What in the hell …

… is the appeal of Lenin?

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1. i think from experiences both with the SWP in the UK and the ISO in the US, i have more of a Trotsky allergy than a Lenin allergy. regardless of what trotsky himself said, i find trots to be some of the most hypocritical fucks i know, whereas most leninists are wrong, but pretty honest about it.

   for me, the best defense of a sort of leninism is in Domination and sabotage. the point is, on the one hand, that the method of dictatorship is really just a sort of anti-identitarian identity, an anti-essentialist friend-enemy distinction, as we have been discussion. regarding the party, negri’s point is that it’s an irresolvible tension, but what’s critical is that we recognize it as a tension. it’s bullshit to just act like there’s no tension there, that we can just ignore the question….

   Comment by geogeogeo — January 14, 2006 @ 12:06 am

2. Nate, this is a thought provoking post with a number of important questions. I can say, in a nutshell, that the appeal of Lenin for Zizek rests in his willingness to act, to break with those supporting war credits before the first world war as well as with those who didn’t want the revolution to proceed any further after Feb 1917, and in his emphasis on organization, both of the Party and in trying to produce the institutions for a new state. As I see it, then, the emphasis if formal, the form of Lenin’s activity, rather than particularly on the content (although this distinction is very sloppy and won’t hold up one bit if you press it). For Zizek, repeating Lenin is then a matter of repeating this willingness to act rather than repeating specific attributes of his politics. This is too quick–to really get a sense you’d need to look at Zizek’s edited collection of Lenin’s letters, Revolution at the Gates, and then particularly at Zizek’s long afterward. I discuss the Lenin stuff in quite a bit of detail in the book I’m just now finishing, but that won’t be out til August (sorry for the gross advertising). I checked the link you gave to the autopsy list and will look at some of the articles referenced on the site.

   Comment by Jodi — January 14, 2006 @ 3:38 am

3. Hello.
   Maybe the following links - that leads to the parts of Michael Hardts dissertation which deals with Negris reading of Lenin - could be of interest:
   http://www.duke.edu/~hardt/Dissertation/CESURE1.htm
   http://www.duke.edu/~hardt/Dissertation/CESURE2.htm

   And another thing. How do you relate to the leninism of Tronti? Is it a question of strategy, a sort of non-leninist intervention in a leninist camp that uses references to lenin for purposes of legitimacy? Or is it so that Tronti had not understood Lenin properly, that he only thought he was a leninist, but he really wasn’t? Or is it a backward part of his writing that could be isolated from the rest? Or is it that his reading of Lenin is something like a Lenin beyond leninism? Or something else?

   Comment by Franz Bieberkopf — January 14, 2006 @ 1:46 pm

4. hi Jodi, Franz, Geo,
   Thanks for your comments. Franz, I’ll look at those links, thanks. I’ve read that before but long ago. (It’s interesting that the section of Hardt’s dissertation on Deleuze turned into a book, but not the stuff on Negri. There’s a section of it in the recent book on Negri edited by Murphy and Mustapha, I’ll find the title if you like.) You might also be interested in this piece, it’s by Sergio Fiedler, uses the line ‘Lenin Beyond Leninism’ - http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Congress/9183/newsubjects.html
   Sergio got a recommendation from Steve Wright once in an email, I can’t really think of any recommendations I take more seriously than Steve’s, otherwise I’d have found the Lenin stuff offputting. As for Tronti, I really don’t know. I’m currently reading his book Operai e Capitale (have you read that? If not, do you want to - it’s available in French, Spanish, and Italian. I’m trying to get more discussion going on the book, if you’re interested let me know, I’ll email you.) Tronti’s all about Lenin. I don’t know what to do with that. In some ways I’m changing in how I relate to some of the Italian stuff, in part as I read more of it. In the end I think I’m more taken with some of its receptions outside Italy, where it gets mixed with ultraleftism (like Harry Cleaver’s work, Midnight Notes, to a lesser extent Wildcat and Aufheben). I’ve got Negri’s 33 Lessons on Lenin book, still haven’t read that, plan to, eventually… after finishing the Tronti and that Negri I’ll have more to say on this. I also plan to read more Lenin and related folks, as part of making sense of all that. That’s all a nonanswer I guess, because I’m not sure. What do you think?
   Jodi, advertise away compa, it’s all good. I look forward to reading it. I will say this, though: if Zizek’s is a formal interest in Lenin then it’s not clear to me why Lenin in particular. I read something by him that someone posted on an email list once, something to the effect of reading Lenin in a Kierkegaardian vein. In that sense, then, why not just read Kierkegaard? Or read any number of other less known and less overdetermined figures of decisive action. I may just be being overly stereotypically anarcho/ultraleft here, unable to get past my own biases, but I do think that the selection of this particular example for a formalist interest is indicative of something. At the very minimum, I feel like the trumpeting of Lenin lends at least an infintessimal (sp?) credence to people and organizations I’m opposed to (like Freedom Road, for instance, who took over the leadership of the union local some friends of mine belong to and who are quite undemocratic).
   To be fair, though, one could probably make the case for intervening in christian discourses, given how hegemonic that is in the US today, by a reading of Paul and Christ and all that, and I’d be open to that. I’d also, though, want to insist that a project like that should also recover and try to popularize less known/hegemonic figures like Muntzer and Winstanley (both of whom I’d like to know more about). Similarly, I’d be more open to the Lenin stuff if it involved addressing other figures too, like Kollontai or some folks who started out big fans of the Bolsheviks and then moved away from them (Bill Haywood, I think, falls into this category, though he was I think buried in the USSR, or Emma Goldmann - all of these are figures I’d like to know more about too, I don’t mean to claim any expertise here). But the difference is that I think christian discourse and organization is hegemonic (and largely winning the class struggle in the US, in a scary and potentially fascistic way), whereas I don’t think Lenin et al have a corresponding hegemony within movements: if anything, I think this stuff might be an attempt at (or have an effect in the direction of) crafting/recrafting such a hegemony in movements.
   Geo, I’m with you re: Trots. They’re the absolute fucking worst. Mark had a great button on his site, that Cafepress refused to let him sell, “kill Trots where they breed”. Icepick holders, that’s their only use. I had a sort of friend in Chicago who was a member of Freedom Road, that group are insane, but he was still a great guy - really open about his politics, able to disagree without having it always be taken personally, and able to talk about other things without trying to constantly recruit surreptitiously. (He was also an anglophile with great taste in music, that’s part of how we bonded.) I’ve had that kind of experience with various sectarians, but much less so with Trots. I wonder if that’s just an accident of my experience, or something more than that. Anyway, I haven’t read that Negri piece yet so I can’t say either way. Do you want to say more about that? For now, I have the same response as I do to Jodi’s comment that Zizek’s got a formalist interest in Lenin, which is why retain those names and those terms then? If there’s an important organizational tension, sure, but is that the Party tension? The Lenin tension? Why not the Council tension, the Pannekoek tension? Or the militia tension/Durruti tension? Or the union/Joe Hill tension? It’s one thing to say that Lenin addressed problematics of organization that can’t be neglected, and that there are genuine hard questions in there, and that we have to address these same questions. It’s another thing to say Lenin’s a particularly special (and laudable/emulable) case. I’m particularly suspicious when those claims are made by people with vanguardist organizational pasts (to be clear, while loathe the answers derived I respect the organizational moment, that they addressed those questions, but I do also wonder if bad answers might be worse than not addressing the questions at all), which Negri definitely had. Steve Wright’s article “A Party of Autonomy?” is one good source on this.
   I should also add that one of the things that makes me pause about all this is that I think my experiences that I complain about are not unique, but that there’s been a response among vanguardist groups post-counterglobalization stuff, post-visibility of the 90s North America anarchist movement (as a social trend, not necessarily as an organized thing), to try and regain some ground and some legitimacy in order to recruit and try to set directions for movements. I’m not sure how much academic receptions do or do not impact movements, but that’s one of the concerns in the background as I’m responding to this. That’s what I was trying to say about Lenin and hegemony within movements. I don’t know the history of class movements in North America (or at all) well enough to know if there’s never been a hegemony of this stuff in the US or if there was and it’s been lost. I am, of course, strongly invested in some figures that were never subject to that hegemony either way (mainly the IWW, but not exclusively). This is even more off the cuff than usual, I hope all this makes sense.
   take care,
   Nate

   Comment by Nate — January 14, 2006 @ 5:18 pm

5. Whoa, that’s a long comment. Great post, I think a kneejerk anti-Leninist response is totally appropriate in all situations. When people start approvingly talking of Lenin, no matter how interesting they may be in other respects, I want to simulatenously vomit and punch them. Although that’s certainly overly emotional, it is impossible to overemphasize the seemingly irrepairable damage Lenin and Bolshevist ideology and practice have done to the communist project.
   On the other hand, this is not to say that one can’t learn anything by reading Lenin himself, or by reading those who consider themselves Leninists. I myself like some things Lenin said, like “When we are victorious on a world-scale, I think we shall use the world’s gold deposits to make urinals for public restrooms.”
   But then, there’s stuff like this, which reveals his true commitments “Unquestioning subordination to a single will is absolutely necessary for the success of processes organized on the pattern of large-scale machine industry…Today the revolution demands - precisely in the interests of its development and consolidation, precisely in the interests of socialism - that the people unquestioningly obey the single will of the leaders of labor.”

