reading at the end of the summer - Lenin on Marx (1914) Chicago Sat. Aug. 28 1-4PM SAIC
Christopher Cutrone
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/granat/
This standalone reading group session to discuss Lenin on Marx will take place at the normal time and place in Chicago Sat. Aug. 28 (1-4PM at SAIC 112 S. Michigan Ave. room 707), led by me, and Sun. Sep. 12 in NYC (1-4PM, location TBA), led by Richard.
This text was used as the principal background reading for this year's Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) summer educational conference. It is perhaps one of Lenin's most straightforwardly "traditional Marxist" (or, less charitably, "vulgar Marxist") writings, written for a popular audience (a popular Russian encyclopedia readership), and written before Lenin's close engagement with Hegel's Science of Logic (documented in Lenin's famous Hegel Notebooks) later in 1914.
Lenin's encyclopedia entry on Marx captures, however, something essential about the 2nd International Marxist radicalism of Lenin, Luxemburg and Trotsky, on the threshold of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. As such it is a very interesting and important attempt to summarize the importance of Marx to these radicals, right before they attempted to make the revolution, in the context of the global crisis of capitalist civilization in WWI.
As was pointed out in the context of our closing reading on Marx and Marxism this summer, Horkheimer's "The Authoritarian State" (1940), 1917 punctuates two broad periods of the history of Marxism post-1848: that leading up to 1917; and that of its aftermath, which was brought to a close in certain key respects by 1940.
The post-1940 period ushered in postmodernism and the New Left, both of which were prefigured in the 1917-40 period of the "Old Left" of the 1920s-30s and its "late modernism" (as characterized, for example, in Adorno's essay on "Those Twenties," where Adorno pointed out that perhaps emancipatory possibilities, in avowed politics and the broader society and culture, after the failure of the Revolution in Germany 1918-19, "only appeared so").
Thus, Lenin's writing is an expression of 2nd International Marxism in its best, most advanced form -- which was not quite adequate to the task, as shown by history. The question raised by this text in the context of Platypus is, how did Marx appear in 1914? What was the basis of "Marxism," in its highest form, at that time?
The primary reading group syllabus during the academic year (especially its second half, beginning at the end of Jan. 2011) will be concerned with parsing out carefully the manifold dimensions of this question. Thus, Lenin's encyclopedia entry on Marx can be regarded as preliminary to this, and not only as a summing up of our summer readings on Marx and Marxism.
-- Chris