The Soviet debates in the 1920s over what is Marxism are quite interesting. Such debates occurred across a wide variety of different disciplines, as people attempted to figure out what was the correct Marxist approach to philosophy, or what was the true Marxist psychology, or what was the correct Marxist approach to the arts.
Those sorts of discussions and debates promoted an intellectual pluralism in the Soviet Union that persisted until it was suppressed by Stalin. Although, years later, some of these debates were revisited during the time of the Khrushchev thaw.
Jim Farmelant http://independent.academia.edu/JimFarmelant
---------- Original Message ---------- From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> To: "lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org" <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] The Ideology Problem Date: Tue, 04 May 2010 08:14:28 -0500
I'm not invoking "true" Marxism vs "false" Marxism. I am talking about the mere label: to what extent were the social revolutions/movemnts of the last satwo centuries "inspired" by what their partiicpants would have thought of as Marxism? And I answer as I did before: They were not in any sense Marxist movements. The richness of Soviet thought in the 1920s (until Stalin closed it down) consisted in a wonderful scramble to find out what Marxism was.
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