LENIN’S LEGACY TODAY is an accursed share. Lenin is a specter haunting us after a century which has failed to fundamentally transcend the terms he set for revolutionary politics. The philosopher Theodor Adorno described this historical situation as one wherein “Philosophy, which once seemed outmoded, remains alive because the moment of its realization was missed.” The work of Adorno can be understood as reflecting on that missed moment for the realization of philosophy, which had been heralded by Karl Marx in 1844 as the proletarian revolution, and which the communist militant Karl Korsch had announced Lenin as symbolizing in 1923.
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FOR AN INTERNATIONAL MOVEMENT supposedly fading into irrelevance, the gathering on New York’s Upper West Side on Saturday, January 13, was remarkable: an auditorium overflowing with hundreds of people arguing passionately about where Trotskyism is going and how to get there. On one side were the Spartacists and the International Communist League (ICL), whose U.S. outlet, Workers Vanguard, has long been known for its wit, high intellectual tone, and pugilistic style.
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LAW IS A PRODUCT of the people’s will — its calculus exacts the “is” versus the “ought” of society. The science of law from the judiciary’s perspective is jurisprudence, but the science of law from society’s perspective is politics. Society’s drive to bring about conditions that are not possible is called its utopianism. Utopia conditions the psychic direction of society’s politics, the law has merely followed these inclinations.
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On June 24, 2023 at Trades Hall in Melbourne, Australia, the Platypus Affiliated Society hosted a panel on the legacy of 1968. The speakers included Andy Blunden, Alison Thorne, and Arthur Dent. Barry York provides his response to the panel.
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ON NOVEMBER 15, New York University announced the opening of a new Center for the Study of Antisemitism. Among its central goals, “the Center will research both classical forms of antisemitism as well as the ‘new antisemitism’ and its links to anti-Zionism.” With the hermeneutic suspicion of the anti-Zionist Jew and Marxist-Leninist I am, I ask: what is this “new antisemitism,” and what is to be done? Here, as I frequently do, I went to consult Lenin.
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