Lenin Reloaded: Toward a Politics of Truth

Edited by Sebastian Budgen, Stathis Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek

Lenin Reloaded is a rallying call by some of the world’s leading
Marxist intellectuals for renewed attention to the significance of
Vladimir Lenin. The volume’s editors explain that it was Lenin who made
Karl Marx’s thought explicitly political, who extended it beyond the
confines of Europe, who put it into practice. They contend that a focus
on Lenin is urgently needed now, when global capitalism appears to be
the only game in town, the liberal-democratic system seems to have been
settled on as the optimal political organization of society, and it has
become easier to imagine the end of the world than a modest change in
the mode of production.

Lenin retooled Marx’s thought for specific
historical conditions in 1914, and Lenin Reloaded urges a reinvention
of the revolutionary project for the present. Such a project would be
Leninist in its commitment to action based on truth and its acceptance
of the consequences that follow from action.These essays, many of which appear here in English for the first time,
bring Lenin face-to-face with the problems of today, including war,
imperialism, the imperative to build an intelligentsia of wage earners,
the need to embrace the achievements of bourgeois society and
modernity, and the widespread failure of social democracy. Lenin
Reloaded demonstrates that truth and partisanship are not mutually
exclusive as is often suggested. Quite the opposite—in the present,
truth can be articulated only from a thoroughly partisan position.

Contributors. Kevin B. Anderson, Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Daniel
Bensaïd, Sebastian Budgen, Alex Callinicos, Terry Eagleton, Fredric
Jameson, Stathis Kouvelakis, Georges Labica, Sylvain Lazarus,
Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Lars T. Lih, Domenico Losurdo, Savas
Michael-Matsas, Antonio Negri, Alan Shandro, Slavoj Žižek

Table of Contents

Introduction: Repeating Lenin 1

Part 1: Retrieving Lenin

1. Alain Badiou, One Divides Itself into Two 7

2. Alex Callinicos, Leninism in the Twenty-first Century?: Lenin,
Weber, and the Politics of Responsibility 18

3. Terry Eagleton, Lenin in the Postmodern Age 42

4. Fredric Jameson, Lenin and Revisionism 59

5. Slavoj Zizek, A Leninist Gesture Today: Against the Populist

Temptation 74

Part 2: Lenin in Philosophy

6. Savas Michael-Matsas, Lenin and the Path of Dialectics 101

7. Kevin B. Anderson, The Rediscovery and Persistence of the Dialectic
in Philosophy and in World Politics 120

8. Daniel Bensaid, “Leaps! Leaps! Leaps!” 148

9. Stathis Kouvelakis, Lenin as Reader of Hegel: Hypotheses for a
Reading of Lenin’s Notebooks on Hegel’s “The Science of Logic” 164

Part 3: War and Imperialism

10. Etienne Balibar, The Philosophical Moment in Politics Determined
by War: Lenin 1914-16 207

11. Georges Labica, From Imperialism to Globalization 222

12. Domenico Losurdo, Lenin and Herrenvolk Democracy 239

Part 4: Politics and its Subject

13. Sylvian Lazarus, Lenin and the Part, 1902-November 1917 255

14. Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Lenin the Just, or Marxism Unrecycled 269

15. Lars T. Lih, Lenin and the Great Awakening 283

16. Antonio Negri, What to Do Today with What Is to Be Done?, or
Rather: The Body of the General Intellect 297

17. Alan Shandro, Lenin and Hegemony: The Soviets, the Working Class,
and the Party in the Revolution of 1905 308

Contributors 333

Index 335