   Comment by Quinlan Vos — January 14, 2006 @ 11:28 pm

6. I can’t see what the difference between Lenin and Trotsky (or for that matter, Stalin or Mao) is meant to be, but nevertheless I have a much more tolerant attitude to ‘The Trots’. In fact, I think the anti-Trot attitude is responsible for far more harm than The (out-of-power) Trots. Maybe these things are different in the US. Here, however, The Trots are generally easily managed - if there is a need to do it, which often there isn’t. With these people, I often feel it is necessary to step back a bit - if you try to engage them at some level of political economy and theory, it’s just a recipee for disaster. But if you have to organize something, they can be very helpful. At a minimum, you can’t defeat sectarianism by being more sectarian than the sectarians.

   Lenin’s writing, in my opinion, is a mess. I find his appeal really mysterious. The one thing he dealt with coherently was imperialism, and I thought that Rosa Luxembourg and Hobson between them provided an empircally sounder and more radical understanding of 19th C imperialism. They are all hopelessly out of date by 1920. Lenin’s doctrine of state is more or less in the same position that George Bush’s philosophy is - we have a record of what it translated to in practice at the hands of the master himself, so there is little need to decode its intricacies, except forensically.

   As for why he appeals to Zizek, Badiou, Althusser and a long line of boring, pretentious wankers, it is simple enough. Lenin was the intellectual who ran an empire, who made hard decisions and dispensed huge power and authority. These dishonest fucks would very much like to do that - for good, of course. Vanguardism is very seductive, if you think you might end up in the vanguard. The explanation, then, is sociological and maybe about the psychology and ideology of intellectuals; the content of Lenin’s writing is essentially meaningless.

   Comment by TCO — January 15, 2006 @ 2:22 am

7. hi Quinlan, Thiago,
   It’s always nice to get my preconceptions affirmed by smart people, so thank. Thiago, can you say more about the damage of anti-Trot pespectives? I can’t really relate.
   take care,
   Nate

   Comment by Nate — January 15, 2006 @ 3:44 am

8. Well, I am thinking specifically of social movement and university student organizing in Australia, rather than anything in the unions, or in Brazil or the UK. What often happens, in my experience, is that people basically use the presence of The Trots in something or other as an excuse to do nothing. Or the Trots becomes the reason why the left is a shambles, or why you can’t be part of the left - there is in fact a substantial degree of elitism, I think, in this attitude that says, oh well, we can’t have anything to do with x mass movement, that’s just some exercise in disciplining the activist population. Most of the time, that’s just a fantasy - not always, but the cases in which The Trots are both powerful enough and motivated enough to do anything of the sort are very rare.

   Anti-Trotism can get fairly pathological. People start freaking out that someone is selling papers at a rally. I have seen this become an excuse for political censorship, and not just once, but several times. Like, what is the harm of that? I have seen people victimize ‘trots’ at meetings in ways which would be considered Stalinist if the tables were turned. There is sort of an idea that if you have a trot hanging around, or you are friends with them, boom, it’s all infected. Then there is the hallucinatory overestimation of trot numbers, power, influence, whatever - in Australia, if you include the whole circus, anarchists outnumber the trot cadres several times over. They have big profile because, like, they do things. When people start complaining about that, I think mostly that’s just an excuse to be lazy. It is hard organizing with people you have differences with, but what do people really want, a world in which we all agree? One in which we never have to work with anyone we disagree with? How is that desirable?

   Also, what pisses me off about anti-trotism is the way that it is stuck somewhere around 1967, still flinging situationist slogans around as if the enemy were the PCF still. Modern Trots are nothing like your old school trots. There is a reason why the popular campus sects are considered reformist and weak by Spartacist dead-enders: once, the average trot had roughly the Spart ideology. Now they are, well, Sparts, a byword for lunacy. I mean, to think that these people haven’t changed and the problems with them are those diagnosed by Debord for the 1950s PCF is just lazy. It’s particularly fucked up since over the last ten years, there has been a lot of changes in the way these people work, at least in Australia. The main change, I think, has been towards the adoption of increasingly loose forms of organization. The ISO, for instance, is essentially considered dysfunctional by the UK SWP - no party discipline, people off in every direction, lots of participation in things that are sterile for recruitment. But in my opinion, they are the bettere for it. Here we also have a phenomenon where splits from the ISO get progressively more libertarian, at least initially. So that was the case with Socialist Alternative when the ISO purged its editorial team in the mid 90s, and Solidarity, the breakaways from Socialist Alternative are so far out I get calls from local Wobs when I criticise them.

   The reasons for this, I think, has to do with the tiny size of the radical left in Australia. In the UK, in Brazil and in France, it’s another story. But even in those cases, the SWP, the PTSU or Lutte Ouvriere are hardly massive obstacles for anarchists. Between laziness and capitalism, they have their hands full.

   I love Debord anyway. I think the telegram is brilliant. But if you sent it to the local Stalinists, it would just be bitchy, rather than audaciously meaningless.

   Comment by TCO — January 15, 2006 @ 2:15 pm

9. Also, I think it’s worth pointing out that Trots can be quite susceptible towards more libertarian tendencies and have taken off in that direction several times in the past. Some of the most interesting stuff to read comes from ex-Trots, like Socialisme ou Barbarie, or the Johnson-Forrest tendency and the various people involved in that (James, Glaberman, Dunayevskaya, etc.)
   The best article on Trotsky in my opinion is Claude Lefort’s “The Contradiction of Trotsky”. (http://libcom.org/library/contradiction-trotsky-claude-lefort)

   Comment by Quinlan Vos — January 15, 2006 @ 9:19 pm

10. Touche, mon amis. Quinlan, I agree completely. Those folks you name are really important (and would themselves be candidates for some valorizing of the type that some folks to re: Lenin), I’d like to read more of them. There’s some ex-trots in NEFAC, which is a group I have the utmost respect for. (I have maoist past myself, PLP, so I’m certainly not one w/ spotless past as far as organizational idiocy goes.) That said, Thiago, I’m not advocating a sort of blanket purge of trots or vanguardists. I do think there’s some real problems with some organizational aspects in the organizations of this type that I’ve encountered (democratic centralism, for one, and generaly nontransparency internally and externally in dealing with other groups). But I’m not anti- the name. Okay, I am. But not to the point that you describe in Oz. That seems to be a different situation. Chicago was the HQ of a number of groups like the US’s ISO who, I’m pretty sure, got thrown out of some Trot international grouping for their destructive rule-or-ruin relationship with others. I do generally think the vanguardists have bad ideas, but I’m also committed to a view that people can do great things with bad ideas. I’ve just had a number of bad experiences with these kinds of folks fucking up other activities I was involved in - or trying to. So I tend to hear that in the lionizing of Lenin and all that. If that’s not what’s going on, I’m curious to know what is going on there. Like I said, I do also worry that said lionizing aids people whose organizations and movement behavior I find odious and counterproductive in a lot of ways. The answer to all of this, of course, is not to grouse but organize and to organize better - I’m not sure that Lenin and co have much to offer along the lines of doing that (except perhaps for some tips on what to watch out for when the rule-or-ruin types come sniffing around), I think someone like Glaberman’s a lot more helpful, and I think this is a huge problem, organization has to happen. Also, I’ve no problem with people selling their papers or whatever, but quite frankly I do get suspicious of someone if I’m at some meeting that’s going to involve some kind of collective decision making and they identify as a member of one of those groups (and even more suspicious if I find out later that someone’s part of one and didn’t identify). Paranoid? Sure. But not wrong in every case (party-line robots do exist, though certainly not in the numbers that they do in anarchonightmares), and not really a problem as long as it doesn’t result in the type of censorhip etc you’re talking about. You may disagree w/ me here, say I’m being unfair or archaic, but in my experience the Cohn-Bendit quote from ‘68 or ‘69 still holds true, that the best thing that comes out of Trot et al groupings is ex-members of those groupings. (I’d say exactly the same of the staff of business unions and NGOs as well.)

