When: Wednesday, December 14, 6:30 PM
Where: News and Letters Library, 228 S. Wabash Ave., Room 230, Chicago
News and Letters Committees invites you to a meeting on
Hegel and Lenin
Part of a series of discussions on Liberation and organization: philosophy and revolution
Organization is crucial as we fight to change our oppressive reality of exploitation of labor, racism, sexism, hatred and discrimination against LGBTQ people, and outright wars on civilians, as in Syria, Yemen, and Congo.
From Black Lives Matter to Women’s Liberation and from Occupy Wall Street to the Fight for $15, movements for freedom have been looking for alternatives to discredited models of organization like the vanguard party of “Marxism-Leninism.” Yet organization of people from below and organization of liberatory thought have not yet united in such a way as to create the foundations of a new, human society.
Bring your ideas about revolutionary transformation to a series of discussions on the relationship of a philosophy of freedom to organization.
Hegel and Lenin
How can we move beyond Lenin’s concept of a vanguard party, not alone politically but philosophically? We look at how the dialectic of the Absolute in Hegel and the “self-determination of the idea” relate to establishing a new basis for revolutionary organization.
Speaker: Gerry Emmett, author of “World in View” column in News & Letters
Suggested readings:
Chapter 17 of The Power of Negativity, which includes:
• 1986 letters to non-Marxist Hegel scholars on the Idea of Cognition as the threshold of the absolute and how that relates to Lenin’s philosophic ambivalence, and on Hegel’s Third Attitude to objectivity
• Jan. 21, 1987, Talking to Myself letter on “the dialectical flow of the Self-Determination of the Idea” in the 1953 Letters on Hegel’s Absolutes, and
• Dunayevskaya’s last “Theory/Practice” column. (Alternative format in this pdf.)
Readings available via News & Letters Committees, arise@newsandletters.org / 312-431-8242 / 228 S. Wabash #230, Chicago, IL 60604.
You can find more information about the series at https://newsandletters.org/a-discussion-series-liberation-and-organization-philosophy-and-revolution/.