Lenin, Day 2 (16 September, 2010)

The accusations against Lenin: 

1. Opposes the workers’ spontaneous organization,
2. Thinks that workers must be led by Marxist intellectuals (“professional revolutionaries”), and
3. Is anti-democratic.

The first count bases itself in texts like the following: “the task of Social Democracy is to struggle with spontaneity, to cause the workers’ movement to stray from this spontaneous striving of trade unionism to come under the leadership of the bourgeoisie” (p. 9).


In order to address the accusation, we must answer 3 questions:

1. What is spontaneity? 
2. Why does the workers’ movement have a spontaneous tendency towards trade unionism and bourgeois leadership? 
3. How does Social Democracy struggle with spontaneity?

Lenin, Day 1 (14 September, 2010)

Luxemburg brought to our attention the central problematic of revolutionary Marxism in its pre-WW I iteration: the problem of organization.  Capitalism produces the conditions of its overcoming – its own gravediggers, in Marx’s words – but it doesn’t overthrow itself.  If the revolution is necessary and inevitable, it is because those gravediggers must and will start digging.

This problem of organization can be schematized as follows: [Sorry -- no diagram]

Luxemburg, Day 2 (9 September, 2010)

Last class, one of you raised the issue of whether Luxemburg’s opposition to the path of social reform implied a socialist strategy of making things worse in order to hasten the revolution.  I waved my hands a bit, mentioned that this strategy has a technical name – heightening or accelerating the contradictions – and pointed to her discussion of unionism.  I’d like to tackle this in greater depth today. 

I want to start by looking at the case of technical innovation. 

Screening: The Weather Underground

The Weather Underground, a documentary examining the rise and fall of the 1970s radical group, will be shown next Tuesday as part of Cinema Politica.

Tuesday September 21, 2010 | Screening begins 18h30 | Venue: Leacock Buidling room 26 on McGill campus

Relevant Talk: James C Scott at Concordia

The Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Society and Culture at Concordia University announces:
Professor JAMES C. SCOTT: "The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia."
A lecture on Monday, September 20, 2010, at 7pm; Hall Building (corner of Bishop and de Maisonneuve), room 763.
Professor Scott is th author of : 

• The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (2009) 
• Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1998) 
• Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (1990) 
• Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985) 
• The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia (1979)