Re: AUT: Re: Henwood and Lenin

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

On Fri, 29 Oct 2004, Doug Henwood wrote:

> Harry M. Cleaver wrote:
>
> >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.
>
> That would be an interesting exercise but I'm not sure what purpose
> it would serve, other than a purely scholastic one.

My immediate purpose is scholastic - for a history of thought class - but
as I'm sure you've noticed not only Leninists have picked up on the PNAC
rhetoric of a new American "empire" and some of the critique of "Empire"
concerns the continuing relevance of the old theories of imperialism.

> I still don't
> know what it means to be a Leninist in an OECD country in the 21st
> century, and I don't see what relevance his writings have to
> contemporary politics. With Marx, there's something fresh and
> relevant on almost every page; Lenin's stuff reads like a series of
> pamphlets, written for particular moments that have long passed.

For my part, Lenin continues to be relevant in so far as his writings on
"what is to be done" AFTER "the revolution" illustrate how NOT to get out
of capitalism, e.g., "The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government", "On
Competition" etc. Same goes for Preobrazhensky, et al. The Soviet
experience, of which Lenin is an important part, is not one to be
forgotten.

H.

>
> Doug
>
>
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>

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Harry Cleaver
University of Texas at Austin
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Chiapas95 homepage:
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