A new post of mine on the Political Theology blog.
17 February, 2012
Lenin and the Partisanship of Freedom
Posted by stalinsmoustache under Lenin, philosophy | Tags: freedom, Political Theology, reading Lenin |[2] Comments
[2] Comments
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18 February, 2012 at 6:30 am
I just read this (in The Dictatorship of the Proletariat by John Ehrenberg): “The Commune Marx described was not just another working-class insurrection. The proletarian seizure of politcal power had begun to transform all the terms of traditional public discourse. Democracy and dictatorship had a qualitatively different meaning and had qualitatively different effects when organized by the productive majority than when they had been weapons of capital. When used by the insurrectionary workers, they became powerful levers with which the repressive bourgeois state could be transformed into its opposite.”
And, one of my favorite quotes from Marx: “The division between the personal and the class individual, the accidental nature of the conditions of life for the individual, appears only with the emergence of the class, which is itself a product of the bourgeoisie. This accidental character is only engendered and developed by competition and the struggle of individuals among themselves. Thus, in imagination, individuals seem freer under the dominance of the bourgeoisie than before, because their conditions of life seem accidental; in reality, of course, they are less free, because they are more subjected to the violence of things.”
18 February, 2012 at 1:42 pm
Hence Lenin’s daring argument that the soviet was the direct successor of the commune.