French responses to the Prague Spring: connections, (mis)perception and appropriation

Looking at the vast literature on the events of 1968 in various European countries, it is striking that the histories of '1968' of the Western and Eastern halves of the continent are largely still written separately.1 Nevertheless, despite the very different political and socio-economic contexts, the protest movements on both sides of the Iron Curtain shared a number of characteristics. The 1968 events in Czechoslovakia and Western Europe were, reduced to the basics, investigations into the possibility of marrying social justice with liberty, and thus reflected a tension within European Marxism. This essay provides an analysis specifically of the responses by the French left—the Communist Party, the student movements and the gauchistes—to the Prague Spring, characterised by misunderstandings and strategic appropriation. The Prague Spring was seen by both the reformist and the radical left in France as a moderate movement. This limited interpretation of the Prague Spring as a liberal democratic project continues to inform our memory of it

Unredeemed Marxism:political commitment in Bourdieu and MacIntyre

In different ways, Alasdair MacIntyre and Pierre Bourdieu owe an intellectual and political debt to Marxism. They belong to the same generation of critical scholars formed by an engagement with Marxism in the course of Cold War working class militancy, anti-imperialism and anti-Stalinism. These recent collections of their most politically committed writings represent important contributions to reflexive praxis today. MacIntyre's 'revolutionary Aristotelianism' is shown to be rooted in his Marxist analyses and practices of the 1950s and 1960s, while Bourdieu's critique of neoliberalism was informed by a decades-long engagement with Marxism in opposition to the pseudo-science of Stalinist apologetics. Political engagement is imposed on the intellectual, conceived after Pascal as a 'thinking reed', by capitalism's vast accumulation and destruction of social potentiality. Between them an effort is made to round out and deepen the classical Marxist inheritance

Totalitarianism and geography: L.S. Berg and the defence of an academic discipline in the age of Stalin

In considering the complex relationship between science and politics, the article focuses upon the career of the eminent Russian scholar, Lev Semenovich Berg (1876–1950), one of the leading geographers of the Stalin period. Already before the Russian Revolution, Berg had developed a naturalistic notion of landscape geography which later appeared to contradict some aspects of Marxist–Leninist ideology. Based partly upon Berg's personal archive, the article discusses the effects of the 1917 revolution, the radical changes which Stalin's cultural revolution (from the late 1920s) brought upon Soviet science, and the attacks made upon Berg and his concept of landscape geography thereafter. The ways in which Berg managed to defend his notion of geography (sometimes in surprisingly bold ways) are considered. It is argued that geography's position under Stalin was different from that of certain other disciplines in that its ideological disputes may have been regarded as of little significance by the party leaders, certainly by comparison with its practical importance, thus providing a degree of ‘freedom’ for some geographers at least analogous to that which has been described by Weiner (1999. A little corner of freedom: Russian nature protection from Stalin to Gorbachev. Berkeley: University of California Press) for conservationists. It is concluded that Berg and others successfully upheld a concept of scientific integrity and limited autonomy even under Stalinism, and that, in an era of ‘Big Science’, no modernizing state could or can afford to emasculate these things entirely

American Stalinism and anti-Stalinism

https://stars.library.ucf.edu/prism/1457/thumbnail.jp

The Bolshevik Party Transformed: Stalin’s Rise to Power (1917–1927)

The article was submitted on 17.01.2017.In 1917, the Bolsheviks promised the liberation of the working masses from exploitation. And yet, within twenty years, they had delivered a regime that was substantially more exploitative and repressive than that of the Tsarist regime they had overthrown. This article argues that more than a quarter of a century after the opening of the archives, we still misapprehend how it happened. Historians tend to see the process as programmatic, or planned and intentional: that the Bolsheviks were authoritarian by nature, or that Stalin hijacked the Revolution and satisfied his lust for power by building a personal dictatorship. The article argues that we have failed to grasp the extent to which the positive programme of liberation continued to motivate the Bolshevik leadership throughout the interwar period. But they had underestimated the obstacles to creating a consensual, participatory political order. Considerable progress was made overcoming basic illiteracy, but it was another matter altogether to establish a functioning administrative apparatus, to fight and win the civil war, and to rebuild a shattered economy. The breakdown of liberal (“bourgeois”) democracies in Europe encouraged complacency about the superiority of the “transitional” proletarian dictatorship. The struggle for power after Lenin’s death turned local organisations against inner party democracy. It did not seem appropriate to revive it either in the midst of collectivisation and rapid industrialisation. The survival of the Revolution and catching up to the advanced capitalist countries took precedence. But if we treat extreme political violence and dictatorship as ends in themselves, we will fail adequately to grasp the fate of the Revolution.В 1917 г. большевики обещали освобождение трудящихся масс от эксплуатации. Но в течение 20 лет они установили режим гораздо более эксплуататорский и репрессивный по своей сути, чем побежденный ими царизм. Автор утверждает, что спустя более четверти века после открытия архивов мы все еще остаемся в неведении по поводу того, почему так случилось. Историки склонны рассматривать этот исход как запрограммированный либо преднамеренно спланированный, поскольку большевики были авторитарны по своей природе, или же Сталин «оседлал» революцию и установил личную диктатуру, удовлетворяя жажду власти. До сих пор нет ясности в понимании того, в какой степени положительная программа освобождения народа продолжала мотивировать большевистское руководство в межвоенный период. Большевики недооценили препятствия на пути создания общественного порядка, основанного на согласованном политическом участии. Существенный прогресс был достигнут на пути ликвидации неграмотности, но значительно труднее было создать функционирующий государственный аппарат, бороться и выиграть Гражданскую войну, а также восстановить разрушенную экономику. Падение либеральных («буржуазных») демократий в Европе укрепляло ощущение превосходства «переходной» пролетарской диктатуры. Борьба за власть после смерти Ленина направила местные партийные организации на борьбу с внутрипартийной демократией. Возрождать ее в условиях коллективизации и ускоренной индустриализации казалось неуместным. Гораздо более важным представлялось выживание революции и стремление догнать передовые капиталистические страны. Автор отмечает, что если относиться к проявлениям политического насилия и диктатуре как к конечной цели советской власти, невозможно должным образом понять судьбу революции