Lenin, day 3 (21 September, 2010)

The defense of Lenin continues:

1.      Lenin is not opposed to the spontaneous organization of the workers, but to allowing this spontaneous organization to fall prey to the imposition of bourgeois ideology.

2.      Hence, he does think the workers must be led by Marxist intellectuals, but only in the sense that committed socialist theoreticians must communicate Marxist theory, and the ideology of socialism, to workers through comprehensive political indictments (agit-prop).

3.      We must now consider whether this makes Lenin anti-democratic.

In one sense, this just seems obviously false.  Lenin is at pains to point out that a Social Democratic politics necessarily encompasses democratic political demands.  The political leadership of the Marxist intellectual consists, he says, in taking advantage “of every event, however small, in order to set forth his socialist convictions and his democratic demands” (17, III.E).  Again: “he is no Social Democrat who forgets in practice that ‘the communists support every revolutionary movement,’ that we are obliged for that reason to expound and emphasize general democratic tasks before the whole people” (ibid.).

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)

Luxemburg, Day 1 (7 September, 2010)

Before talking about Luxemburg, let me say a few words about her adversary in the text we are reading: Eduard Bernstein. Bernstein is best known for Evolutionary Socialism, a cleverly titled translation of his much less cleverly titled German book Die Voraussetzungen des Sozialismus und die Aufgaben der Sozialdemokratie (The Preconditions of Socialism and the Task of Social Democracy, 1899).  This is the book against which Luxemburg inveighs, and against which Lenin will also inveigh in What Is to Be Done?