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ON THE CENTENARY OF LENIN’S DEATH  
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Ruth Wilson Gilmore
January 25, 2024
Verso
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_ What do Lenin's writings show us about theory breaking into
practice, and how might the politics explained or implied in these
writings inform our grasp of what is to be done now? How are his
concepts of imperialism and self-determination relevant?  _

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Lenin was present in my early consciousness of politics and communism:
the Soviets and ‘us’. In this instance, ‘us’ was some
combination of Negro peoples – soon to become Black in the US –
who were involved in the post–WWII round of emancipation.
Universalist and internationalist in ambition, this movement linked up
and shared inspiration and analysis with global anti-imperial
liberation movements. The weapon of theory, as we understood it, was
meant to both guide and to respond to action. We had to repeatedly
assess our own resources. Was anything consistently reliable? We were
constantly debating and acting on our insights about how to fight,
which included making decisions about what we were fighting. In other
words, the struggles, and the people who fought them, developed
constantly – driven by the ongoing effort to know the dynamic
objects of our antagonism. We wanted to win.

In order to evade being absorbed – formally emancipated – into a
social reality that would perpetuate the domination that generations
had organised to undo, we had to not only ‘resist’ culturally and
politically but also build our awareness of organised violence as an
ensemble of activities impeding abolition in general. This ensemble of
activities turns every ‘what’ into a ‘where’ because violence
is always a spatial practice that produces and defines territories,
peoples, mobility, possibility.

If capitalism reached its highest stage at the beginning of the
twentieth century, it surely hasn’t run out of energy. Capitalism
saving capitalism from capitalism is a way to think about the mode of
production’s necessary dynamic through which it realises its
inherent imperative. Whatever problem production or accumulation runs
up against, innovation appears to resolve. Technological and financial
barriers to entry enable capitals that innovate with particular
time-space felicity to dominate and eventually monopolise. What Lenin
noticed in thinking about finance, monopoly, and imperialism is akin
to what many kinds of intellectuals throughout modernity keep noticing
too: tools for innovation comprise technologies of many kinds –
productive but also political, military, murderous. There is no
singular rationality of power, as Herman Bennett reminds us.

When asked if I’d like to write something to recognise the centenary
of Lenin’s death, I thought it would be a great opportunity to
share what thinking with Lenin might help us see as we make our way
in this unrolling present. Why should we read this collection of
Lenin’s writing today? What do these writings show us about theory
breaking into practice, and how might the politics explained or
implied in these writings inform our analytical and practical grasp of
what is to be done now? How are the two key concepts – imperialism
and self-determination – explored here by Lenin  relevant? The
organised violence of imperialism continues to stalk the earth in the
form of its fleshly and ghostly remnants – accumulated
underdevelopment – and viscerally in contemporary unequal relations
of power that rush value upward, by way of elites, to the ‘economic
north’, wherever the owners might reside. But in its muscular
liveliness, self-determination hasn’t disappeared from the earth’s
surface, nor wholly been absorbed into the system of nation-states
mostly disciplined by debt and developmentalism.

We should read as though we are thinking with Lenin in his time while
also thinking about the struggle at hand, so that Marxism’s
contemporary practicality doesn’t get lost. This practicality
cannot be overstated, even if the frenzy of many debates obscures
underlying necessity. As an organiser active during the 1930s in New
York City explained, ‘We went out every night after supper to knock
on strangers’ doors. I’d say “I am from the Communist Party and
I am here to help you solve your problems.”’

In contrast to such theoretically guided practicality, a good deal of
mainstream Western Marxism seems culturally shaped by a quest for
truth revealed on the page. That might be because so many of its
adherents are themselves born-again historical materialists. Their
fundamentalism is barely Methodist (though method plays a big role in
the confusion), but rather more Calvinist. The sober assessment of how
the world works casts a shadow dividing the elect from the rest in
austere dismissal of politically meaningful conditions of existence
and analytically powerful categories of analysis. More than communism,
it would seem, the specter of Weber haunts the West.

There was always something about Lenin, to my youthfully vigorous
mind, that was other than the West. This was due in part to
reassuring if woeful presumptions about physique – eyelids,
cheekbones, and other aftermaths of the racist ‘science’ of
humanity that raged as Ulyanov came of age. But something else, too
– less easy to confess but viscerally there – a peculiarly
not-liberal universalism that offered theoretical muscle for the
struggle at hand as something we all could and should exercise.

One night in the late 1960s, during the point-counterpoint of
assassinations and riots, I wandered through town looking for my
father in hope of a ride home. He’d been invited to speak at a
teach-in, one of those noisy aftermaths to the din of police and fire
and sirens and bullets and protest, in which people try to craft
sentences out of crisis and churn. He had street cred. Whatever he
said, though most certainly in the style of harangue, would have
tightly followed the locally fatal contours of power and difference.
He would have insisted on how they at once originated
from _and _radiated in dynamic connection to liberation struggle in
general. Skipping that talk, I found my father’s car with the event
flyer stuck under the windshield wiper – his name circled,
annotated: ‘Looks like Lenin.’ 

An edited excerpt from Imperialism and the National Question by V. I.
Lenin, Introduction by Ruth Wilson Gilmore.
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_Ruth Wilson Gilmore is Professor of Earth & Environmental Sciences,
and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of
New York, where she is also Director of the Center for Place, Culture,
and Politics. She is the author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus,
Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. _

_Verso Books is the largest independent, radical publishing house in
the English-speaking world, publishing one hundred books a year._

* Lenin
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* Self-determination
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* imperialism
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