Joanna
Michael Pugliese wrote:
> Lifted from H-HOAC, the H-NET list on American Communism.
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>>>We should also admit that we still lack a satisfactory theory of Stalinism.
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>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? <<
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