Re: what is to be done with what is to be done? was Re: AUT: RE:

[Doug Henwood <dhenwood@xxxxxxxxx>]

Sebastian Budgen wrote:

>for what it's worth, I certainly don't hate you, although sometimes
>I think you do your very best to achieve this result, if you don't
>mind me saying so.

I'm certainly not trying. If anything, I try - maybe too much - to
make people like me. I had a pleasant time chatting with your comrade
Alex Callinicos at a conference in Virginia last April, in fact.

>Well, you'll be able to judge when the volume comes out, but the
>other papers were generally relatively scholarly attempts to engage
>at a greater level of detail with one or other particular element of
>Lenin's thought and relate this to contemporary problems.

As I recall there was almost no effort to engage with contemporary
politics at all. There was a paper on Hegel's influence on Lenin from
someone in the News & Letters cult; Fred Jameson talked about a dream
that Lacan had about Lenin; etc. Callinicos mentioned Seattle at the
beginning of his talk, but then he quickly retreated to Partyland.
Even though the conference was supposed to be inspired by the spirit
of Lenin's rethink of absolutely everything after the Soc Dem parties
supported their governments in WW I, there wasn't much rethinking
going on.

>However, Doug, you will no doubt throw this back in my face, but
>were you interested in writing a new piece that, for example,
>examined Lenin's writings on finance capitalism, state capitalism
>and so forth, and related them, even if very critically, to
>contemporary issues, that would be most welcome.

If you'd held the other papers to that standard, it'd be a very slim volume.

And who organizes a conference these days where 94% of the presenters
are male, anyway? That would have been a good place to apply some
fresh thinking to some old problems.

Doug


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