Reconstructing Lenin reviewed by Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal

Tamás Krausz’s living Lenin

Review by Doug Enaa Greene

March 3, 2015 – Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal — With the end of the Cold War and the victory of capitalism, and the seeming defeat of “Marxism-Leninism” in 1991, it appeared we could at last bury Lenin. And certainly, who will mourn for the death of a Lenin encased in granite monuments with his words turned into a dogmatic religion to legitimise the Eastern Bloc regimes?

However, there is another Lenin who remains very much alive. This Lenin has been unearthed in recent years with the “Lenin renaissance”. Different scholars and political activists such as Lars Lih, Paul Le Blanc, Slavoj Zizek, Kevin Anderson, to name just a few have explored what remains very much alive in Lenin. While they don’t necessarily agree on all their conclusions, all of them have challenged Soviet-era mythology and anti-communist historiography by revealing the Lenin who fused a creative and dynamic Marxist theory to develop a revolutionary political practice to change the world.

Now, to this distinguished list, we can add the name of Tamás Krausz with the release of his magnificent book, Lenin Reconstructed. Although Krausz is a long-time Marxist intellectual and academic in Hungary, working in the tradition of Georg Lukacs, this is the first substantial work of his to appear in English. Krausz’s work aims to “reconstruct the history of ideas in Lenin’s thought, his sociological and theoretical views” (pp. 10-11). In studying Lenin, Krausz rejects the approach of the infallible Lenin of the Eastern bloc and the anti-Leninism of Western historiography, but approaches him from within Marxist theory and practice. It is only through this conceptual paradigm that Lenin’s theoretical and practical successes and failures can be judged…

Read the entire review in Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal