Lenin Reloaded

by Budgen, Sebastian; Kouvelakis, Stathis; Zizek, Slavoj

• ISBN13: 9780822339298
• ISBN10: 0822339293
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-04-30
• Publisher: Duke Univ Pr

Summary

Lenin Reloadedis a rallying call by some of the world's leading Marxist intellectuals for renewed attention to the significance of Vladimir Lenin. The volume's editors explain that it was Lenin who made Karl Marx's thought explicitly political, who extended it beyond the confines of Europe, who put it into practice. They contend that a focus on Lenin is urgently needed now, when global capitalism appears to be the only game in town, the liberal-democratic system seems to have been settled on as the optimal political organization of society, and it has become easier to imagine the end of the world than a modest change in the mode of production. Lenin retooled Marx's thought for specific historical conditions in 1914, andLenin Reloadedurges a reinvention of the revolutionary project for the present. Such a project would be "Leninist" in its commitment to action based on truth and its acceptance of the consequences that follow from action. These essays, some of which are appearing in English for the first time, bring Lenin face-to-face with the problems of today, including war, imperialism, the imperative to build an intelligentsia of wage earners, the need to embrace the achievements of bourgeois society and modernity, the widespread failure of social democracy, and the popular rejection of the European constitution.Lenin Reloadeddemonstrates that truth and partisanship are not mutually exclusive as is often suggested. Quite the opposite-in the present moment, truth can only be articulated from a thoroughly partisan position.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Repeating Lenin

Retrieving Lenin

One Divides Itself into Two

Leninism in the Twenty-first Century?: Lenin, Weber, and the Politics of Responsibility

Lenin in the Postmodern Age

Lenin and Revisionism

A Leninist Gesture Today: Against the Populist Temptation

Lenin in Philosophy

Lenin and the Path of Dialectics

The Rediscovery and Persistence of the Dialectic in Philosophy and in World Politics

"Leaps! Leaps! Leaps!"

Lenin as Reader of Hegel: Hypotheses for a Reading of Lenin's Notebooks on Hegel's "The Science of Logic"

War and Imperialism

The Philosophical Moment in Politics Determined by War: Lenin 1914-16

From Imperialism to Globalization

Lenin and Herrenvolk Democracy

Politics and its Subject

Lenin and the Part, 1902-November 1917

Lenin the Just, or Marxism Unrecycled

Lenin and the Great Awakening

What to Do Today with What Is to Be Done?, or Rather: The Body of the General Intellect

Lenin and Hegemony: The Soviets, the Working Class, and the Party in the Revolution of 1905

Contributors

Index

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