Status Updates From Main Currents Of Marxism: T...

The 2005 epilogue is laughably incoherent. Kolakowski does an "end of history" victory lap talking about how China is a great evil and anti-free trade and anti-war protestors are obscurantists opposed to progress while also acknowledging (but not conceding) that there is "great danger" to the rapid advance of technology that modern capitalism has proved unable to cope with socially.

The analysis of the New Left probably coincides with that of doctrinaire PCF intellectuals, just gives the impression of an old professor scared of the youth. The analysis of Mao's China ideologically is pure polemical nonsense, and he gets various points completely wrong. On these two phenomena he was writing far too early for an accurate analysis.

"...the student New Left especially admired negro leaders in the United States who advocated violence and black racialism." (1179)

Jesus, way to go mask off buddy.

Quick off the cuff and irrelevant dismissal of Heidegger's association with Nazism! One of the most egregious examples of nonsense in all three volumes! Genuinely caught me off guard!

Kolakowski almost takes Bloch's overcoming of death as a genuine immortality, which is a silly misreading, but reels it back to the Feuerbachian influence, which then means he made that critique for no reason, but to just get a shot in at Bloch. Just being petty here.

The wholesale dismissal of all of Marcuse's critiques of modern capitalism, in forming desires and technological, is very disheartening. By volume 3, he is not even engaging with the ideas he critiques except on a very basic philosophical level. The idea of Marcuse as the ultimate totalitarian, even further than Soviet Marxism (both dubious charges), would be funny were he not completely serious.

Kolakowski is right to treat Marcuse's Freudianism as downright silly, vague and contrary to much of Freudian theory itself. Ironically he treats Fromm much more respectably despite the vague and silly nature of his Freudianism! Another example of Kolakowski picking and choosing his tone based on his personal perception of a theorist as a political threat.

Kolakowski's critique of Marcuse's Hegelianism in defense of positivism is silly. Obviously Hegelianism had authoritarian aspects, but to pretend positivism was the absolute bastion of democratic thought (I am not denying its liberal wing) when it produced intellectual reactionaries like Taine and Social Darwinism is simply spiting Marcuse instead of reasoned analysis.

The critique of the Frankfurt School, Adorno in particular, is extremely dense and fascinating, provides good insight into Adorno's work and the non-Marcusian wing. Yet again, however, Kolakowski's analysis is hampered by the ultimate conclusion that this particular branch of thought is obscurantist and full of truisms and thus is to be summarily discarded with no further thought to it.

The section on Korsch is enlightening, but further proves Kolakowski's subordination of his political views to his scholarship. Were Korsch's views the same but in favor of the USSR, he would he condemned as an absurd obscurantist. Because he is an anti-Sovietist, he is treated gingerly and with respect.

The ultimate condemnation of Lukacs as a Stalinist puppet is silly, although the criticism of his contradictory attitudes towards literature and ideology are sound. The idea of Lukacs as an anti-rationalist concerned merely with political primacy is simple polemic, without merit of any kind.

Kolakowski's out of hand dismissal of The Destruction of Reason is ridiculous. He cannot deny the charges that Lukacs brought forth on idealist and vitalist philosophy and their influence on Fascism, so he must dismiss them as ridiculous and move on. Lukacs is not even adopting a doctrinaire or extreme Marxist position here.

Kolakowski's inability to grasp Lukacs' understanding of truth is hampered in that Tailism and the Dialectic was unavailable to him. For Lukacs' social dialectic and natural dialectic are separate; natural/scientific truth is different in its manner than social/political truth found in the class struggle. He is no "species relativist."

It occurs to me that the attack on dialectical logic does not confront crit. of formal logic raised by Marxists; his crit. of Marxist unfamiliarity with modern philosophy of logic is sound, but acts as though philosophy of logic is historically a non-problem or Marxists are silly for approaching it despite its very long history. Kolakowski charges of truisms hold some water, but only in that it applies to all logic.

Unsurprisingly, and like many others, Kolakowski detected a contradiction between Gramsci's "philosophy of praxis" and philosophical materialism, but his understanding of materialism in that section is deeply simplified and reductive. He cannot properly the contradiction that exists other than asserting Gramsci's primacy of historicist human praxis makes it so. I am not convinced by the four pages devoted thereto.

"The whole difference comes down to thie: that Trotsky believed himself to 'represent the historical interests of the proletariat,' while Stalin believed that he, Stalin, did so." (946)

Zhdanov did great damage to Soviet Marxist philosophy in his static and vulgar division of "idealism" and materialism, in which Augustine and Bauer or Spinoza and Holbach's philosophies would be considered equivalent based on their underlying ontology, without a real grasp of their historical development.

Historiography regarding the Terror and Stalin era in general, Arendtian in nature, doesn't hold up to modern academic historiographical scrutiny.

He again allows his anti-Stalinism to take precedence over academic rigor asserting no difference between the Deborinites and the "New Philosophy" led by Mitin et al. Both Sheehan's scholarship and Chinese debates of the 1930s provide ample evidence of genuine ideological differences, not just some manifestation of further party control over philosophy.

He lets his anti-communism take the lead once again; collectivization is such an evil that Soviet agriculture is said to have not recovered even into the 1970s, a pure fiction. His analysis of the Trotsky-Stalin split is salient in that it was personal animosity over actual theoretical difference; his analysis of the Bukharin-Probranzhensky debate is excellent. Sultan-Galiev deserved a longer analysis.

Not sure how anyone who read Plekhanov could conclude Lenin's philisophical writing is cruder than his; Lenin at least engaged with the philosophical currents of his day as well as read Hegel historically rather than Plekhanov's brief overviews and simplifications.

Impressive level of Russophobic analysis in discussing Russian history and pre-Marxian philosophy; not surprising from a Polish anti-communist I guess.

Kolakowski's anti-Stalinism means he has to defend the silly position that the Second International was the "Golden Age of Marxism" intellectually while having to recognize that nearly no one(especially Kautsky, Luxemburg, and Bernstein) aside from Jaures, Labriola, and to a lesser extent Sorel, had any grasp of philosophy beyond the most basic summaries written by Engels.

Theoretical-practical critique of Luxemburg is harsh but necessary. Her martyrdom has often overshadowed a critical reflection on her conceptual views outside of the realm of political economy.

Kolakowski makes more a compelling case for the "Engelsism" thesis than most, but still cannot deal with the stark contradiction that Marx was alive while Engels wrote much of his philosophical "innovation," and did not object either in private or public works. His refutations of LTV are interesting as a critique. I would like to see more contemporary theorists engage with the more rigorous theoretical objections.

I don't know about Kolakowski's insistence on "dehumanization," in that verbiage, as the key to Marxist critique of capitalism. Feels like his reading his dissident Marxism (although he had developed past it by then) back into Marxism, and then gearing up for a critique of post-1917 state socialism as bringing back that "dehumanization" under the banner of socialism. We'll see in 400 pages I guess.