11.22.09
Van der Linden’s book on Kantian ethical socialism
Theories of Stalinism
— Paul Le Blanc
The Marxism of Leon Trotsky
By Kunal Chattopadhyay
Kolkata: Progress Publishers, 2006, 672 pages, including index, $25 paperback.
Western Marxism and the Soviet Union
By Marcel van der Linden
Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009, 379 pages, including index,
$20 paperback.
KARL MARX AND his comrades deemed their own approach “scientific,” as compared to “utopian” intellectual efforts on behalf of socialism, because they believed that practical efforts to challenge and ultimately replace capitalism with something better must be grounded in a serious study of economic, political, social, historical realities and dynamics.
Two biographies of Trotsky are out and I have glanced at both, unsatisfied, grumbling, mad as hell with the idiot left. Trotsky is no help. Forget him.
Thus I link to a third, but also to anything by Van Linden who wrote a most fascinating book on Kantian ethical socialism.
This work details the long lost moment of the Kantian socialists of Marburg at the end of the nineteenth century. Their influence seeped in the debates of Second Internationale but went nowhere, and confused Bernstein who used a Kantian twist from the Marburg school to end up by discrediting social democracy and Kant in the eyes of most leftists.
But the point is that Marxist theory is dead, and hankering after Trotsky isn’t going to help. That pipe dream has delayed the needed reckoning with Bolshevism which is a dead loss in toto.
Something like Kantian ethical socialism is the only hope for the left, and even that has already been ruined by Marxist scholarship on the subject. But the point is that a whole vein of socialism exists that is not psychopathic Marxism. We need awfully for the old generation to drop dead and for a totally new organism to rise in its place. A complete disconnect with all the hasbeens still trying to defend Lenin or resurrect Trotsky.
Trotsky was Stalinism lite, so I fail to see the fan club interest in his case.