From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Mon May 08 2006 - 12:24:46 EDT
Jerry asked: How long is this book? I do not know exactly, that's because a few sections and chapters were added and so on, but I would think it would be well over 300 pages, more like 400 though, once they set the text it might come out different. It was a long job, took me the best part of three months (heaps of notes as well). Because it is an historical survey of how the critical theories evolved, it does not necessarily delve into the foundational questions as much as I personally like, beyond alluding to them. But just about all the theoretical variants are represented. However, Cockshott & Cottrell's theory isn't there, i.e. the Western Marxist variant that believes the Soviet Union was some kind of "state socialism", and Marcel doesn't really recognise the possibility that there might be *different kinds* of socialisms, some of which deserve support and others not, i.e. you might have a socialism, but it is not one you would support even if you were a socialist. But this is not entirely his fault, since most Marxists argued you either have socialism or you haven't (Marx himself of course explicitly argued contrary to the Marxists in this sense - i.e. he was well aware that there were all kinds of socialisms, propagated by different individuals and social classes, and he liked some, but vigorously opposed others - see e.g. Vol. 4 of Hal Draper's magnum opus). But I do like Marcel's book as a sympathetically critical statement which shows you what the problems and pitfalls of Marxist theorising are. In particular, he shows in detail how the Marxists generally had a unilinear view of historical progress - from feudalism to capitalism to socialism, and how basically that meant that societies had to be either feudal, capitalist or socialist, or in transition from one to the other, ruled either by the bourgeoisie or the proletariat or some kind of new class (Djilas) or new elite (Ticktin) (well, bar the odd theory such as Dutschke's concerning a Russian "Asiatic mode of production"). This explicit or implicit assumption shaped all the perspectives that people had, yet it often evaded the deeper questions concerning the meaning of human progress as such. That is, Marxists assumed that they knew the "general march of history" in advance, and when history moved in a different, unexpected direction, there were various theoretical contortions to reconcile presumption with reality (some of them so absurd, that they're in retrospect just wildly funny, even although at the time they were mooted with utmost seriousness). Marcel suggests in the end that really the Western Marxists could not explain the historically novel phenomenon of the Soviet Union (and its allied states) at all, without either twisting logic or the facts, or departing from Marx's own conceptual apparatus. And that makes for a thought-provoking read, especially since he dragged out some anecdotes and quotes from the archives few people would know. Jurriaan
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