History of the Surrealist Movement Gérard Durozoi University of Chicago Press, 2002 This massive work, originally published in France in 1997, is actually a history of surrealism as it manifested itself in the visual arts—painting, sculpture, and film. The movement’s core literary expression receives short shrift in the book’s 800-plus pages. The political battles of […]
Tag Archives: Stalinism
The marking of the 70th anniversary of the Allied invasion of Normandy, the prelude to the liberation of France, presents an opportunity to make available two brief texts on the role of the Stalinists in the resistance. The first comes from the extremely interesting short book Internationalists in France During the Second World War by […]
The Marxists Internet Archive has made available two pieces by Raya Dunayevskaya on revolt inside the U.S.S.R. at the close of the Stalin period: “‘Russia, More Than Ever Full of Revolutionaries…’” (1954) and “The Revolt in the Slave Labor Camps in Vorkuta” (1955). The first appeared in Correspondence, the second in one of the first […]
The Marxists Internet Archive has made available an excerpt from American Civilization on Trial: Black Masses as Vanguard by Raya Dunayevskaya. This work was originally published as a pamphlet in 1963 (the title of the original was American Civilization on Trial: The Negro As Touchstone of History) and distributed in large numbers at the massive […]
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 […]
I have finally taken the time to read Robin D.G. Kelley’s Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. The book was written twenty years ago, but it is still widely read and its subject matter is of such importance that it warrants a brief review here. Kelley is a professor of American Studies […]
The Marxists Internet Archive has made available a 1957 critique by Raya Dunayevskaya of The New Class by Milovan Djilas. Djilas was one of the leaders of Yugoslavian Communism until he broke with Tito in 1954. Dunayevskaya’s critique is interesting for its focus on Djilas’s interpretation of Marxism rather than on the political ramifications of […]
The Romanian writer Panaït Istrati (1884-1935) seems to be virtually unknown in the U.S., although the recent republication of his first novel, Kyra Kyralina by Talisman House may serve to remedy this situation somewhat. Biographical information about him is not in abundance in English and, sadly, I have had to rely on the Wikipedia entry […]
The Marxists Internet Archive has just made available a 1953 text by Raya Dunayevskaya, “Malenkov Pledges H-Bomb and Caviar.” This document appeared in Correspondence, the newspaper of the group that had been known as the Johnson-Forest Tendency until 1951, when its members openly broke with Trotskyism and left the Socialist Workers Party to embark upon […]
The Marxists Internet Archive has just made available one of Raya Dunayevskaya’s analyses of the political aftermath of Stalin’s death in March of 1953. “Russian Regime Cannot Afford a Beria Show Trial,” which appeared in Correspondence on January 9, 1954, recounts the execution of Lavrenti Beria, chief of the Russian secret police, in the context […]
Criticism &c. 