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From International Socialism, No.26, Autumn 1966, p.35.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Marxism and Freedom: A Symposium
Ed. Herbert Aptheker
New York, Humanities Press, $1.95.
Marxism and Democracy: A Symposium
Ed. Herbert Aptheker
New York, Humanities Press, $1.95.
The writing on alienation is approaching encyclopedic proportions, almost always lacking both the profundity of the original Marx or the vivid working-class wisdom accumulated since his day. The first anthology is a case very much in point. The contributor from the University of Budapest tells us something unwittingly about the Hungarian Revolution with the workers at its centre: ‘The most important social source of alienation ... is the division of labor’ (p.130). But he is of the type and print familiar on both sides of the Iron Curtain, listing ‘apathy and indifference – the groundstones of the phenomena of alienation.’ The ending of his essay sees him come up completely limp with apologetics: ‘This weak example’ (p.140) is followed by ‘The example is trivial’ (p.141).
To compensate for the impact of workers’ revolution in Hungary the final essay is by a Russian, truly an international division of intellectual labour. It leads but to the grave: Stalinists were given to blaming non-socialist phenomena on the remnants of the bourgeoisie. Post-Stalinists simply blame it on the dead Stalin or the half-dead Kruschev, thereby always guaranteeing the triumph of dead labour over the living labourer, a consummate characteristic of the dominion of capital, whatever the politics. With nothing as awesome as Marx’s Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts to give them pause the contributors to the second symposium are sent into even more fruitless meandering. The overall impression they create is that Marxism and democracy are horses of entirely different colours that somehow, anyhow, must be placed in tandem and be rode to no one knows where. The less said about this source of confusion the better.
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Last updated on 17.12.2007