During the twentieth century a number of competing accounts of Lenin’s theory and practice have sought to reclaim its true meaning from ossification under Stalinism. One account popular today is the Hegelian-Marxist interpretation of Lenin’s Philosophical Notebooks written in 1914 and 1915. According to thinkers such as Raya Dunayevskaya and Kevin Anderson, Lenin’s notebooks on Hegel’s Science of Logic represent a radical break from classical dialectical materialism. For these Hegelian-Marxists, Lenin’s acerbic remarks on Engels’s and Plekhanov’s dialectics reveal him as (...) the forerunner of Georg Lukács and Herbert Marcuse and represent a thoroughgoing reconceptualization of the dialectics of revolution. In this article I submit these arguments to the test of a fine grained textual analysis. I conclude, opposite to the Hegelian-Marxist narrative, that Lenin neither intended to nor accomplished a refoundation of Marxist dialectics in 1914. The notion of quantity-quality leaps Lenin adds to his works.. (shrink)

Nathan Coombs demonstrates that the Marxist science of history has been reimagined by a strand of contemporary French theory after Louis Althusser. Taking a comparative approach, Coombs explores the technical details of both traditions' historical sciences.

A critique of ‘beyond left and right’ ideologies, from red Toryism to techno-libertarianism.