Volume 5, Number 4 · September 30, 1965
You Can't Go Home Again
By E.J. Hobsbawm
Marxism: 100 Years in the Life of a Doctrine
by Bertram D. Wolfe
Dial, 432 pp., $6.95
Strange Communists I Have Known
by Bertram D. Wolfe
Stein & Day, 222 pp., $6.00
There are still some good reasons for writing another book about Marxism, but Bertram Wolfe has chosen by far the least convincing one, namely that Americans have not been told enough about it. This is a curious assertion, even if we agree with him that recent American (but not European) writing has concentrated excessively on the latter-day Marxism of the Leninist era, which he, reasonably enough, refuses to identify with Marx's own. It is possible to disagree with most of the biographical, exegetical, or critical literature about Marxism, but not to deny its bulk. Indeed this bulk is nowadays a major obstacle in the path of the lay reader, who approaches the subject with nothing but a simple desire to find out what Marxism is all about. Still, it is not beyond the power of the expert to draw up a brief list of available titles which would give the student a reasonable amount of information, and some of the gaps could be easily filled by translating available foreign works or restoring out-of-print English ones to circulation. No such list would satisfy more than a fraction of the experts, but then, neither will Mr. Wolfe's nor any other volume.
Review, 1765 words
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