Haggle on Marxism

...It is fashionable to assert, as Wesson does, that "the predictions made or implied by Marx have nearly all been falsified by history...

...Were author Wesson objective and scholarly, instead of obsessively intent upon general denigration, he could have found many criticisms of Marxism-Leninism in the writings of Marxists...

...Surely he would have insisted that he was not a Marxist-Leninist, had he lived to see that development...

...Marx is reported to have declared "I am not a Marxist" in his exasperation with the exposition of his ideas by self-styled disciples during his lifetime...

...It was characteristic of Lenin that he could distort for his own purposes the words of Engels in the latter's critique of the draft program of the Erfurt Congress of the German Social-Democratic Party in 1891...

...It should be pointed out that Marx was involved in a study of the capitalist system, how it came to be, and what forces animate it and might destroy it...

...He is involved in attacking Marxism...

...More detailed was her remarkable statement in The Russian Revolution, written in 1918, where she noted that "socialism by its very nature cannot be decreed by ukase...

...In an address to the American Economic Association some years ago, Wassily Leontief, now a Nobel Laureate in economics, said of Marx's contributions...

...Unfortunately for him, the news these days is that to French, Italian, Spanish, Yugoslav, and British Communist parties, the Marxist-Leninist diktat is no longer acceptable...

...Yet Lenin, in State and Revolution, wrote, "Engels repeats here in a particularly emphatic form the fundamental idea which runs like a red letter throughout Marx's work, namely, that the democratic republic is the nearest approach to the dictatorship of the proletariat...

...He admits that the materialistic interpretation of history "was more original, but independent Marxists nowadays hardly take it seriously...

...He was concerned with objective social science and had little taste for speculation about the future society...

...Considering the impact of that theory upon such non-Marxists as Charles Beard, Vernon Parrington, Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, Thorstein Veblen, and C. Wright Mills, that is a strange statement...

...It is a fact that Lenin's concept of the party and its role, and his principle of "democratic centralism," were criticized and opposed from their inception both within and outside the Russian socialist movement...

...He advocated socialism but did not guarantee it...

...When, in 1922, Lenin introduced his New Economic Program, he commented that "it did not even occur to Marx to write a single word on this subject...

...You will find nothing in Marx on the subject of national economic planning, or multinational corporations, or scores of other concerns which preoccupy us today but of which he could not be aware more than one hundred years ago...

...Victor Lebow is co-chairman of the Columbia University Seminar on Business Practices and Society and the author of "Free Enterprise: The Opium of the A merican People...

...For example, he has three passing references to Rosa Luxemburg, but he fails to record the amazing insight and prescience of her critiques of Lenin's policies...

...What he fails to understand is that there are many varieties of Marxism, from Marx's Marxism to Engels's variations on his themes, to later revisions, amplifications, and distortions...

...Wesson appears to consider it a triumph of expose' to assert that Marx borrowed the labor theory of value from Ricardo...

...While he acknowledges Marx's enormous influence on modern sociology and anthropology, he sees it as an aberration of these social sciences...

...Aside from his early attachment to Hegel, his major influences were the French in philosophy (particularly Saint-Simon and Comte) and the British in economics (especially Adam Smith and David Ricardo...

...As for the technical contributions made since Marx's time to the progress of economic theory, "they are overshadowed by his brilliant analysis of the long-run tendencies of the capitalistic system____" Wesson, however, gives short shrift to Marx and his theories...

...He might have added (as Marx did) that Adam Smith had more than a glimmering of the same idea, and he, in turn, had it from the Physiocrats...

...He does make the point that Marx did not advocate revolution in all situations, for he did feel that socialism might be achieved through reforms and legislative effort...

...Wesson is a professor of political science at the University of California at Santa Barbara...

...But with the repression of political life in the land as a whole, life in the Soviets must also become more and more crippled...

...It would take an inordinate amount of space to detail all his criticisms, his reluctant admissions, and his distortions...

...While his publisher tells us that he is "a leading authority on Marxist thought," the sloppiness of his thinking and his distortions and misstatements of facts incline this reviewer to doubt his credentials...

...it would hardly be an exaggeration to say that the three volumes of Capital helped more than any other single work to bring the whole problem into the forefront of economic discussion...

...Engels had written, "If one thing is certain, it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of the democratic republic...

...Thus, he ignored the sharp difference between specific form and nearest approach, and beclouded the issue...

...Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains an active element____" Wesson does admit to some truth in Marx's views...

...Wesson appears to be ignorant of the fact that Marx's theory inspired today's institutionalism, of which Gunnar Myrdal is probably the chief practitioner...

...This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat...

...Generally, he fails to understand that Marx was in the tradition of the Enlightenment...

...the present-day business cycle analysis is clearly indebted to Marxian economics...

...Since I make no pretense to Marxist expertise, this review is based entirely upon the references mentioned by Wesson...

...The Continuing Success of a Failed Theory, has been designed to provide comfort and reassurance to the fearful, for its purpose is to demonstrate that Karl Marx "was a dismal failure," rescued from oblivion by the Russian Revolution...

...To Wesson, Marxism-Leninism is the definitive form of Marxism...

...In 1904 she attacked his organization of his party as undemocratic...