>>> Brad De Long <delong at econ.Berkeley.EDU> 05/23/00 01:49PM >>>
>
>CB: "Totalitarian megalomaniac" is the ideological doublespeak of
>the world's actually existing Totalitarian Evil Empire. U.S.
>imperialism.
It's supposed to be a quote from Eric Hobsbawm, as anyone paying any attention to this list would recall.
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CB: These days reports on Hobsbawn hint he may have gone bad the way Plekhanov or Kautsky did, an ex-Marxist, so to speak.
There are lots of Marxists who become anti-Communist later, leading anti-Communists intellectuals.
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When your list of ideological servants of U.S. imperialism includes Eric Hobsbawm, it's time to reset your processor and start thinking again from scratch...
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CB: Not really. Plekanov was the number one Marxist in Russia at one point. By 1917 he opposed the insurrection in October.
Some of Kautsky's early books are still good theoretical expositions. I just read and recalled that he put _Theories of Surplus Value_ together. By 1914 he was a renegade , ex-Marxist. His misleadership of the German Social Democrats may be the critical fact in preventing socialist revolution in Germany, which very well could have been the difference between world revolution and not in the 20th Century.
I forget the names of the famous U.S. Marxists who became Reaganites.
Things and people change. They even turn into their opposites, as Marxists put it.
CB