5 June 2007 

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 

Part 1: Retrieving Lenin

1. Alain Badiou, One Divides Itself into Two 
2. Alex Callinicos, Leninism in the Twenty-first Century?: Lenin, 
Weber, and the Politics of Responsibility 
3. Terry Eagleton, Lenin in the Postmodern Age 
4. Fredric Jameson, Lenin and Revisionism 
5. Slavoj Zizek, A Leninist Gesture Today: Against the Populist 
Temptation 

Part 2: Lenin in Philosophy

6. Savas Michael-Matsas, Lenin and the Path of Dialectics 
7. Kevin B. Anderson, The Rediscovery and Persistence of the Dialectic 
in Philosophy and in World Politics 
8. Daniel Bensaid, “Leaps! Leaps! Leaps!” 
9. Stathis Kouvelakis, Lenin as Reader of Hegel: Hypotheses for a 
Reading of Lenin’s Notebooks on Hegel’s “The Science of Logic” 

Part 3: War and Imperialism

10. Etienne Balibar, The Philosophical Moment in Politics Determined 
by War: Lenin 1914-16 
11. Georges Labica, From Imperialism to Globalization 
12. Domenico Losurdo, Lenin and Herrenvolk Democracy 

Part 4: Politics and its Subject

13. Sylvian Lazarus, Lenin and the Part, 1902-November 1917 
14. Jean-Jacques Lecercle, Lenin the Just, or Marxism Unrecycled 
15. Lars T. Lih, Lenin and the Great Awakening 
16. Antonio Negri, What to Do Today with What Is to Be Done?, or 
Rather: The Body of the General Intellect 
17. Alan Shandro, Lenin and Hegemony: The Soviets, the Working Class, and the Party in the Revolution of 1905 
 
 

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