[lbo-talk] Zizek on the Frankfurt School and Stalinism

Michael Pugliese michael.098762001 at gmail.com
Tue Mar 22 22:27:14 PST 2005


Lifted from H-HOAC, the H-NET list on American Communism.


>> We should also admit that we still lack a satisfactory theory of Stalinism.
It is, in this respect, a scandal that the Frankfurt School failed to produce a systematic and thorough analysis of the phenomenon. The exceptions are telling: Franz Neumann's Behemoth (1942), which suggested that the three great world-systems – New Deal capitalism, Fascism and Stalinism – tended towards the same bureaucratic, globally organised, 'administered' society; Herbert Marcuse's Soviet Marxism (1958), his least passionate book, a strangely neutral analysis of Soviet ideology with no clear commitments; and, finally, in the 1980s, the attempts by some Habermasians who, reflecting on the emerging dissident phenomena, endeavoured to elaborate the notion of civil society as a site of resistance to the Communist regime – interesting, but not a global theory of the specificity of Stalinist totalitarianism. How could a school of Marxist thought that claimed to focus on the conditions of the failure of the emancipatory project abstain from analysing the nightmare of 'actually existing socialism'? And was its focus on Fascism not a silent admission of the failure to confront the real trauma? << -- Michael Pugliese



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list