    Comment by Nate — January 15, 2006 @ 11:56 pm

11. TCO said:

    Well, I am thinking specifically of social movement and university student organizing in Australia, rather than anything in the unions, or in Brazil or the UK. What often happens, in my experience, is that people basically use the presence of The Trots in something or other as an excuse to do nothing. Or the Trots becomes the reason why the left is a shambles, or why you can’t be part of the left - there is in fact a substantial degree of elitism, I think, in this attitude that says, oh well, we can’t have anything to do with x mass movement, that’s just some exercise in disciplining the activist population. Most of the time, that’s just a fantasy - not always, but the cases in which The Trots are both powerful enough and motivated enough to do anything of the sort are very rare.

    Okay, and if we’re talking about the Australian situation then Thiago’s comment needs a bit of counter-exampling, because I would regard the above as a pretty biased and itself fantastical proposition in itself. In my experience, disassociation from Trots (and Leninists, as well as the small-l leninists who like to create informalised parties by way of social ‘gangs’) is not only about a distaste at the ‘disciplining of an activist population.’ It’s because they tend to actively derail actions. They’re not people you want around when you need reliable people to support you in a lock-on or an occupation or whatever. Of course, they’re obsessed with ‘looking good on the news’: resulting in, among other examples: Trot/Leninist marshalls or representatives telling people to sit down in front of a line of horses; arguing that escaped detainees from Woomera should be handed back to the authorities; doing ‘benefits’ for particular actions, and neglecting to hand any of the funds raised over to that particular action (instead capitalising on the publicity to do some of their own fund-raising/recruiting). And so on, and so bloody on. If they don’t always succeed in ‘disciplining the activist population’ it’s because people tell them to fuck off. Unlike Nate, I don’t think people generally do good things with bad ideas: and I’m just not prepared to work with people who consistently try to derail shit. I’d rather have les people and no mass movement.

    The trots are not why the left is in a ’shambles’ — tell me, who has ever articulated the problem in such simplistic terms? They’re part of a larger problem, which is… er… capital? (NOt to be too simplistic or nothin’.)

    (Just for the benefit of other readers, this particular argument about Australian localised left politics, Thiago’s line, and mine, have a long rehearsal history on various email lists including autopsy, the old loveandrage list, and the discussion lists for almost every action organised in Australia by autonomist/anarchist/coalitional people since, like, forever. I’m biting in a largely rhetorical way, which means I may not come back and argue the point further. Just sayin’.)

    Comment by az — January 17, 2006 @ 3:51 am

12. hi Az,
    Thanks for that. Just to be clear: I don’t _generally_ think people do good things with bad ideas. Especially when those people/ideas are Trots, who I kind of hate. What I meant instead was just to say that I do think it’s _possible_ that people can do so. You might say that what I said was sort of like a “I hate them, but, you know, some of my best friends are Trots, they just don’t act like Trots…”. Which is not actually true. (See above re: hate. I don’t have any Trot friends that I can think of. Maybe one that I haven’t seen in a few years.)
    take care,
    Nate

    Comment by Nate — January 17, 2006 @ 4:06 am

13. Note to self: print this. It’s Schmitt’s Partisan book -
    http://www.msupress.msu.edu/journals/cr/schmitt.pdf

    Comment by Nate — January 17, 2006 @ 9:43 pm

14. Hm. Thiago’s apparently rational-political criticism of “the pathology of anti-trotism” obscures some very particular personal and labouring attachments. The disclosure of which might explain something more about Thiago’s contradictions - a critique of trotskyist practice and rationalist lectures about the ‘pathology’ of hating the trots - than it does about the situation in AU.

    Distinguishing between so-called ‘irrational’ emotions and ostensibly ‘rational’ politics is neither possible nor (politically and emotionally) credible. Thiago can’t do it, despite the pretense - and no one else does or should.

    Comment by s0metim3s — January 18, 2006 @ 2:21 am

15. Btw, Nate, there’s an article by Grant Farred on ‘not-yet counterpartisan’ politics somewhere which might be of interest. In South Atlantic Quarterly if you have Muse access.

    Comment by s0metim3s — January 18, 2006 @ 2:26 am

16. Thanks Angela.

    Comment by Nate — January 18, 2006 @ 3:52 am

17. I think it can’t be said that I like leninist ideas or organization. I made it clear above I think that Lenin is not really very different from Stalin, for instance. The entire point of what I said is not that they are so wonderful, but that they are easily contained. I once joined the DSP and the ISO at once, as a joke, but I was never active in either and mostly just annoyed them by quoting Nietzsche all them time.

    There are all sorts of stories about their dodgyness, but while some are not doubt true, in my experience, much of it tends to be hype. Some trots will occasionally argue against some action, and try to scuttle it. So do anarchists of all stripes.

    There are all sorts of problems with money, that’s certainly true. They behave almost as badly as the Greens in that respect. In my experience, anarchists collectives that suddenly come across huge wads of cash have a lot of trouble. As do anarchist collectives that operate semi businesses, like bookshops. There is more than one story about bricks flying trough windows around.

    You also want to be careful with just hammering these people for saying things like ‘return the detainees’ or, more recently, for calling for the end of the hunger strike. I argued, just after woomera, that without some kind of support network, it was very much wrong to free detainees into a condition of persecution, to give them false hopes. They need real, not illusory freedom. I did not advocate returning them, I advocated seriousness and foresight before doing this sort of action in a comprehensive manner. As I understand it, the ISO roughly shared my position and the DSP objected to it, as it turns out on hypocritical grounds. At USYD, they tried recuperate by moving a motion making the Campus a escapee-friendly zone. I argued against this, but abstained from voting, on the grounds that this was talk not backed by any capability of action, and it could conceivably be dangerous for any escapee who took us up on our worthless offer. Instead, we should discreetly help them. As I recall it, the noborders contingent were pretty iffy on the resolution as well. So it’s not that clear cut.

    Perhaps you know that the two people charged with helping escapees escape from Australia were one anarchist, and one member of a certain Trot group. (They were innocent, btw.)

    On the hunger strikers, they argued for them to end it. But look: the people were about to die. These were not random people out there about whom you could voice an abstract opinion, they were personally known to The Trots who were making these calls. They were personally shaken, crying, devastated by the events.

    My point, at any rate, is to keep one’s eyes open. Recently, there is a strong tendency amongst Trot sects to move on a libertarian direction. This is important. It doesn’t mean that they are good, it means that statism just doesn’t fly with new recruits - surely an important point. Some people are blind to this, and anti-Trotism doesn’t help. I think this could be dangerous, if Trots are in fact dangerous.

    For instance, if you look at what is going on now in the Sydney refugee movement, there is a striking move by the very libertarian end of the Trots (Socialist Alternative’s split, Solidarity) to forge links with Falung Gong and Chinese democracy dissidents who are by and large serious opposed not just to communism but to anything that is not liberal democracy and capitalism. The Trots patiently try to argue their position, and fight for the freedom of these detainees who are essentially businessmen along with all the others. They don’t just make some statement like ‘oh, they should be free like everyone else’ - no, they go there and meet these people, forge personal relations, patiently read through insane Falung Gong literature.

    As for Angela’s personal critique of my contradictions, what can I say? Supposedly there is something that should be ‘disclosed’ about me. Hmm. Let’s see. I am a PhD student in anthropology who focuses on PNG. My approach there resembles Lattas’. I kind of like the way Orwell writes, but think he is a racist and a snitch. Yes, I am sort of embarrassed for liking Orwell’s style. I think Chomsky is a brilliant rhetorician, but disagree with him on just about everything there is to disagree in philosophy and social science, except the facts. I am sort of involved with Jura Books, an anarchist bookshop, though mostly I just mind the shop every other saturday. My partner is a member of RAC-NSW, and is a historian of PNG. I organize in various ad hoc groups. I coordinated a Palestine solidarity group that had trots in it once. I do some anti-war things. I have been told I am much nicer in person. I suffer from pretty serious depression sometimes. I change my mind about important things occasionally. I got sick of having a blog because it looked like my rubbish bin. Hmm. Let’s see. Nope, I don’t see how this makes my observation of the trots some kind of symptom.

    Comment by TCO — January 18, 2006 @ 4:02 am

18. hi Thiago,
    Me too, re: depression. I’m less nice in person, though. As for Trots becoming libertarian, I’m all for it if I think it’s sincere, and often very suspicious that it’s a cynical manipulative bid for recruits a lot of the time. I think basically this disagreements comes down to that some of us have had enough of certain bad experiences for us that we get our backs up at people who intentionally use the self-descriptor ‘Trot’ (and not just Trots). The name doesn’t mean they’re automatically going do all that stuff etc etc. A friend of my wife calls herself a capitalist. She’s really nice and has been very helpful to us at different points. I hate her politics and avoid those topics, and if she was organizationally minded I’d have more conflicts with her such that I couldn’t help but make it a personal conflict. But also, she’s not a capitalist. She’s an overpaid white collar worker (nonmanagerial at last I heard). She’s welcome to use that term as a name for herself, but it’s not I how I use the term, just a confusing homonym. Ditto for my complaints over Trots and related ilk. The conflict here’s over organizational behaviors, I think. Though I do think there’s some poor judgment (or lack of awareness of what are to me some important historical events) in using certain names for oneself (capitalist, trot, etc).
    take care
    Nate

    ps- Az, Thiago, (Angela? Pete?), can you guys say a bit about the Oz group Love and Rage? It’s not a history I really know about. There was a US group of the same name, anarcho-group that split in the late 90s I think, had some Maoist type strains, some former Trots, etc. I’m told there was more of ‘autonomist’ streak to L&R in Australia, I’m curious to know more about all that and what autonomist means in that context (certain theoretical bent? practical activities?). Anything y’all can tell me is much appreciated.

