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