Spectres of Lenin : Contemporary Hauntings of a Fractured Left

For a broad section of the radical Left, it often seems as though any viable answers to the old question of what is to be done have to be predicated on the exorcism of Leninism and the spectres it conjures up – from the very question of political power and its conquest, to vanguardism and democratic centralism. But with the rise of far-right populism and the intensifying brutality of a complicit authoritarian-liberal order bent on crushing all that it cannot co-opt, can we still afford not to face such spectres?

In an effort to untangle some of the key points of tension that have fragmented the radical Left over the past 30 years, Spectres of Lenin examines the legacies of Leninist politics that still haunt our collective political imaginary today, looming, like spectres, over many contemporary social movements and struggles and those who seek to interpret their emancipatory potential.

Denis Bosseau thus asks us to confront such automatisms of thought, that still bring many of us to recoil at the very idea of Leninism ,and which threaten to reduce our political horizon as we confront the urgent possibility of rethinking what the political project of revolution could mean in the present global conditions of capitalist domination. Drawing on the works of both detractors and defenders of Lenin(ism), Bosseau proposes a political hauntology of the contemporary revolutionary Left, inciting constructive debate on our historical situation through the prism of a shared inheritance demanding to be engaged with anew.