    Comment by Nate — January 19, 2006 @ 9:34 pm

19. Look, maybe things are different in Melbourne, though I doubt it. I don’t know. I know Chicago is supposed to have fearsome trots - we hear stories here about Sparts packing pipes and whatever. Here the sparts are kind of funny and entertaining. I love their paper. In Brazil, it’s a different story entirely. There the trots are more like mass parties, with a large working class rank and file. They are very socially conservative, much more so than the SWP. The really big social movements there are more or less Trotproofed in the best way one can be Trotproof: the MST, for instance, is so huge and acephalic that they could enter it only like a food particle into an amoeba.

    My favourite SWP story was at the 3rd WSF in Porto Alegre, when the Iraq war was about to start in earnest. There would have been some forty thousand people at the PUC campus at any one time, and maybe a third of them had signs saying ‘JOIN THE MARCH AGAINST WAR TOMORROW!!!’ When I spoke to the SWP people, they said: look, we desperately need to inject some politics into this place. Everyone here is thirdworldist - they are just talking about these little struggles and forgetting about the larger one: against Blair. I am not kidding. Come the march, their tiny contingent is submerged in a sea of humanity screaming things like “Acabou, a cortesia - vamos arrazar a burgesia!” , people coming out of buildings to join the cazerolazo,contingents of radical rubbish scavengers and streetkids, cocaleros, peasants with their tools, VW beetles crushed under huge speakers calling workers out, in sum: a madhouse. Afterwards they complained to me how small the antiwar movement was in Brazil. It didn’t exist, apparently.

    My attempts to convince them that there was a huge war going on, maybe they heard about it in this book by some german guy, that came to nothing.

    My conclusion after that is that they are not so much dangerous as delusional. They live in a world of hallucinations, and is probably wisest not to join them.

    Other people can give a better picture, but L&R were definitely on the autonomist end of the pool, a big streak of situationism. Mostly it was a student organization. At USyd, people floated between that and Red & Black, the anarchist - mostly both organizations were made of the same people. Lots of people in L&R went into what is sometimes called, hilariously, the ‘adult’ anarchist movement - bookshops, anarchopunk. L&R was active mostly on campus, they were strong at UTS and USyd. Sergio Fiedler, who is cited above, was very active in it. He’s in Chile now, but for a while he taught at UTS alongside Drs. Goodman and Avartniakis - I don’t know if Angela has ever taken the piss out of them, she should, maybe they’re too soft a target. They are lovely people, but the most wooly-headed Yeay the Commons! boosters side of George ‘Fuzzybear’ Monbiot. Sergio did not fit that profile at all, however.

    Comment by TCO — January 19, 2006 @ 11:19 pm

20. “I argued, just after woomera, that without some kind of support network, it was very much wrong to free detainees into a condition of persecution, to give them false hopes. They need real, not illusory freedom. I did not advocate returning them, I advocated seriousness and foresight before doing this sort of action in a comprehensive manner.”

    Thiago, the solution at Woomera was to actually ask the detainees what they wanted. It was a bit late to tell them not to escape because we didn’t know what to do with them, at that moment. It’s a fair point to argue the escapes happened without enough forethought and planning (as a result of simply not believing it could happen, on the part of those ‘activists’ outside the fence). But those detainees who did escape inititated it themselves. It wasn’t some thing ‘we’ did, as the people organising the action, or as people breaking the fence down from outside. Even to argue that there should have been more foresight about escape plans on ‘our’ part erases the agency of those inside the fences: they had plans, they were ready. In an opportunistic way. Those I talked to were very aware that their freedom might be temporary. They wanted to take that chance. So people did the only thing possible, under those circumstances: help.

    About loveandrage: I never met any of the actual L&R crew in Sydney, but their email list functioned from the late 1990’s to around 2002 as an Australian node for autonomists, anarchists, people interested in doing horizontal organising and talking about the intersections btw marxist stuff, anarchist stuff, situationist stuff… It’s difficult to say what ‘autonomist’ meant in that context, or means. For a while in Melbourne the talk was all of ‘autonomous organising’, inspired by Reclaim the Streets, Seattle stuff, and, through the filtering and dispersion of people like Ange, Italian stuff — but I came across Italian stuff more in the context of hearing about social centres (particularly a huge squat in Sydney, called the Broadway squats) and tactics than theory to begin with.

    We saw James Arvanitakis do a spiel on the COmmons thing at the Italian Effect conference… Yes, v. wool-headed. Alomnst too ‘nice’ for words, but

    Comment by az — January 21, 2006 @ 1:08 pm

21. I agree. The problem with this is - so now they are out: how would you actually organize to help people who escaped? Angela talks about the straightjacket that is a politics of recognition, here is a concrete example of what I take that to mean. Suppose the USyd SRC, or the ISO, or whoever had voted to help the escapees and funnelled money into that, or facilitated certain acts which might have helped them. Well, what would happen then? They would all be arrested and shoved in jail. As it turns out, this was very nearly the case - and when the pigs came to fuck with people who had supposedly helped the escapees, they didn’t take being a trot as an alibi. The implied disobedience was pretty awesome, the danger everyone was in was quite serious. I doubt anybody would have been inspired to such actions without the initiative of the escapes before them, that’s for sure.

    The point is: ok, so here we have a political practice which almost by definition cannot be put out there for recognition - unless you want a holiday in Long Bay - so is it really reasonable to take a shot at an organization engaged in it for being sort of murky about it?

    Comment by TCO — January 22, 2006 @ 2:02 am

22. I’m really sorry to be coming into this discussion so late, because it’s really germane to what I’ve been thinking about lately. Namely, I’ve been rethinking my absolute hostility to Lenin that was inculcated into me back in the SPGB. Essentially, it’s become clear to me through my research that a blanket war against authority as advocated in libertarian socialism is really a kind of abdication. Leninism has the advantage in principle of advocating the building of a strong counter-power with the specific intention of ousting the bourgeoisie. The anarchist tendency is to see this as not solving the real problem, that of the state, hence replacing capitalism with state capitalism. I must say I find this idea to be completely levelling of the obvious differences between, for example, the Soviet Union and Western capitalism, and there are differences, notably that the Soviet Union was not capitalist, in my view was not capitalist until 1991 (there’s a massive divergence of opinion on this: anarchists tend to say that the Soviet Union was state capitalist from the outset, the IS that it was state capitalist from Stalin’s seisure of power, the Maoists that it was state capitalist from Khruschev’s). There is clearly a difference between corrupt bureaucrats who have a lot of power, and multi-billionaires who shamelessly accrue surplus from a workforce and live in mansions. Stalin lived in like three rooms in the Kremlin. Quite how he was a capitalist I don’t really understand, whatever else he may have been. This is the real appeal of Lenin, not that he merely denounced the Second International - Zizek does use that rationale, but if that was what was at stake, we could have Rosa Luxemburg and Sylvia Pankhurst - but that he actually led a revolution that abolished capitalism. Certainly, it led to a lot of tragic results, all kinds of unintended shit, and possibly it might have been a bad idea, but still capitalism was abolished, and I different kind of social system established, for the first time in history, one which governed in the supposed interests of the working class. Leninism offers some kind of plan for doing this, although it is one which has never come close to success in a Western country, in a bourgois democracy, etc. This is ulitimately my problem with the Trots and shit, and it seems a lot of others’ problems with them, that for all their hyper-activism, they actually achieve little more than their own reproduction (see my much-maligned analysis here. The anarchists aren’t great by the same measure either.

    Comment by mark — January 22, 2006 @ 3:49 am

23. well, your ‘fixed’ comments seem to have eaten my comment, so I’ll write another one.

    I’m sorry to be coming into this thread so late, because a lot of what I’ve been thinking lately has been more sympathetic towards Lenin, after years of thinking of him as some kind of total fuck, which is the line I was taught in the SPGB.

    The appeal of Lenin is not simply that he broke with the Second International - if that were the point, we could just run with Rosa Luxemburg or Sylvia Pankhurst. The hold he has on revolutionary thought clearly comes from his having led a successful revolution.

