WeeklyWorker

13.12.2007

Hegel reloaded?

James Turley reviews: Sebastian Budgen Stathis Kouvelakis, Slavoj Zizek (eds) Lenin reloaded: toward a politics of truth Durham, 2007, pp334, £12.99

There are three named editors on the cover of Lenin reloaded, but one looms much taller over the project. This is a compendium consisting largely of papers delivered at a conference arranged by Slavoj Zizek, the first in a series edited by Slavoj Zizek, and with an introduction recycled almost wholly from a previous Lenin-themed book by ... Slavoj Zizek. It is difficult to work out exactly where the unique contributions of the other editors lie - Budgen does not even deliver any of the collected essays.

Further superficial curiosities arise. The aforementioned conference took place in 2001. Of the eight further essays, several were written before that. Indeed, the copious references to Seattle date many of the essays very badly. That it has taken six years to produce the volume is puzzling - particularly when one considers the rather scattershot nature of the contributions, lurching from the avant-garde theory of Alain Badiou to a typically populist text from Terry Eagleton.

This is apparently intentional - for the editors, rediscovering Lenin means the "compelling freedom to suspend the stale existing ideological coordinates" (p4). The project is therefore substantially negative - all that is required is that the contributor articulate his or her grievances through Lenin somehow (we shall see how tenuous this link can get).

Nevertheless, particularly in the second of the four sections, dealing specifically with philosophical questions, a certain coherent thread begins to emerge, centred on the incorporation of Lenin into neo-Hegelian Marxism and more generally his philosophical notebooks. Before considering this matter, it is worth examining in detail the contribution from the Socialist Workers Party's leading academic, Alex Callinicos.

Weber reheated

Callinicos's essay, 'Leninism in the 21st century? - Lenin, Weber and the politics of responsibility', is not his finest work - it is one of the most confused and banal entries in the whole book. The comrade begins by outlining some of the disservices done to Lenin by mainstream contemporary scholarship - the examples cited are Robert Service and the "execrable" Orlando Figes (pp18-19). Callinicos then laments the anarchistic bent of the anti-globalisation movement, which often tries to "exclude from anti-capitalist coalitions anyone who defends this idea" (of the Bolshevik-type party). The hypocrisy of such words is impressively brazen, if not altogether surprising - certainly the SWP have not been above stage-managing 'anti-capitalist' events.

Callinicos then switches theme abruptly to Zizek's enthusiastic turn to Lenin, conducted on the basis of the latter's total rejection of 'beautiful soul' self-indulgence and his willingness to assume the full consequences of taking power, "getting his hands dirty" as required (pp19-20). It is at this point that Callinicos introduces Weber, who distinguishes between two ways of doing politics: the idealistic "ethic of conviction", or the pragmatic "ethic of responsibility".

Weber, however, is swiftly denounced as a "neo-Kantian" for positing an absolute distinction between facts and values, and for a purely "instrumental" view of reason (p23). The next few pages (pp24-28) are then spent proving that Lenin's practice was of a completely different universe to Weber's ethics - despite the fact that these latter appeared only on the whim of the author in the first place!

The thrust of Callinicos's argument on this point is a simplistic one - if correct as far as it goes. Weber assumes that there is no way of rationally choosing between his two 'ethics'. For Lenin, there is no such rigorous separation, and Callinicos expends a great deal of energy showing that matters of theory were never far from his mind, and very much a guide to action. These are themes that are taken up later in much more depth by the Hegelian contributors, who see in Lenin's reading of the Science of logic a prescient statement of the transformative role of subjectivity in the world, but Callinicos skips over them.

Trotsky mutilated

In the next twist, the focus switches to morality - particularly Trotsky's tour de force on ethics, Their morals and ours. Before he deals with Trotsky in depth, however, he criticises Zizek's enthusiasm for the "dirty work" of revolution: "He warns us against sliding easily over the ugly things that must be done to rid the world of exploitation and oppression. Such warnings [can] take on an apologetic role" (p29).

This leads into a discussion of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's defence of the Moscow trials, Humanism and terror. Callinicos castigates Merleau-Ponty for implying that, in the case of the French resistance, the "resisters [were] proved right because Germany lost the war" (p30). Abominable as his book is, I think that Merleau-Ponty is done a disservice here. It is clear, even from Callinicos's selective quotations, that Merleau-Ponty's judgements on the 'historical correctness' of these events are based implicitly on service to the end of universal human liberation, just as are Trotsky's. Merleau-Ponty's distortions come from his "extraordinarily naive" (Callinicos's phrase) view of the Moscow trials.

Callinicos moves on to Trotsky, and criticises him first for asserting, in Hegelian fashion, that "the end flows naturally from the historical movement" (p32). Callinicos retorts: "As Dewey points out in his response to Trotsky, this involves the Hegelian 'belief that human ends are interwoven into the very texture and structure of existence'. This slide into the naturalistic fallacy, which is reflected also in the idea that ethical norms can be deduced from the 'laws of development of society', should not be allowed to obscure the fact that Trotsky's main point here is that not all means are justified by the goal of liberating humanity" (p32).

Firstly, it is interesting to note that Callinicos derives his main argument from the arch-pragmatist, John Dewey. His objection can be rejected out of hand since it simply is not true - the naturalistic fallacy would indeed entail the location of ethical norms in "the very texture of existence", but this is clearly not the case with Trotsky, even as represented in this text. If he is deducing ethical norms from historical development, then he ipso facto cannot be committing this fallacy.

