> On Mon, Feb 22, 2010 at 2:08 PM, Bhaskar Sunkara
> <bhaskar.sunkara at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> This article on Perry Anderson
>> http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200603/marxist .
>> I can't say that Cockburn and Hitchens are on the same terrain as
>> writers
>> (or have the same intellectual breadth). (I just read *For Marx*, so I
>> wasn't thrilled at his dig at Althusser though.)
>
> He calls him a 'neo-Stalinist charlatan'. I wonder what his definition
> of 'neo-Stalinist is' (perhaps this is a job for Mr Doss). If he
> includes as 'Stalinist' anyone who was a member of a Communist Party
> affiliated to the USSR, I guess - though what is the 'neo'? Althusser
> saw his work as an attack on Stalinism with the PCF and associated
> 'marxist humanism' with Soviet leadership who wanted to sweep
> 'Stalinism' under the carpet while maintaining its bureacratic legacy.
> Gregory Elliot's book on Althusser 'The Detour of Theory' gives a good
> political background.
>
> The meaning of Stalinist shifted a little in the British New Left,
> with EP Thompson (for example) using it to describe an intellectual
> tradition that did not necessarily imply political agreement with
> Stalin or attachment to the USSR - and so, he suggested, certain
> elements of Trotskyism were Stalinist despite the political
> antagonism. (In his essay 'Socialist Humanism'.) I think Thompson's
> polemical essay on Althusser has been hugely influential on the
> latter's reception ever since. Of course, today, even someone like EP
> Thompson can be called Stalinist by the likes of Tony Judt, and it
> seems to mean 'anyone who is now or has ever been a member of a
> Communist Party'.
>
> Mike Beggs
>
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