    Now, anarchists and libertarian Marxists typically deny that this revolution was successful, in that they hold Lenin was a tyrant. To my mind this misses the point, which is not whether the revolution was successful in abolishing the state and authority, as an anarchist revolution would seek to, but whether it achieved the more modest aim of abolishing capitalism. And I think it did. The claim that the Soviet Union was ever ’state capitalist’ seems to me to be just false. In this I am in the company of the more orthodox Trots (including the Sparts, but, T, the Sparts are a bunch of crazed Americans who resemble no other Trots in history in their insane dogmatism, except possibly the Heleayite ICFI [today the WSWS/SEP] with whom they claim some fraternity) and the WWP, but not with anarchists, the IS (who say that Stalin restored capitalism in the Soviet Union) or the Hoxhaists, Maoists and other Marxist-Leninists who claim that Khruschev restored capitalism.

    The Soviet bureaucracy was not a capitalist class. The Soviet Union rather always to some extent operated in the interests of the workers, even if it subordinated the immediate interests of the workers to the interests of its own self-defence, and even if it was incompetent and corrupt. Corrupt bureaucrats are corrupt bureaucrats, but they don’t live in mansions or accrue the surplus labour of a workforce into a block of capital which they then use to dominate. Stalin lived in three rooms in the Kremlin and dressed modestly - he had power, but not capital. After 1991, they gave these bureaucrats ownership and they became capitalists for real - the same process is continuing apace in China, which has actually become capitalist.

    Obviously, there’s a lot more to be said on this, but I think it is fairly clear that the appeal of Lenin is that he actually made a revolution which abolished capitalism. However, there is no indication that his methods are repeatable, certainly not in a modern first world, liberal democratic context. Hence the not unsurprising failure of Trots to do much beyond reproduce their own organisations (see my much-aligned analysis). Anarchist methods have similarly failed to really fuck shit up, however, and I think they have a significant weakness apropos of Leninists that they fail to see how the state and ruling class will respond to revolutionary build-up and consequently fail to organise in the military way necessary to defend themselves from the crackdown. This is, IMO, exactly why the IWW failed first time around. Sure, the Communists who came after were probably even less successful - I’m just saying that the lack of capacity of the IWW to defend themselves was terminal, not that they necessarily would have done better had they had it.

    Comment by mark — January 22, 2006 @ 5:08 am

24. Interesting post. At the risk of playing devil’s advocate though, I’m confused how statements like:

    People like that fucked up the post 9/11 antiwar movements in Chicago pretty bady.

    have anything to do with what might be most interesting in thinking about ‘Lenin, from say an historical, Marxist or philosophical perspective. Medvedev, for instance, argues persuasively that Stalin did much to distort and suppress the ‘lenin’ in Lenin…See here. And Zizek makes the polemical/provocative stakes of his “return” to the (yet-to-be-subsumed signifier ‘Lenin,’ not the man or his policies and especially not his legacy in any simplistic sense), more or less explicit, no?

    One wonders if there isn’t a sort of common category error in most people’s response to Z, one he anticipates and profits off to some degree. But that is admittedly a weak, if not outright lazy and irresponsible way to argue (and like I said, mostly playing devil’s advocate).

    Comment by Matt — January 22, 2006 @ 4:57 pm

25. In Sydney, the three main trot groups - the ISO, the DSP and Socialist Alternative - were alright during the antiwar protests; their arguments were realistic and attuned to the existence of a wider war. The people who really turned that into an occasion for recruiting were the greens and the ALP, both of whom pushed for ‘moderation’ and the suppression of any sort of political economic explanation. Some resurrected CPA people (I don’t know where they are stored in between wars, I suppose there are formaldehyde vats somewhere under Surry Hills)worked hard to sabotage things and to make it as inneffective as possible; even church organizations in fact represented a radical element in the organizing committee, and aligned with the Trots before it all fell apart. It didn’t fall apart because the Trots couldn’t control it - that would have been an improvement, in my opinion - it fell apart because the ‘mainstream’ coalition of recycled Stalinists, some greens and the ALP were so conservative and nationalist that the Trots, along with anyone with a brain, quit.

    As for Lenin ‘leading’ the ‘only successfull revolution’, please - that’s precisely the fantasy, it tells much more about people who believe it than it tells you about the russian revolution. And the whole ‘Stalin did it’ line, come on - at least Zizek accepts Lenin was tyrannical. That’s fucked, but it is at least sane.

    Comment by TCO — January 22, 2006 @ 10:34 pm

26. hi all,
    Matt, re: your question, I have no idea what, if anything, my experiences with Leninists and people who invoke Lenin says about Lenin or how to read him. Those experiences, and which are for me characteristic rather than exceptional in regard to my encounters w/ those kinds of folks, do color my responses to Lenin invocations, quite tremendously. As for thinking about Lenin philosophically, historically, or in a Marxist sense, I’m not sure. I do think it’s important to note that those types of thinking about Lenin can have a widely divergent politics, whether Stalinist, anarchist, councilist, etc. My basic question is quite simply “why Lenin?”. I’ve not gotten around to reading much Zizek, and the Lenin noises don’t encourage me. I will eventually, but frankly he’s not struck me as very relevant to the organizational or intellectual concerns that are most on my mind. Among the people I know of who I respect the most organizationally people are more likely to have read or to make use of Martin Glaberman than Lenin. That’s not an argument, but it does suggest to me that Lenin is not the number one figure for someone whose chief activist-interest is workplace organizing. To be clear, people should read whoever they want for whatever they want, what I don’t get though is what it is that people who I like and respect get from reading Lenin that they like, and if that’s something unique to Lenin or not. Jodi suggests that for Zizek at least this is a formal interest. In one of the few things I’ve read by Zizek I understood him to say he wanted to read Lenin as something like Kierkegaard. My responses to that is then why not read Kierkegaard? One might also be able to make a formal argument using the example of fascist figures, or monks who set themselves on fire as protests. Why one figure is taken to be exemplary over another is not clear to me, though I have a number of uncharitable speculations (political or historical naivety, authoritarian political perspective, desire to be controversial, etc) none of which I could really make stick but at least some of which I don’t think I could give up.
    Mark, your comment got sent to moderation, don’t know why, and I’ve been out of town so I couldn’t approve it, sorry. I disagree entirely about the USSR being noncapitalist. This is a larger discussion on what we think capitalism is. The heart of the matter between us was whether surplus value production existed in the USSR and whether it was used to dominate. To my mind, the answer is yes on both counts. You say no to at least the latter, maybe to both. We’ll have to hash this out later, but I would like to note that the issue of wealth - mansions, being a billionaire - are a non sequitur. Capitalism is precisely a matter of power as far as I’m concerned, also something we may have to hash out later. But the differences you cite between the USSR and other forms of capitalism don’t mean it’s a difference of capitalist or not. There are important differences in various instantiations of capitalism, all of which are important to understand, and some forms of capitalism are certainly preferable to others (I’d rather be a Swedish citizen than a US one, for instance, as I think Swedish capitalism sounds more livable than the US version). In any case, given my understanding of all this, the claim about Lenin leading a successful revolution doesn’t hold any weight for me. We don’t have to agree on this, of course. Is your sense that Zizek thinks this as well? It does seem like one has to believe that in order to hold up Lenin as someone really important, otherwise could one just trumpet anyone who was really effective and decisively active with regard to their organizational projects. I’m sure there are reformists like this, but I can’t think of any off the top of my head. Saul Alinski, there’s one. Anyway, thanks for your comments.
    take care,
    Nate

    Comment by Nate — January 23, 2006 @ 1:42 am

27. T:
    Only successful revolution? Hardly! It was the first in a line of revolutions which overthrew cpaitalism: China, Vietnam, Cuba, etc. This cannot be ignored. It must be critically analysed, but not ignored!

    N:
    let me be clearer. As Foucault says, the problem with the Leninists is that they don’t think about the problem of power. what they did think about, exclusively, was the problem of capitalism. Now, if you’re going to reduce the latter to the former, well that’s just anarchism, i.e. infantile and petty-bourgeois, IMHO. There are two very distinct problems, one of power relations, and the form of the state, the other of economic domination of workers by bosses. Factories operated in very similar ways in capitalism and socialism, in respect of disciplinary power. But what happened with the surplus labour is different! In capitalism, the basic presumption is that it goes to the capitalists. In socialism, the basic presumption is that it goes to the state which represents the proletariat. in both cases a lot of it is skimmed by the state and its bureaucratic and military apparatuses, but the meaning of this skimming depends on the nature of the state. Or are we going to raise a demand like ‘To each according to his work!’, in which case children and the disabled appear as a bloated layer of parasites?

