AUT: Re: Henwood and Lenin

["Harry M. Cleaver" <hmcleave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Doug,
I read your piece and enjoyed it - even tho it misses my biggest problem
with Lenin's Imperialism: his failure to analyze ANY of the pressures he
identifies (need for markets, need for capital outlets, need for raw
materials) in terms of capitalist attempts to cope with workers'
struggles. He has a lovely quote from Cecil Rhodes that points to this
but does absolutely nothing with it.

"And Cecil Rhodes, we are informed by his intimate friend, the journalist
Stead, expressed his imperialist views to him in 1895 in the following
terms: "I was in the East End of London (a working-class quarter)
yesterday and attended a meeting of the unemployed. I listened to the wild
speeches, which were just a cry for 'bread! bread!' and on my way home I
pondered over the scene and I became more than ever convinced of the
importance of imperialism.... My cherished idea is a solution for the
social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the
United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire
new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the
goods produced in the factories and mines. The Empire, as I have always
said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you
must become imperialists."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/ch06.htm

In notes for my course on the history of thought, I skip this very Marxist
preoccupation - tho I might work them in eventually - but do point out how
after seizing power Lenin moved as quickly as possible to solidify the
Russian-now-Soviet empire.
http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/368lecturenotesIII.html
Given his failure to understand imperialism in terms of class struggle I
guess it's not surprising that his own imperial efforts would soon be
faced with local versions of those same struggles.

Forgetting the Leninist people, it would be nice to have a version of your
paper focused on the first part: how the world no longer works exactly the
way Lenin thought it did. I'd like to have it for my students. I might
just use, or excerpt, what you have already written.

Harry


On Thu, 28 Oct 2004, Doug Henwood wrote:

> Sebastian Budgen wrote:
>
> >It will be published next year by Duke UP in the book collecting
> >together the papers from the Essen conference on Lenin.
>
> Interesting. I made a presentation at this conference - which the
> lead organizer, Slavoj Zizek, described as the only truly Leninist
> one, because it was so distant from the literal Lenin - but evidently
> it's not included in the collection. Too journalistic? Too unfriendly?
>
> Shortly after the conference, Zizek told me "They hate you." When I
> asked who "they" were, he said, "Callinicos and Budgen." I guess they
> do.
>
> Anyway, the talk is at <http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/Lenin.html>.
>
> Doug
>
> PS: Most of the papers were pretty dull, so save your money and skip
> this collection. And out of 17 presenters, 16 were men (if you don't
> count the woman who read Badiou's paper for him).
>
>
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>

............................................................................
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Harry Cleaver
University of Texas at Austin
Department of Economics
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