Anderson is a member of "News and Letters" and a rather sharp thinker. The
group is basically a benign cult around the deceased Trotskyist Raya
Duneskaya, who was co-leader of the Johson-Forrest tendency in the SWP
during the 1950s. Johnson was CLR James and she was Forrest. This political
current believes that the Hegelian influence on Marx has been pushed into
the background and this has led to dogmatic errors time and again. If you
suppress dialectics, you lose the ability to see change going on in
society. Hence, you will miss new phenomena like black nationalism,
feminism, etc.
The importance of Lenin's study of Hegel should be obvious given this
context. When Lenin battled Bogdanov's empiro-criticism in 1908, he invoked
a version of Marxist philosophy that was rather schematic, to be generous
about it. The polemics are a rather stultifying version of dialectical
materialism that fits right in with official Stalinist philosophy and
politics.
When WWI began, Lenin was shocked to see the Socialist parliamentarians
vote for war credits. He wanted to understand why Karl Kautsky, the most
respected thinker of Social Democracy, would jump on the chauvinist
bandwagon. Thus he devoted himself to a study of Hegel. His notebooks on
Hegel run into hundreds of pages and they are the subject of Anderson's book.
I myself am a little skeptical about the need to study Hegel. I took a
seminar on Hegel in graduate school in 1967 and read "Phenomenology of
Spirit." Not a bad book, but a bit long-winded.
When I read Marx a few months later as part of my indoctrination into
American Trotskyism, I found that there was just enough Hegel there to give
the whole thing the power that it needed to understand change and process.
Hegel without tears, so to speak. So I have never really understood the
Hegel fetish of CLR James, Raya Duneskaya and their disciples.
Louis Proyect
At 10:25 PM 10/7/97 EST, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>Addressed to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>** Reply to note from [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tue, 7 Oct 1997 14:38:38 -0700
(PDT)
>>
>> I just happened to skim through Kevin Anderson's _Lenin, Hegel, and
>> Western Marxism (U of Ill. Press, 1995) who argues Lenin's position in
>> his 1908 Empirocriticism shifted by 1914 when he re-read Hegel to try to
>> come to grips with Social Democracy's support for war. Thus the
>> Philosphical Notebooks are Lenin's more mature view on such questions,
>> and Andersons also tries to illustrate this in later debates like over
>> trade unions. Anderson suggests Stalinism has upheld Lenin in 1908
>> and suppressed his later and more nuanced, dialectical approach. Engels
>> also gets a few boots.
>
>Bill, I haven't seen the Anderson work (have others?), but it sounds
>curious. Why would Stalinism promote 1908 Lenin except as part of the
>Lenin cult it wanted? just as it used Marx when useful. Paul
>
>
>*************************************************************************
>Paul Zarembka, supporting the RESEARCH IN POLITICAL ECONOMY Web site at
>http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PZarembka and using OS/2 Warp.
>*************************************************************************
>
>