    Comment by mark — January 23, 2006 @ 2:42 am

28. Mark,
    This is a disagreement that we can’t solve here without a longer engagement, the conversation will just devolve into unhelpful exchanges of insulting descriptions (such as “infantile and petty-bourgeois”) and appeals to authority, none of which is a convincing argument.
    I don’t accept your distinction of power and economy, nor your presentation of the presumption of socialism and representing the proletariat. What happens with surplus value is different in more social democratic forms of capitalism too. So do capitalist firms that have higher rates of value turned into wealth for owners, for managers, and for labor aristocracies. We would both agree that these are not substantive differences that in any way make these examples not capitalist. To my mind surplus value under socialism is used to re-accumulate labor power as a commodity, ie, to re-impose domination. So, to me there’s not a substantive difference between socialist surplus value vs ‘free market’ surplus value such that I see the two as both capitalism. Are there differences? Yes. Is one difference that one is not capitalism? No.
    I think we know each other’s views on this at this point. I don’t have the time right now to work through them right now, unfortunately, and reiterating of these differences won’t be productive. I’d be keen to work this out when we can, though. I think doing so will likely require or be best facilitated by reading something together. Perhaps the Aufheben ‘What was the USSR?’ article would work. What do you think?
    And the demand closer to my heart is “to each according to ability”, or “fuck off and die” directed to bosses and scabs. “To each according to work” is the viewpoint of capitalism, with work defined and valued based on implicit political criteria.
    take care,
    Nate

    Comment by Nate — January 23, 2006 @ 3:58 am

29. Dude, way to go being a Leninist thug and fucking up my earlier argument.

    Comment by TCO — January 23, 2006 @ 4:32 am

30. I’m sorry, but I think any suggestion that Lenin ‘led’ anything is historiographic - if not ideological - nonsense. It’s a fantasy, that feeds further fantasies that revolutions require plans hatched by individual heroes. And it’s this fantasy which strikes me as both infantile and individualistic. Much more so than anarchs who gripe about authoritarianism.

    In any case, it’s fairly clear that Lenin shifted and changed his fundamental positions - in other words, he did much more following than leading.

    Comment by s0metim3s — January 23, 2006 @ 11:16 am

31. As for ‘petty bourgeois’ - such accusations do not make on a more authentically proletarian. Lenin’s understanding of the role of the party, as well as of its composition, not to mention his admiration for Taylorism (which was continuous with his understanding of the party) is very much a ‘petty bourgeois’ one.

    The less slingshot of Leninists would at least try and argue that this was necessary because of Russia’s ostensible ‘backwardness’ - a position I don’t agree with, but I’ve more respect for than claims that Leninism is more prole for being enamoured of democratic centralism. The two positions are the same, but it’s the latter which is the most voluntaristic, the most inclined to partake in Lenin-as-papa-hero, or the most cultish.

    Comment by s0metim3s — January 23, 2006 @ 11:32 am

32. It’s not historiographic nonsense. Lenin’s leadership is a fact, established by the centralism of the Bolsheviks. This doesn’t imply that the revolution was created by Lenin as some kind of messiah - it just implies he led it.

    moreover, Lenin was bourgeois, and certainly not proletarian, at least in origins. Calling anarchism petit-bourgeois was not meant to imply that Leninism is proletarian. After all, it’s a vanguardism which explicitly claims that they proletariat are incapable of creating a revolution by themselves.

    Comment by mark — January 23, 2006 @ 10:55 pm

33. Nate,
    I think this is a bit rich for you to ask what the appeal of Lenin is and then only tolerate answers from an anti-Lenin libertarian socialist perspective. I accept your wish not to get bogged down, however, and you propriety over your own blog.
    Mark

    Comment by mark — January 23, 2006 @ 11:10 pm

34. Mark, there will continue to be an historical debate over whether the centralism of the bolsheviks amounted to leading a revolution or a counter-revolution. I incline toward the latter view. Not least because Left-Wing Communism - An Infantile Disorder was (rather ironically) written so as to denounce those who fought against the introduction of Taylorism, piece work and the like. I’m not of the view that there capitalism has/had to be imposed as a prelude to communism.

    So, on this, we agree:

    it’s a vanguardism which explicitly claims that they proletariat are incapable of creating a revolution by themselves.

    But it’s this that I find offensive. Not simply intellectually untenable, but deeply offensive.

    In any case, what remains to be written about Lenin is something about the nexus between racialised depictions of class, notions of Russian ‘backwardness’, and the rise of a state-directed Taylorism.

    And didn’t Medvedev write his book so as to claim that Gorbachev was the real heir to Lenin?

    Comment by s0metim3s — January 24, 2006 @ 3:39 am

35. Mark,
    I can’t tell if you’re saying this in serious or not. By not tolerating other answers I assume you mean the level of feeling bound up with my and others’ disagreement with you, is that right? Or do you feel like there’s been some move made to prevent you from saying what you think? If so, please let me know as I don’t want that. You’re a pal and I think you’re wicked smart. I am, to be honest, a bit surprised to find we have this disagreement on this subject. I wish I had the time to hash it all out right now, but I don’t. I did, however, offer to read something with you and to start what will probably be a longer process of political conversations. So, where you perceive non-tolerating is really not clear to me.
    All of that said, I do have no problem whatsoever with excluding people when I decide to. I did so with a troll earlier. I see this space as one where I try to work through questions on things I want to understand better, and sometimes friends and comrades and friendly acquaintances joins in and say things that are often quite helpful to me. But I’m not like Le Colonel Chabert, who has a non-exclusion policy. When conversations happen here I see them as like a conversation in a booth at a diner or over drinks, from which people are relatively free to exclude whomever they like. My own criteria for exclusion in that setting are ones of respect and pleasantness much more than political agreement. (My criteria for conversation partner selection and for channging the subject are different.)
    Lastly, you are right though that I’m less interested in nonlibertarian answers to the questions I’ve got about why people like Lenin. I think that was pretty clear from the thing I wrote. My question was not one about the value of Lenin, I’m convinced there isn’t much beyond historiographic. My question was more like what value are apparently smart people who don’t have utterly bankrupt political judgment seeing in Lening? Another way to pose the question could have been “what in the hell is with smart people lionizing disgraceful authoritarian fucks?”, which would have made the point even clearer. It’s not far off of my response to the experience I occasionally have where people whose minds and views I come to respect and for whom I develop an affection turn out to be christians. Out of my interest in them, and out of a more general political interest due to the role of their discourse in my world, I want to know what they make of their beliefs, in part in order to find points of contact where I can talk with them on what they think are important matters while bracketing our disagreements (ie, without having to pretend we agree and also without having to fight about our disagreements). Put differently, it’s like, “what are you doing with your beliefs or what are your beliefs doing for you?” Knowing those things makes it easier to converse across differences in beliefs, and sometimes (though I rarely do so) to propose alternative beliefs that might serve the same functions. Basta.
    take care,
    Nate

    Comment by Nate — January 24, 2006 @ 4:03 pm

36. Yeah, that’s this whole intellectual culture in which you can’t disagree with someone, you can only deride and assault them. I reckon that is sort of revealing.

    Look at something like Rabinowitch, Prelude to Revolution, or for that matter any serious non-Leninist analysis of the events leading up to November. The Bolsheviks were a picture of non-Bolshevism: not centralied, trying hard to stave off challenges from their left, risking loss to the initiative of anarchist ‘infants’ - far from being a vanguard, they were working hard to ride an explosive working class. That’s before the revolution. After, they immediately set about destroying the soviets, reversing worker’s control, then waged a huge, immensely counterproductive war against Ukranian anarchists for reasons more or less unrelated to the civil war. Lenin’s model for the Soviet economy was in fact drawn from his misimpressions of the wartime German economy, which kind of explains everything.

    But all this is besides the point. I don’t think more than a third of the Trots have read Lenin, or read him with any seriousness; this is in fact one way the sects are internally structured - there are hermeneuts who translate the bizarre, incoherent, irrelevant writings of the master into useful strategy, or just use their knowledge to cajole. And on the other hand, the ignorance about Lenin or the history of the Russian Revolution also helps Leninists behave in a good, unLeninist fashion. Sometimes. Mostly when they are not talking about Lenin.

    Comment by TCO — January 24, 2006 @ 11:19 pm

37. In case Mark’s concern about ‘tolerance’ here has something to do with the speed at which comments appear, or whether they appear at all, Blogsome has a tendency to relegate comments to moderation (and in some cases, they just get nuked by the spamkiller) for reasons I’ve yet to work out. It’s inconsistent, as far as I can tell - and even my own comments are being sent to moderation for the last couple of months or so. Understandably, such things are ascribed with meaning when there’s a debate on.

    Comment by s0metim3s — January 25, 2006 @ 1:10 am

38. Nate:

    I think we know each other’s views on this at this point. I don’t have the time right now to work through them right now, unfortunately, and reiterating of these differences won’t be productive.

    This is what I saw as ‘non-tolerance’. You have time to listen to people going, “Yes, I, like you, am baffled by the appeal of Lenin,” but when I try to actually offer explanations why people might think he was great, you don’t want to hear. This is a form of exclusion, although rather an unconscious one.

