Denis Bosseau

While abolition and revolution might appear complementary, it is not always easy to see how they can relate with each other as part of a coherent conception of emancipatory struggle, nor how such complementarity might inform political strategy. In response to this problem, the objective of this paper is to contribute to a critical reappraisal of the revolutionary heritage of abolitionist thought by drawing attention to what Joy James called ‘the revolutionary era’ of abolitionist politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s USA, focusing on the organisational politics of George Jackson who I consider to be one of the period’s most original thinkers. The claim I would like the reader to consider is that the type of vanguardism once presented by revolutionary abolitionists like George Jackson can help us to re-evaluate the political and ideological basis upon which a greater socialisation of struggles can be built today in view of the constitution of potential counter-hegemonic blocks capable of contesting the demands that capital makes on the planet and our lives. To put it in broader terms, the paper hopes to contribute to a widening of the conversation on how the question of abolition can help us rethink revolutionary politics in the twenty-first century.

This thesis proposes to examine the ways in which certain questions which are often closely associated with V.I. Lenin – such as that of ‘what is to be done (?)’ or what the latter called the ‘conquest of political power’ (taking power) – can still be said to effectively haunt our collective political imaginary, looming, like spectres, over many contemporary social movements and struggles. But this project is also interested in examining how some of us in academia and beyond remain haunted by the very repetition of these questions, how these can both inspire fearful reactions and/or cautious optimism; how it affects the way some of us come think about the sense of revolution and of emancipatory politics. My chief argument is that the enduring presence of the spectres of Lenin in the history of struggles demands to be critically engaged with in terms of a living heritage; one that still weighs on us today. The question being: what is the nature of that heritage and what are we going to do with it? Contrary to academic contributions which would see Lenin(ism) as essentially dead and buried, something to be exorcised from contemporary social and political thought, this project intends to re-evaluate its contemporary significance as an indispensable interlocutor when it comes to rethinking questions of revolutionary strategy, political power and organised resistance against the damages incurred by real existing capitalism today. In that spirit, I have chosen to divide this project into two distinct yet interrelated parts, with part one (comprising chapters I and II) focusing on the heritage of the question of ‘what is to be done (?)’ and part two (comprising chapters III to V) focusing on the idea of ‘taking power’ or what Lenin commonly referred to as the ‘revolutionary conquest of political power’ as a unifying strategic aim of contemporary significance for democratic social movements and struggles for emancipation.