[lbo-talk] Eagleton Reviews Hobsbawm

[Ismail Lagardien]

In 1976, a good many people in the West thought that Marxism had a reasonable 
case to argue. By 1986, most of them no longer felt that way. What had happened 
in the meanwhile? Were these people now buried under a pile of toddlers? Had 
Marxism been unmasked as bogus by some world-shaking new research? Had someone 
stumbled on a lost manuscript by Marx confessing that it was all a joke?

We are speaking, note, about 1986, a few years before the Soviet bloc crumbled. 
As Eric Hobsbawm points out in this collection of essays, that wasn’t what 
caused so many erstwhile believers to bin their Guevara posters. Marxism was 
already in dire straits some years before the Berlin Wall came down

 http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n05/terry-eagleton/indomitable

Ismail Lagardien
Department of Politics and Public Administration

Elon University
Elon, NC
27244

Tel: +1(612) 227-5037 (Personal)