    As you go on to say, belying your claim that ‘we know each others’ views,

    I am, to be honest, a bit surprised to find we have this disagreement on this subject.

    I’m as surprised as you are by my views, as I haven’t had to assess what I think of Lenin for a while.

    Angela:

    it’s this that I find offensive. Not simply intellectually untenable, but deeply offensive.

    Yeah, but things that offend you are not necessarily untrue. Reality is a messy thing. Your attitude strikes me as a bit idealist/universalist/arrogant. Of course, that doesn’t mean you’re not right!
    BTW, I didn’t think the problems with posting comments were intolerance on Nate’s part.

    Thiago:
    The stuff you say is beside the point is, I think, exactly to the point: what actually happened in the revolution is what determines whether Lenin is someone worth looking up to. This comment is food for my thought, so thanks.

    Comment by mark — January 25, 2006 @ 1:53 am

39. Mark, I’ve no idea why you imagine you haven’t just defined ‘reality’ - and distinguished it from affect - in such a way that is neither arrogant nor idealistic nor universal.

    Comment by s0metim3s — January 25, 2006 @ 2:57 am

40. The best reference I can think of is the Solidarity pamphlet, written by Maurice Brinton, called “The Bolsheviks and Worker’s Control”. I don’t know if you can get that online, but there is usually a copy lying around Jura Books.

    Comment by TCO — January 25, 2006 @ 3:46 am

41. Angela, I’ll go you one better - I have no idea what you’re talking about! Are you saying that saying reality is ‘messy’ is arrogant, universalist, idealist or a definition? Because my intention was precisely to eschew defining reality.

    Comment by mark — January 25, 2006 @ 5:55 am

42. hi Mark,
    Sorry about that. I came off differently than I intended.
    To clarify: I was surprised by your views regarding Lenin and the Russian (non)revolution. Now I feel I know them to some degree. I feel I know them well enough to say with confidence that there are some very substantial disagreements between us. As I see it, addressing these disagreements will require a rather involved process (you may disagree, and if so, please let me know and how). I don’t have time right now for process as involved as I think that one will be. I am interested in taking that process up at some point (hence my offer to read something with you about this, which still stands). I say all of this as a sort of fair warning that I don’t think we can adequately address our disagreements here. I can see how that may have come off as a “shut up” remark and wasn’t meant that way. We can keep discussing this here as time permits (one good starting place would be your claim about the distinction between power and economy, a distinction which I don’t accept and which I think is close to the point where we part ways here). You’re quite welcome to keep posting here, I hope you do. It’s not that I don’t want to hear your explanations. It’s that I don’t take them to be explanations, because I think you’re wrong. I agree with the anti-Lenin comments. Feel free to change my mind on this (and to prove me wrong as to whether we can successfully have that conversation here and now w/out a larger project of reading and discussion). I hope this dis-spells the sense of nontolerance.
    take care,
    Nate

    ps- Angela, thanks the explanation re: blogsome, I should have done that. Poor hosting on my part. (To rectify, anyone want coffee or a beer?) I had to disable some of the anti-spam stuff here. Some things still get sent to moderation for reasons that are beyond me. I try to approve them as soon as possible once I find out stuff got sent to moderation.

    pps- This is the crux of the matter: a vanguardism which explicitly claims that the proletariat are incapable of creating a revolution by themselves. That’s a bad idea, and one which authorizes all sorts of underhanded and bloody activities in the name of the very people whose interests the perspective claims to represent. Given that one is capable of maintaing the in some ways very counterintuitive hypothesis that revolution is possible, I see no reason to limit the hypothical revolution-making capacity to the vanguard, other than either a) despair, impatience, or lack of imagination b) an ulterior motive c) an authoritarian bent or d) some other confusion.

    Comment by Nate — January 25, 2006 @ 6:13 am

43. Ugh, my fucking spelling. Sorry, hope that’s all clear. I don’t know how to install a preview button around here, I’m not a handy sort. Probably wouldn’t use the thing anyway so that’s no excuse.
    Also don’t know how to install a thing so that people could email me on the blog, anyone able to give me some e-renovation tips would get into my (admittedly easy to get into and hence perhaps of low value in the affective marketplace) good graces.

    Comment by Nate — January 25, 2006 @ 6:17 am

44. Posts on two other blogs taking up this stuff, one by Angela here and another by Quinlan here. Perhaps a future symposium on a work by Lenin (and/or responses to) is in order?

    Comment by Nate — January 25, 2006 @ 7:01 am

45. Nate
    last I heard we were going to read some stuff by some Zedong guy which might be some kind of way into these issues.
    Mark

    Comment by mark — January 25, 2006 @ 8:19 am

46. I’ve just written a fucking essay in response to this.

    Comment by mark — January 25, 2006 @ 10:37 am

47. I’d like to backtrack a bit to the original question that Nate posed of ‘Lenin’s appeal’, and twist it around a little. Jodi flagged Lenin’s ‘willingness to act’, and Franz puzzled over Tronti and leninism. As far as I can make out Tronti in the sixties and Negri in the seventies (taking into account that the latter flipflopped a lot on this front), Lenin and the party mattered because they provided the only tool which could ward off capital and the state’s efforts to disrupt the process of unfolding working class autonomy. They rarely put it that way, but their position seems in part an attempt to overcome what they see as the inability of non-leninist perspectives, from syndicalism or industrial unionism to the council movements, to provide an answer to this problem.

    I’m playing devil’s advocate here – I don’t think the ‘answers’ that Negri or Tronti came up do anything but create new obstacles to the process of social self-organisation, or whatever you want to call it. But you can see a similar kind of debate unfolding within Socialisme ou barbarie in the fifties, with Castoriadis insisting that some kind of non-leninist vanguard was needed … if for no other reason than to stop the statists from taking over a future councils movement (or so I recall the argument from what I’ve read of that time, more often via sources like Gombin’s The Origins of Modern Leftism than my poor efforts to parse the original French texts). Again, I can see Castoriadis’ approach creating a whole lot of its own problems if it was taken up with any seriousness, but I can also understand why the argument is being put for it.

    I can bore people for hours about dealings with the ISO right across the eighties here in Melbourne, but that would be unfair …

    Comment by Steve — January 25, 2006 @ 11:39 am

48. Hello, could someone point me to a commentary on the concept of vanguard in the writings of Lenin? I ask because I always thought this concept was at the center of the conflict between Lenin and the people he attacks in “Left-Wing Communism - An Infantile Disorder”. But I’m a bit puzzled over Herman Gorters reply to that pamphlet. How I understood the concept of vanguard in that pamphlet (which I by the way think is weak compared to other things I have read by Lenin)is that the vanguard could be “won over” to communism by means of propaganda, the non-vanguard part of the masses, however, could not, as propaganda could not compete in strength with the sorts of habits implied by pessant and pettit-bourgeoisie conditions of life. Some sorts of organizational intervention + ecceptional historical conditions is needed for these people to turn against “the old world”. So in this work Lenin does not seem to equate the vanguard with the party. The vanguard seem to include the greater part of the working class. The vanguard is not whats at the center of centralized command. Lenin does not seem to include himself in the vanguard. But I could be wrong and if so could someone point me to other sources?

    Herman Gorter, in his “Open letter to comrade Lenin” and i just gather that Gorter here speaks for the German-Dutch Left (including Pannekoek etc.), reply not by stating that the people excluded from the vanguard in Lenins writing really should not be. His reply consists mainly in the argument that if the communists of russia was dependent on the support of pessants etc. the communists of Germany could not be. He doesn’t seem to question the thesis that what Lenin calls the vanguard of the working class constitutes a ecceptionally important group when it comes to revolutionary transformation, what he question is that this group of people should try to build alliances with other people at all. There is only the industrial working class, every one else (including the lower middle classes, teachers, nurses and the like) should be counted as counter revolutionary.

    So it seems to me that if Gorter turns against the sorts of rear:ing Lenin after all advocates in the relation between vanguard and non-vanguard masses it is not because this is patronizing, but because what Lenin call the non-vanguard already should be counted as class enemy.

    So if I find Lenins position in the mentioned pamphlet problematic I dont think the ones he attacks in that pamphlet constitutes the non-problematic alternative.

    Comment by Franz Bieberkopf — January 25, 2006 @ 1:52 pm

49. Franz,
    Are you on the aut-op-sy list? If so, I recommend posting this question there. There’s several people there who could provide detailed answers w/ a lot of intellectual and historical contexts. I don’t know personally. I’ve only recently gotten over a “I’m not going to waste my time reading these fuckers” attitude, because I want to be better able to criticize.
    take care,
    Nate

    Comment by Nate — January 26, 2006 @ 3:39 am

50. Steve said, in reference to Tronti and Negri: “Lenin and the party mattered because they provided the only tool which could ward off capital and the state’s efforts to disrupt the process of unfolding working class autonomy. They rarely put it that way, but their position seems in part an attempt to overcome what they see as the inability of non-leninist perspectives, from syndicalism or industrial unionism to the council movements, to provide an answer to this problem”.

