David’s Reviews > Main Currents Of Marxism: The Founders, The Golden Age, The Breakdown > Status Update

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.