There is certainly a sense in which a post-Althusserian such as Callinicos, not without justification, may consider History as part of that very texture of existence, but to use the argument in this way would be to commit the obvious fallacy of confusing the phenomenological-subjective lived experience of the world with the properly naturalistic view of culture as deduced from nature as such, associated with bourgeois-enlightenment philosophes. Callinicos uses these two textual butcheries to argue for the necessity of an "appeal to some general normative principles", but the genius of Trotsky's text is that it effectively explodes any such appeal by radically historicising it.

After Callinicos, the discussion turns to more philosophical matters.

Hegel reanimated

Just as, according to popular wisdom, truth is the first casualty of war, a philosophical symposium on Marxist matters generally cannot proceed very far without hanging poor Friedrich Engels out to dry - for his positivism, scientism and all manner of other theoretical sins.

The reader of Lenin reloaded, alas, will not find an exception to this rule. In this case, it is the work of neo-Hegelians - in two almost identical essays, Stathis Kouvelakis and Kevin B Anderson put the boot in: Anderson speaks disparagingly of Engels' theory of "'two great camps' in philosophy: idealism and materialism" (p126), and rather less plausibly states that "none of the major figures [of the Second International], including Engels, seemed very interested in Hegel" (p124); while Kouvelakis applauds Lenin's "irrevocable" break with "the way of dealing with philosophical questions inherited from the late Engels" (p173).

When faced with an intellectual ancestor who stubbornly refuses to come out and say what you would like to hear for your own philosophical purposes, you have two major options - melodramatically cast that ancestor out, or find in their oeuvre the truth just moments from bursting out. Marx famously used the latter method on the classical works of political economy; the anti-Engels brigade share the former, if nothing else, with Eduard Bernstein. Suffice to say, nobody in this volume ever actually embarks on a critique of anything Engels actually wrote - let alone a proof that this was substantially different to Marx's theses.

What, however, do they make of Lenin? Firstly, the early Lenin (that is, pre-1914) was not different philosophically from the aforementioned positivist/neo-Kantian heresies put about by the Second International at large. Materialism and empirico-criticism, the main intervention into matters of philosophy in this period (specifically 1908), uncritically cites Plekhanov throughout (Kouvelakis, p171). However, in the wake of the betrayal of 1914, Lenin suffers an "intellectual crisis" (Anderson, p125). He immediately sets about reconstructing Marxist theory, starting from its fundamentals - that is, Hegel. He moves "away from crude materialism and towards a critical appropriation of Hegel's idealist dialectic" (Anderson, p126 - my emphasis). This new approach bears fruit almost immediately, in allowing Lenin to relate more effectively to national liberation movements - for example the 1916 Easter rising in Ireland (pp128-37).

All in all, then, a heart-warming tale - after years of the thin gruel of Second International evolutionism, Lenin stumbles upon the dynamic philosophy of Hegel - a philosophy of the subject acting in history, of movement, of 'Leaps! Leaps! Leaps!' But, like all fables, it leaves a lot of unanswered questions. If Lenin was under the spell of Plekhanov up to 1914, and that spell is politically fatal, under what philosophical aegis did Lenin immediately condemn the betrayal? How was it that the vast majority of the Zimmerwald conference attendees managed to be loyal, anti-war leftists without embarking on an epochal re-examination of Hegel's Logic?

It is, of course, a matter of public record that Lenin did indeed embark on just such an exhaustive study, and was indeed very positively disposed to Hegel's enterprise. However, in the same period - as Étienne Balibar points out in his essay - he also studied in detail Carl von Clausewitz's classic Vom Kriege, and in "the following period explicit references and allusions to both Hegel and Clausewitz almost always go together" (p213). Balibar notes that Lenin's musings on Clausewitz are missing from the official Collected works, and they are certainly missing from the present Hegelians' treatment of how Lenin got to his 'new line' on imperialism - a staggering lacuna.

Stragglers enumerated

For reasons of space, it has not been possible to examine in detail all the essays. The book also includes a characteristically scatterbrained contribution from first-among-editors Slavoj Zizek and a poetic but ultimately empty work of Fredric Jameson (for once, this archetypal cultural polyglot seems lost for words). Domenico Losurdo writes interestingly on Lenin's approach to democracy, arguing that his contribution was substantially to radicalise it and claiming that "democracy cannot be defined by abstracting the fate of the excluded" (p240). Philosopher of language Jean-Jacques Lecercle performs an interesting reading of Marx and Deleuze-Guattari through Lenin's approach to slogans. Antonio Negri is on an old-school autonomist trip, Mario Tronti epigraph and all.

The wooden spoon of the whole enterprise goes to a dire essay from Sylvain Lazarus. He manages to 'prove' (that is, baldly assert) that all parties are today part of the state, and that "'revolution' is intrinsically bound up with the historicist vocabulary, and that its use ... is necessarily inscribed in historicism and consequently the present hegemonic form of historicism that is parliamentarism" (p263). Precisely how a political strategy can be a "form" of an epistemological position is left to the reader's imagination.

Lenin reloaded is a frequently interesting and occasionally frustrating read. It is very definitely targeted at academics, and its most thoroughly radical Marxist postures, being aimed at the sort of postmodernist who has given up on revolution of any kind, often seem tame to those of us who are actively involved in far-left politics.

It is often too unaware of what it is all for, however. This eclectic scattershot collection could have done with a little direction beyond the accidental confluence of a handful of Hegelians.