Ideologists tend to see the future in terms of the past. The pioneers of the Great French Revolution paraded as Brutuses. The Bolsheviks in turn imitated the Jacobins, hoping to improve on their predecessors’ performance while escaping their fate. Now …
The year was 1922 and the speaker was not a New York hardhat but Heinrich Mann (brother of the Thomas who was to become the oracle of Weimar Culture). From this source, the complaint sounds surprising; for Heinrich Mann had …
Who are they, and who has the right to speak for them? Oppressed nationalities find it difficult to get a hearing because those who pretend to represent them often are political adventurers who merely exploit them—be it for imperialistic purposes …
This April Georg Lukács would be 90 years old. When he died, four years ago, he was eulogized for a number of conflicting reasons: • To some, he was the guardian of orthodox Marxism and the only disciple who had …
Dear Mr. Buckley: I am writing to you today because I was delighted to hear that we share an interest in classical music. Unfortunately, that information came to me in a piece .of bad news: that you are closing down …
Bukharin and the Bolshevik Revolution: A Political Biography, 1888-1938, by Stephen F. Cohen. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. 495 pp. Among the fathers of the Great October Revolution, the brilliant and incisive L. D. Trotsky has long held the attention …
Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith. New York: International Publishers. 482 pp. When Antonio Gramsci’s Letters from Prison were first published, ten years after his early death, Benedetto …
At the press conference in Tehran—while solemnly announcing the raise of posted oil prices to $11.6 a barrel and the government take (correctly called royalty because it is the king who receives it) to $7—Shah Mohammed of Iran said: We …
What the Lord did on the eighth day the Bible does not state; it is permitted to speculate that He continued to rest and, for all that the last million years’ record shows, never returned to the hectic working spree …
When the devil is seen in conversation with the pope, one may wonder who is converting whom. And when both the governments of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. profess an ardent desire for detente, one may feel entitled to a …
There is no “iron law of organization.” No “iron law” of logic forces a labor party to choose either sectarian ineffectiveness or the shallow opportunism and the bureaucratic machine rule of a mass party. Observers of the German Social Democrats …
Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom, by Hugh Thomas. New York: Harper & Row. 1696 pp. Guerrillas in Power: The Course of the Cuban Revolution, by K. S. Karol. Translated from the French by Arnold Pomerans. New York: Hill & Wang. …
Let us assume that at some time during the seventies the United States will have withdrawn the last GI from Vietnam, that other GIs are preparing to leave Germany and Japan, that Taiwan is again Chinese, Okinawa Japanese, and most other …
IN 1959, THE GERMAN SOCIAL DEMOCRATS adopted a new program. At the same time, the British Labour party also adopted a new program. Each of the two was trying to shed the image of a Marxist workers’ party and to …
One can approach the phenomenon of fascism from various angles. The first analyses, mostly by Communist writers, explained it simply as the dictatorship of monopoly capital (a thesis that still lingers in Franz Neumann’s Behemoth, 1941, and Ignazio Silone’s School for Dictators, …
