From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Sat May 06 2006 - 13:03:29 EDT
>>Are there any other OPE-Lers who have books that are about to >be printed? > >My English translation of Prof. Marcel van der Linden's historical survey thank you again for your translation work. >"Western Marxism and the Soviet Union; Criticism and Debates 1917-2005" will >be published by Brill in the HM series soon, though I don't know exactly >when yet. The book traces the evolution of all the main variants of Western >Marxist theories from Kautsky/Luxemburg/Lukacs/Korsch/Gorter etc. thru to >Alvater/Bettelheim/Mandel/Marcuse/Cliff/Operaism/Dutschke/Red Flag/Bahro >etc., in different era's of history, that were published in German, Dutch, >English, French, Italian, Norwegian, Swedish etc. Some of the authors cited >are wellknown, others rather obscure. > >It also features an extensive bibliography of original sources (mostly >excluded are the "official communist" views that reflected the positions >taken by Moscow and Beijing, because they are ruled out of Western Marxism). >Earlier (shorter) versions of Marcel's book appeared in Dutch (as his Phd >thesis) and German previously. > >One (not really spectacular) finding of the study is that, although the >Western theories offered implied errors of logic and errors of fact, and >mostly are a far cry from Karl Marx's own thought or dispassionate >scientific appraisal, the various theorists often did notice some important >problems of the Soviet Union. The theories also tended to change according >to the climate of the times. > >Jurriaan Hi Jurriaan, I am very much looking forward to reading this book. Is van der Linden a critic of state capitalist theories? I have grown increasingly skeptical of such theories, and wonder whether the point of them was to preserve in the face of the horrors of the Soviet system a metaphysical view of history in which only socialism could follow capitalism. yours, rb
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