David Ames Curtis has added a “pre-script” to his Amazon.com critique of Helen Arnold’s translation of A Society Adrift by Cornelius Castoriadis (for an introduction to the matter, see my earlier post, “Castoriadis In Translation“). The particulars of the ongoing conflict are a little hard to follow (in addition to Arnold, it involves the Castoriadis […]
I never ceased to be amazed at the amount of S.W.P. nostalgia floating around out there (Alan Wald, Paul Le Blanc, etc). One consistent thread in much of this school of thought is the unnecessity of the many splits the party underwent in its history (for one example, see Paul Le Blanc’s “What Happened to […]
The Hathi Trust Digital Library has made available a full-view image of the first edition of Ernst Bloch’s Geist der Utopie. Bloch was to publish a revised edition in 1923, but the one available here is the original 1918 version. A partial English translation of the book’s final section, “Karl Marx, Death, and the Apocalypse,” […]
The Marxists Internet Archive has made available a 1954 piece by Raya Dunayevskaya on the deeply reactionary nature of the Communist Control Act (“On Both Sides of the Iron Curtain“), which, despite a few successful legal challenges since its passage, is still in effect. It appeared as her regular unsigned column in the September 18 […]
I have created a list on OCLC’s WorldCat titled “Books Reviewed on Criticism &c.” As of this writing, there are just a total of 41 titles on it, but I’m sure I’ve missed a few books that I may have mentioned in passing. WorldCat isn’t much fun to look at, but the sheer volume of […]
Trinity of Passion: the Literary Left and the Antifascist Crusade University of North Carolina Press, 2007, (319 pages). Alan Wald, a cultural historian of the U.S. left and editorial board member of Against the Current, is now midway through a projected trilogy on leftist writers of the twentieth century. Trinity of Passion: the Literary Left […]
The Marxists Internet Archive has made available the 1953 column by Raya Dunayevskaya (“Intellectuals and the Radical Workers“) that I mentioned in an earlier post. This version, which appeared in Correspondence, is a little fuller account of the encounter of A.J. Muste and the American Workers Party with the radical intellectuals of the 1930s than […]
Paresh Chattopadhyay has published a review of a collection of socialist writings edited by Irfan Habib, a prominent Marxist historian of Mughal India, in the most recent issue of Economic and Political Weekly (Vol. 45, Issue 41; Oct. 9-15, 2010). As usual, Chattopadhyay does not let his scholarly respect for an individual deter him from […]
The Marxists Internet Archive has made available a 1959 column by Raya Dunayevskaya on Nikita Khrushchev’s speech at the 21st Congress of the Russian Communist Party (“Khrushchev Talks On and On“). Dunayevskaya’s comments on the Russia-China tensions, as well as those on Khrushchev’s main concern, raising the low productivity of the Russian worker, are insightful. […]
The French philosopher and political theorist Claude Lefort has passed away at the age of 86. Lefort was a co-thinker of Cornelius Castoriadis when the two worked together on the journal Socialisme or Barbarie (Lefort’s pseudonym was Montal). He last contributed to the journal in 1956 and split with Henri Simon to form a group […]
Criticism &c. 