Ah, am I hallucinating? "Really existing socialism, " and , "True Socialism, " make their reprise. As if, many marxists from Rudolf Bahro from the ol' GDR, Paul Sweezy in, "Post-Revolutionary Society, " published after the debacles in Poland and the GPCR ("Great Prolatarian Cultural Revolution.") and Charles Bettelheim (see his long resignation letter to the China-France Frienship Society in the special double issue of MR circa 1978 if memory serves. Answered in subsequent issues by Joan Robinson, Michael Yates and a then maoist Robert Leiken, later a flack for the Contras.)
Is this 1952 or 2002? In all my reading of left periodicals and discussion bulletins, and not just those from the USA, from the period before WWII to the present, in the series, "Radical Periodicals in the US, " the Greenwood Press reprints, there are zillions of debates about the trajectory of the Russian, Chinese, Vietnamese, Cuban, Ethiopian, etc. Revolutions. Just one example, in Socialist Register in 1980, Ralph Miliband, examined the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. Frank is on the SR list. Has he any familiarity w/any volumes of the SR? Does he also anathmatize Colin Leys and Robert Brenner as Kautskyite Revisionist Devils as does another internut loon?
Tim Wohlforth is an acquaintance of mine, David I kibbitz w/ a bit. Usually disagree w/ him but appeciate his pov's. Bogdan, in the one time I've been around him seems the archetype of the Old Left intellectual.
Go to the HX section of the College of Marin library and skim these vols. if they have them. "Marxism and the USSR, " by Paul Bellis. "The Alternative in Eastern Europe, " by R. Bahro. "Class Struggles in the USSR, " C. Bettelheim. "The Prophets Children, " Tim's autobio. "Cuba: The Radical Face of Stalinism, " Left View Books. By a John Lister in the UK. Active in Trotskyist politics there. "The Evolution of Communism, " by Adam Westoby, a late UK marxist. "The Revolution In Peril, " by French Trot, Jeanette Habel, Verso Books. "The Tragedy of Afghanistan, " blanking on the authors name, a Pakistani leftist, preface by Fred Halliday, Verso Books, mid-80's. "Radical Paradoxes: Dilemmas of the American Left, 1945-1973, " by Peter Clecak, examines Sweezy, Baran, Marcuse, Mills and the Old and New Left. One interesting bit thee, btw, was to see that the CPUSA within a yr. of MR being launched condemned Sweezy as a Revisionist! Michael Pugliese