Reflections on Hegel, Lenin, and the American far-Right:

A conversation with Kevin B. Anderson on Hegel and Lenin

October 8, 2025, informal seminar on Lenin and Hegel:

Handout for October 8,2025, seminar on Lenin and Hegel

Reflections on “Hegel and the Heritage Foundation“

Right after the collapse of the Second International following the outbreak of World War I and the nationalistic turn of workers’ parties in Western Europe, Lenin immersed himself in a reading and study of Hegel’s Science of Logic and Logic, leading to his 1914-1915 Hegel Notebooks.

As Kevin B. Anderson has meticulously demonstrated in his book Lenin, Hegel, and Western Marxism: A Critical Study, Lenin’s turn to Hegel deeply influenced his theories of imperialism and of the state leading to the second Russian revolution of October 1917, as reflected in his major works from the period, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism(1917) and The State and Revolution (1917).

In this segment, we turn to Lenin’s reading and use of Hegel for critical praxis.

Core Readings

G.W.F. Hegel, Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).

G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic, Being Part One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), available at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/slconten.htm

Vladimir Lenin, Conspectus of Hegel’s Book The Science of Logic (1914-1915), 85-238, in Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 38, Philosophical Notebooks (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1972), also available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1914/cons-logic/index.htm

Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism: A Popular Outline (1917) (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1975), also available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/imp-hsc/

Vladimir Lenin, State and Revolution (1917), in Selected Works of V.I. Lenin, Volume II, Part I (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1952), also available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/

Kevin B. Anderson, Lenin, Hegel and Western Marxism: A Critical Study, 2nd edition (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2023).

Additional Readings

Tariq Ali, The Dilemmas of Lenin: Terrorism, War, Empire, Love, Revolution (London: Verso, 2017)

Louis Althusser, Lénine & la philosophie, suivi de Marx & Lénine devant Hegel (Paris: Maspéro, 1975)

Louis Althusser, “Lenin before Hegel,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press 1971), available at https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1969/lenin-before-hegel.htm

Kevin B. Anderson, “Lenin’s Encounter with Hegel After Eighty Years: A Critical Assessment,” Science and Society 59, no. 3 (Fall 1995): 298, available at https://marxismocritico.com/2014/06/02/lenins-encounter-with-hegel/.

Kevin B. Anderson, “Revisiting Lenin’s Hegel Notebooks, 100 Years Later,” Socialism and Democracy, 28, no. 1 (2014), available at https://kevin-anderson.com/article/revisiting-lenins-hegel-notebooks-100-years-later/.

Georg Lukács, Lenin: A Study on the Unity of his Thought (1924), trans. Nicholas Jacobs (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1971), also available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lukacs/works/1924/lenin/

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We also hope to organize a seminar on C.L.R. James

“I take the liberty of sending you a work of my own … a study of the dialectic of Hegel, not explanations of the dialectic but directly the dialectic itself,” C.L.R. James reportedly wrote upon completing his manuscript, Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin, in about 1948. “I regret to say that it is the only direct study of the dialectic that I know.”[i]

C.L.R. James turned to the study of Hegel’s dialectic, focusing on The Science of Logic, soon after he and Raya Dunayevskaya formed the Johnson-Forest Tendency within the Socialist Workers Party. The return to Hegel represented an effort, along with Grace Lee Boggs, to rethink the foundations of Marxism.

In this segment, we turn to CLR James’ inversion of Hegel and what it might contribute for us today.

Core Readings

C.L.R. James, Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin (1948), available at https://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/dialecti/index.htm.

Raya Dunayevskaya 1972: On C.L.R. James’ Notes on Dialectics: https://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1972/misc/james.htm.

Additional Readings

C.L.R. James, Grace C. Lee, and Cornelius Castoriadis, Facing Reality. The New Society: Where to Look for it & How to Bring it Closer (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 2006)

C. L. R. James papers, 1933-2001, at the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript, https://findingaids.library.columbia.edu/archives/cul-6910705; as well as Grace Lee Boggs and Raya Dunayevskaya (collections at the Walter P. Reuther Library at Wayne State University in Detroit.

Brent Edwards, “Black Radicalism and the Archive,” the Du Bois Lectures at Harvard (2015)

Evgenia Ilieva, “Notes on Dialectics: C. L. R. James’s Hegel,” Hegel Bulletin, 2024;45(1):144-165. doi:10.1017/hgl.2024.12.

John H. McClendon, C.L.R. James’s Notes on Dialectics: Left Hegelianism or Marxism-Leninism? (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004).

Additional Resources

Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003) (last chapter includes discussion of International African Opinion, the journal CLR James edited in London with George Padmore and others in the late 1930s).

Notes

[i] Quoted in Raya Dunayevskaya, “On C.L.R. James’ Notes on Dialectics” (1972), note 1, available here https://www.marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1972/misc/james.htm.