But what does the Left have to say?

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Thu Jun 4 08:35:58 PDT 1998


Dennis R Redmond wrote:


>The Frankfurt School did. Adorno pointed out as early as the Fifties that
>the East was but the pale ontological shadow of the West, right down to
>hideous industrialism and exchange-value-mad elites lording it over their
>serf-workers. One set worshipped at the altar of Diamat, the other at
>Daimler-Benz, but the content was drearily similar.
>
>Heiner Mueller, the late, great, magnificent, epoch-shattering East German
>playwright, also predicted the 1989-91 revolutions in his amazing play,
>"The Hamletmachine", written in 1979.
>
>Marxism 2, Bourgeois Empiricism 0.

In a talk at Columbia last year, Duncan Foley argued that one of the greatest analytical triumphs of Marxism was those Eastern European Marxists who predicted the downfall of Soviet-style regimes, on the basis of their analysis of these as class societies.

Any idea of who exactly he was talking about, and what they had to say?

Doug



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