Volume 27, Number 14 · September 25, 1980
Dictator Marx?
By Peter Singer
Marxism After Marx
by David McLellan
Harper & Row, 355 pp., $18.50
The Two Marxisms: Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory
by Alvin W. Gouldner
Continuum Books/The Seabury Press, 397 pp., $17.50
Marx on the Choice between Socialism and Communism
by Stanley Moore
Harvard University Press, 135 pp., $12.50
Karl Marx and the Anarchists
by Paul Thomas
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 416 pp., $40.00
Marxism: For and Against
by Robert L. Heilbroner
Norton, 186 pp., $9.95
The one thing most readers have always wanted to learn from books about Marxism is how much responsibility Marx must bear for the authoritarian character of the regimes that claim to follow his doctrines. On the answer to this question our attitude to Marx must in large part rest. If the state created by Stalin can without distortion be traced back through Lenin to Marx's ideas, Marx stands condemned by his own offspring. If, however, these same offspring can be shown to be bastards fathered onto Marx's writings in violation of their letter and spirit, Marx can be cleared of the heaviest charge against his name.
Review, 5907 words
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