and struggles of real people. It now resembles the species of 19th century German idealist philosophy that Lenin reviled. It is amusing to contemplate what Lenin would make of Badiou or the unbelievably opaque Zizek, and how he would review this mud-wallow of speculation without praxis, addressed to a vacuum. It seems designed to put its audience to sleep or drive them into the arms of Liberal Democratic theory. At least that body of work has some relation to reality and attempts to address itself to the real world. There is something to be said for Leninist labour camps for this pompous gaggle of academic wankers.