Viewpoint was invited to debate Lenin’s State and Revolution in a panel at the Left Forum. Check it out if you’re near New York City this weekend. Details below.
State and Revolution: Is Lenin Still Relevant?
Hosted by the International Socialist Review
Session 5
Sunday, March 18, 10:00am - 11:50am
Pace University, Room W511
New York City
Revolutions of the “Arab Spring” toppled governments but remain far from taking state power. Meanwhile, many activists in the Occupy movements are not certain that ought to be our goal to begin with. Lenin wrote State and Revolution towards the beginning of the greatest social crisis capitalism had yet witnessed, the “thirty years’ crisis” of 1914-1945, which resumed Marx and Engels’ conceptions of the state as part of a larger argument about how revolutions must deal with state power as part of a broader international strategy to end war, colonialism and capitalist exploitation and oppression. In this panel we revisit it to revive the classic three-sided debate between anarchist, marxist and social democratic visions of social revolution and state power and draw some strategic and tactical lessons for the emerging world order of the 21st century.
Presenters:
Salar Mohandesi is a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania and an editor of Viewpoint Magazine.
Todd Chretien is the editor of a forthcoming edition of Lenin’s State and Revolution and the author of a new introduction reviewing the background to Lenin’s book. He is a frequent contributor to SocialistWorker.org and the International Socialist Review. He is a long-time Oakland, CA-based activist and is currently a graduate student in US History at the University of California Santa Cruz.
Radhika Desai is Professor at the Department of Political Studies, University of Manitoba. She is the author of Slouching Towards Ayodhya: From Congress to Hindutva in Indian Politics (2nd rev ed, 2004) and Intellectuals and Socialism: ‘Social Democrats’ and the Labour Party (1994). Her forthcoming books are Geopolitical Economy: After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire (2012) and The Making of the Indian Capitalist Class (2013).
Samuel Farber was born and raised in Cuba and has written numerous books and articles, including Revolution and Reaction in Cuba, 1933-1960 and The Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered. His most recent book is Cuba Since the Revolution of 1959, A Critical Assessment (Haymarket Books, 2011). He is Emeritus Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York (CUNY).
Chair:
Sherry Wolf is the author of Sexuality and Socialism (Haymarket Books) and runs the Sherry Talks Back blog from New York City.
A few months ago, Chris Cutrone gave a talk on this subject. If you’re interested, you can access the audio and video of this lecture by clicking here.
Is there any audio or video from the event you hosted at the Left forum?
Posted by Ross Wolfe | March 24, 2012, 8:28 amIs Lenin still relevant? Only insofar as his life and work should serve to demonstrate the futility and downright risibility of so much left wing thinking. The man who informed the world in 1918 that ”Reality tells us that state capitalism would be a step forward. If in a small space of time we could achieve state capitalism, that would be a victory” surely bears much of the responsibility for the tragic confusion that has gripped political debate between state capitalism (or even simple nationalisation), and socialism/communism, which was historically – and ought to be understood as – a democratically-run world wide society in which there would be free access to all goods and services, common ownership of the means of production, and significantly, an absence of money (or any other means of exchange), wages, profit, and, of course, the state. The urgency for establishing genuine socialism/communism simply cannot be overstated (see http://andycox1953.webs.com/ ). Those on the left who persist in agitating for piffling reformist measures such as ‘A fairs days pay for a fair days work’ or who bizarrely feel it incumbent upon them to support the bourgeois pretensions of various ‘national liberation struggles’, are no less blameworthy for obfuscating matters, and setting back the day when the world finally rids itself of this odious wasteful destructive system of commodity production known as capitalism. This is something that needs to happen NOW, not fifty years down the line.
Posted by Andy Cox | March 28, 2012, 1:44 am