This lecture series examines the legacy of Lenin, the leader of the October Revolution, among contemporary leftists, social democrats, post-Marxists, postmodernists, etc. After three lectures, there have been participants in the chat seeking to steer the conversation in the direction of identity politics. Some of this has been for the sake of interruption and some of it the usual left postmodernism. Left postmodernism is the framework with which this now available publication by Daraja Books and Kick Ass Books, which has texts from around the world, including one from me, commemorates the hundredth anniversary of the death of Lenin. The first image after the table of contents is a postcard image of two children placing blocks into the shape of a ziggurat pyramid. This Socialist Realist work, titled "We Are Building a Mausoleum," is from the 1930s and painted by Olga Ludvigovna Della-Vos-Kardovskaya. This theme of youth, which functions as gay subterfuge, is doubled by the last set of images in the book, a collage of Socialist Realist images by Johann Salazar, with one of these people assembled around Lenin's dead body ("Lenin's Funeral" by Isaak Brodsky), and another a picture of Lenin in a casket with the word "Labor 20" stamped on top. The numbers 2, 20 and 2000 are commonly associated with gay hipster innuendo. The term grave is also hipster innuendo for the anus, as in Boris Vian's postwar novel I Spit on Your Graves. I won't belabour the details of the introduction or of the other texts in the book, except to say that such now safely decadent petty-bourgeois Marxism and postmodern leftist "skin in the game" asks for universalist macropolitics, which is what defines Leninism, to be reconceived in micropolitical terms. At best, it asks for politics to be conceived in aesthetic terms, but my sense is that in these times, where queer sexuality is standard academic fare, we're rather dealing with identitarian post-history. This and much more is presented in the words of a 1917 Russian Futurist Manifesto: "A Slap in the Face of Public Taste." After having just watched Todd Haynes' May December (2023) I feel that I can safely say that this is less a slap in the face than it is another expression of progressive neoliberal public taste, only with revolutionary subterfuge added to distinguish oneself from the liberals. This is not to question our comrades' desire to change the world, but rather a query as to what that means exactly if you are unable to say what you want to say - not that we are ever done saying what we want to say. The added notion that one will not be taking the "phallic" road to socialism, whatever that means, rather comes across as another bid for sexuality as Foucauldian slave plantation, or some other motivation of the obscene underside, like perhaps "Lenin was so sexy." Moving forward, it might be necessary to rethink what terms like scab and straw boss mean in a context where leftism is thought to have moved out of the workplace and into the so-called social factory of cultural and knowledge work, especially since there will no doubt be plenty of straight leftists who don't agree with gay leftists and their erstwhile "allies" on the terms of what it means to change the world - even and especially when people pretend that they're agreed. Otherwise, the lack of revolution will leave us with little more than the sentimental dross of Kiss of the Spider Woman or Raspberry Reich. In a recent text on the 50th anniversary of the infamous "Bulldozer Exhibition" of 1974, in which Soviet authorities demolished an unauthorized outdoor exhibition of nonconformist art, Vitaly Komar argues that when the avant gardes became the official artists of the regime, their role as Carnival Kings was emulated by Soviet elites, who used the artists' nihilistic energy to destroy bourgeois traditions for the sake of their own pursuit of power. Lenin, he argues, didn't like the Futurists.
Available at https://darajapress.com/publication/lenin-the-heritage-we-dont-renounce.