Louis Proyect on Paul Le Blanc on Kevin Anderson on Lenin on Hegel

[Louis N Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The latest Monthly Review arrived in my mailbox this morning. There
is a review of Kevin Anderson's "Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism,
A Critical Study" by Paul Le Blanc, an ex-SWPer who is one of the
sharpest Marxist thinkers in the US today.

Kevin belongs to "News and Letters", a small "state-capitalism" left
group that is basically a harmless cult around Raya Duneskaya, its
founder. Raya Dunayevskaya was the "Forrest" in the Johnson-Forrest
opposition in the SWP during the 1950s. Johnson was none other than
CLR James. (I discovered from a reading of Paul Le Blanc's essay on
the first 50 years of American Trotskyism, contained in the book I
reviewed for the list a couple of weeks ago, that Raya Duneskaya's real
name was Rae Spiegel. Now I knew a certain Rae Spiegel who rented
a bungalow at Kaplan's Cottages in my home town in the Catskills
during the 1950s. Do you think they could be the same person, Scott?)

One thing should be added about "News and Letters" people. They are
the smartest and most well-read people on the left. They of course
belong in a broader left party rather than in their own tiny group.

I met Kevin at the last Socialist Scholars Conference and we hit it off.
He was on a panel with my good friend Joel Kovel, speaking on "Marx
as Multiculturalist" and spoke about a forthcoming book that contains
all of Marx's incidental writings on ethnology and anthropology, some
of which are available for the first time. In it there is a side of Marx
that is not commonly known. He studies many precapitalist societies
such as various American Indian tribes and comes to the conclusion
that a capitalist development stage would be harmful to peoples like
this. He said that Marx's hope that a socialism in Russia might directly
arise out of peasant communes had resonance in these writings.

During the discussion period I stated that this theme did not end with
Marx. Lenin himself started out implicitly rejecting Marx's hopes
when he attacked Russian populists who had similar beliefs, but
reversed himself late in life. His "On Cooperation" projects a rural and
village-base agricultural model for the USSR. Also, Mariategui, the
father of Peruvian Communism, held out similar hopes in the Indian
villages of the Andes.

This is from Paul's review:

The author is Kevin Anderson, who argues the contemporary
relevance of the political thought of someone who is portrayed as a
dead dog by innumerable capitalist boosters and discouraged leftists:
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Anderson's book, "Lenin, Hegel and Western
Marxism, a Critical Study", despite certain limitations, makes a
substantial contribution to the scholarship on Marxism, on Lenin, and
on the interrelationship of philosophy and revolutionary theory.
Specifically, this is the first book-length examination of Lenin's own
1914-15 studies of the early 19th century German philosopher, Georg
Friedrich Hegel. Lenin took up these studies at what would seem an
odd historical moment: the eruption of the First World War, the
collapse of the Socialist International, and the quickening of a
revolutionary upsurge that would yield both a new wave of anti-
colonial national liberation struggles and the Russian Revolution of
1917. Anderson demonstrates--far more thoroughly than preceding
scholars who have argued the point (such as Michael Lowy, one of
several whom Anderson approvingly cites)--that these in-depth studies
of Hegel's dialectical philosophy influenced the Russian revolutionary
in a manner that culminated in: (1) a powerful Marxist critique of the
so-called "orthodox Marxism" of the Second International, (2) a
penetrating analysis of the imperialist origins of the catastrophic
World War, (3) an original analysis of nationalism and national
liberation struggles, and (4) an innovative and radically democratic
approach to the questions of the state and revolution.




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