    The basic view I’ve got is that the vanguardists are a variant the state/capital impeding the autonomy of the working class (a la Mark’s “the class can’t do it itself” characterization of Leninism). How to prevent this disruption of the political recomposition of our class is the practical question par excellence. I suspect that theory has limited contributions to make to this generally, and the Lenin stuff less than most.

    Comment by Nate — January 26, 2006 @ 3:45 am

51. I have no idea what you’re talking about! Are you saying that saying reality is ‘messy’ is arrogant, universalist, idealist or a definition? Because my intention was precisely to eschew defining reality.

    Is that so, Mark? Then why, directly after you make this remark, do you suggests that ‘a lot of the behaviour of the Bolsheviks, Stalin, etc can be explained with reference to practicaly exigencies’? How does the notion of ‘practical exigencies’ work without recourse to a universalistic and idealist understanding of reality, and the arrogant presumptuousness of defining such?

    In any case, it’s your attempt to distinguish affect from ‘reality’ that I found puzzling. If you assume that ‘reality’ is already cut across by difference (not least of class), then it makes no sense to me to quibble about whether an abhorrence for managerialism is ‘true’. I said that I found the bolshevik’s adherence to Taylorism offensive. I can understand why others might not; just as I find the use of ‘cunt’ as a term of derision offensive, while I can understand why others might not. The argument here, surely, is not about whether one’s affective response is ‘true’ or not. But it’s always interesting to watch people who purport to be radicals try and rationalise their rather capitalist (or sexist) affective maps as if this might accord better with ‘reality’. I guess that in some ways it might, given what reality consists of. But, isn’t the question how to go about changing reality, or what passes for it?

    Comment by s0metim3s — January 27, 2006 @ 5:20 am

52. hi all

    Seeing as I saw my name mentioned I thought I’d weigh in. But be warned I haven’t read all of this massive comment thread. Maybe in a few days when I get home.

    On Oz LnR, I was peripherally involved towards the end of the organisation but it was pretty much Sydney people only plus one Newcastle guy (I’ve always lived in Canberra for those who don’t know). Anyway it started in the mid-late 90s on various Sydney university campuses out of the student lefty group (originally CP?) Left Alliance (or was it that other one with the similar name? Angela and Az would know). I think they were involved in some decent stuff but also never made much effort to decide on what they wanted the group as a whole to be and do. For me their worst flaw was their inability to divorce themselves from the farce that is the National Union of Students. It’s not a union of individual members but a federation of most of the Student Unions/Associations in Australia. Sort of like the AFL-CIO for students. LnR peeps held various minor offices in the NUS bureaucracy throughout LnR’s existence AFAIK while other LnR people were opposed to NUS.

    I went to LnR’s mini-conference in Feb 01 with a few other Canberra comrades. It was meant to solidify and expand the organisation (ie with us Canberrans and the far cooler group Revolutionary Action from Wollongong) with a constitution and similar bureaucratic stuff but it really marked the end of it.

    The email list, as Az said, was much broader than the org itself and it was lively til about mid-03. I had a bunch of pretty savage arguments on it with various people including Thiago. But he’s right, he’s nicer in person and when I see him once a year or so and we talk quite pleasantly.

    Some of the younger people who were in LnR are now some of the better comrades in Sydney IMHO although I certainly don’t know everyone in the Sydney anarcho/autonome/commie scene.

    On Trots, I tend to agree with Thiago. For all that the Trots are fucked in the numerous ways detailed here, too much is made of anti-Trotism (sic?). For the worst anarchists declaring your hatred of the Trots is the price of entry to their boring rackets. As if defeating the Trots would clear the path to revolution.

    This thread from a dull Oz anarchist forum should provide a good idea of what I’m talking about. My assault on the anarcho-puritans is on page 3. Haven’t thought up an insulting enough reply to their reply yet.

    http://bull.anarchy.org.au/viewtopic.php?t=110

    cheers
    Pete

    Comment by Pete — January 28, 2006 @ 2:27 am

53. hi Pete,
    Thanks for that. Can you say a bit about Revolutionary Action and the NUS? Re: the latter, what are student unions? We don’t have them in the US, I’m keen to know how they function and what they do. I’ll check out the link you posted when I get a minute. Last thing - I remember you being part of some thing, a mag or something (I think maybe with Anthony H?), way back when Chris and I were trying to start a magazine. Is that right? Whatever happened with that?
    take care,
    Nate

    Comment by Nate — January 28, 2006 @ 9:42 pm

54. hi Nate

    AFAIK some people who were in RA did have minor positions in the NUS bureaucracy but maybe not while they were in RA. One of the people involved was president of Wollongong Uni Student Union. But I think they generally realised how pissweak the student bureaucracies were and vowed never to go near them again. In general compared to LnR, RA was much less focused on the campuses even though a fair chunk of them were students.

    As to student unions - until this year every student at an Australian uni had to join. They do various things from running sports facilities, bars, food outlets, music venues as well as more trade union-like stuff of welfare and representation. They’ve long been a focus for all the student leftist rackets from the Labour party through the Greens and various Trots. The Liberal government has long wanted to get rid of compulsory student unionism and finally passed a bill banning it through Federal Parliament late last year.

    Nearly all the individual university student unions federated in NUS, which was formed in the late 80s after an earlier similar organisation collapsed in the late 70s. NUS did sterling service for the state early in its existence when it recuperated the fairly big movement against the new university fees into a harmless High Court challenge. NUS activity seemed to consist of 1) Organising one or two ill-attended National Days of Action every year against the latest government outrage against the unis 2) Lobbying ministers and 3) Spend most of its budget on a yearly conference in Melbourne where various student hacks got drunk, schemed, fought and fucked. All good training for a career as a politician or trade union hack.

    As for the zine, well Ant and I are still good mates but none of our several zine projects went anywhere.

    Cheers
    Pete

    Comment by Pete — January 30, 2006 @ 8:25 am

55. Their idea of a protest against the rampant racism currently fulminating Sydney was to have everyone wear orange badges on Australia day, to show unity and tolerance. I am 100% serious. The NUS would almost be an argument against studenty unions, except of course it isn’t a union.

    Comment by TCO — January 30, 2006 @ 10:05 am

56. Sounds like most folks here are still flogging an understanding of Lenin based on a repudiation of a couple of ideas, especially the vanguard thing, which he perhaps didn’t hold anyway. Even bourgeois scholarship has moved on since the ’90s:
    http://readingthemaps.blogspot.com/2006/10/new-light-on-lenin_27.html

    Comment by Scott — May 21, 2007 @ 3:23 am

57. hi Scott,
    I’ll definitely own up to having only just abouve zero knowledge on Lenin. I do plan to rectify that, in part because in general I just want to know works that were taken seriously by sincere past revolutionaries, and in part because I want to be able to more effectively argue against (self-proclaimed) Leninists I’ve met who I think are talking total shit. (I was part of a sadly too short-lived Mao reading group based on similar motivations, and I took a lot of good things away from it - that is, I benefited from reading Mao.) At least some of these (self-proclaimed) Leninists themselves put forward arguments like ‘the vanguard thing’ appealing to Lenin. A few caveats —
    I’ve not seen any of this in writing (just arguments I’ve had in activist circles) so I can’t provide you with examples. I’ll ask you to trust me here (ie, to presume I’m not a liar). Second, I recognize that these Leninists I’m thinking of do not make an argument against Lenin (if I didn’t say that then I would be making a strawperson argument). As part of that, I recognize that they may themselves have been really terrible Leninists, no more ‘really’ Leninist (however one judges these things) than they and many other lackluster folk are ‘really’ marxists. But in the short term it is these people who are part of my wanting to know Lenin’s work better and they do color my interpretation. I think this is reasonable on my part as long as I keep the last point (the difference between ’some Leninists’ and ‘Lenin/Leninism’).

    I expect I’ll still end up disagreeing with you on some things re: Lenin, but that’s neither here nor there.

    All of that aside, Scott, do you have or do you know of any reasonably short statement on why Lenin is an important figure to read? I’m sure we could both make such a justification for Marx. I’m just curious how you’d do so or how others do so for Lenin. (I’m not asking you to convince me to read Lenin, I’m already planning that for this summer.)
    take care,
    Nate
    ps- I’d love to hear more about your work on Thompson (Thompson and Althusser, isn’t it?) I’ve recently had a conversion to Thompson and like many such things I’m kicking myself for taking so long to get to that point.
    http://whatinthehell.blogsome.com/2007/05/07/did-it-take-me-so-long-to-read-ep-thompson-for/

    Comment by Nate — May 21, 2007 @ 4:43 pm

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