The Road to Disillusion: From Critical Marxism to Post-communism in Eastern Europe

by Ray Taras

The history of reform movements in postwar Eastern Europe is ultimately ironic, inasmuch as the reformers' successes and defeats alike served to discredit and demoralize the regimes they sought to redeem. The essays in this volume examine the historic and present-day role of the internal critics who, whatever their intentions, used Marxism as critique to demolish Marxism as ideocracy, but did not succeed in replacing it. Included here are essays by James P. Scanlan on the USSR, Ferenc Feher on Hungary, Leslie Holmes on the German Democratic Republic, Raymond Taras on Poland, James Satterwhite on Czechoslovakia, Vladimir Tismaneanu on Romania, Mark Baskin on Bulgaria, and Oskar Gruenwald on Yugoslavia. In concert, the contributors provide a comprehensive intellectual history and a veritable Who's Who of revisionist Marxism in Eastern Europe.

216 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1991

About the author

Raymond C. Taras

Reviews

[Fernando Ramírez de Luis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting yet dated read on the developments of critical Marxism in the Socialist Bloc. Imbued with a clear Fukuyama-ish belief in the growth of civil society in most Post-Communist societies as a result of the shortcomings of Critical Marxism, it nevertheless provides a decent coverage of the works of many dissidents and theorists in all countries whilst paying attention to the specifics of each of them.