Articles tagged “Lenin; V. I.”

On Hegel’s Dialectic of the “Beautiful Soul” in the French Revolution and the question of  “ethical reality” in the political philosophies of Rosa Luxemburg, Raya Dunayevskaya and Gillian Rose; originally presented at a panel on “Marxism Beyond the Boundaries,” sponsored by the Hobgoblin Online Journal and the International Marxist-Humanist Organization, London, November 11, 2010  – Editors

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It is argued that today’s crisis is best confronted through a return to Rosa Luxemburg’s key contributions to Marxist philosophy viewed through the Marxist Humanist lens of Raya Dunayevskaya, with a particular emphasis on the relationship of theory to practice. This chapter originally appeared in Gender Activism: Rosa Luxemburg Annual Seminar, Institute for Social and Economic Research, Rhodes University, South Africa, 2008 (http://www.ru.ac.za/iser).  –Editors

Celebrating the Centenary of Raya Dunayevskaya  (1910-1987)

Video of meeting at Loyola University Chicago featuring presentations by Peter McLaren (UCLA), David Schweickart (Loyola University), Sandra Rein (University of Alberta), Ba Karang (West Africa), Kevin Anderson (University of California, Santa Barbara), and Peter Hudis (Loyola University). We have also posted the written texts or summaries for some of the presentations.

A report from the successfully concluded Founding Conference of the International Marxist-Humanist Organization, Chicago, July 3-4, 2010

It is necessary to look at Marx’s work as a whole, not fragment him into the economic, political, or philosophical dimension alone. In analyzing the global economic crisis, especially in Greece, we need to ask why so many of the current critiques from the left have stressed making the rich not the workers pay, rather than the uprooting of the capitalist system itself.  Here another look at Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Program alongside Dunayevskaya’s writings on the dialectics of organization and philosophy is crucial.  We also need to develop the politicalization of philosophy in light of recent events in Iran, Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine, and elsewhere. — Editors

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A student active in the support movement for Palestine discusses the dialectics of revolution and of national liberation in Marx, Lenin, and Luxemburg based upon a reading of Dunayevskaya’s work.  This is connected to a critical assessment of the Palestinian national liberation movement since the First Intifada of 1987.  Gender, globalization, fundamentalism, and the brutal Israeli occupation are discussed.

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Erich Fromm’s work is unfortunately neglected in academia today, in no small part because his expansive humanism is out of joint with many forms of radical thought popular in those quarters. In addition, university psychology and psychiatry departments have almost completely excluded Freudians or psychoanalysts of any kind, which leaves no room for Fromm there either. Among the larger educated public in the U.S. and Germany, however, Fromm continues to be read widely, as can be seen in sales of his work. Many assign his writings in college and even high school courses. I have used his Escape from Freedom (1941) for years as a main text in an introduction to sociology course. Students, whose response has been very favorable, encounter therein a clear and engaging introduction to social theory (Marx, Weber, and Freud), to the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Europe, to the anatomy of fascism and authoritarianism, and to a critique of the atomization of modern capitalist civilization and its culture industry.

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An assessment of Rosa Luxemburg’s life and work on the occasion of the publication of the Rosa Luxemburg Reader.  Among Luxemburg’s concepts discussed are socialist democracy, her critique of Lenin, and her analysis of imperialism. Recently Eduardo Galeano has referred to her concept of democracy in a critique of Cuba, while Slavoj Zizek has distorted her critique of Lenin in order to attack her — Editors

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A review of Georg Lukacs’s recently discovered manuscript, published as Tailism and the Dialectic. This previously unpublished book was written as a defense of Lukacs’s  History and Class Consciousness (1923) in response to attacks on it from within the Communist International by Abram Deborin and Laszlo Rudas. Originally composed in 1925 or 1926, Lukacs’s Tailism is somewhat of a disappointment in that it reduces the concept of subjectivity to a defense of the vanguard party. At the same time, Lukacs continues in muted form his earlier critique of Engels’s scientism and the book contains some brilliant insights on Hegel. It is unfortunate that philosophers like Slavoj Zizek and Trotskyist writers like Jonathan Rees have embraced Tailism uncritically today, using it to attack Rosa Luxemburg for having criticized Lenin’s single-party state — Editors

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This book takes up Lenin’s extensive but little-known writings on Hegel, especially his 1914-15 notebooks on Hegel’s Science of Logic. I argue that in these notes, Lenin broke with the crude materialism of his generation of Marxists and of his own earlier work like Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908).