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What Marx Really Said by H B Acton New York Schocken Books 1971 X 148 PP Dollar195 Paper

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34 views1 page

What Marx Really Said by H B Acton New York Schocken Books 1971 X 148 PP Dollar195 Paper

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620 Slavic Review

terms of intellectual history. Yet Howard is also adept at tracing the filiation of
ideas current within that remarkable group. (It may seem a trivial matter, but the
copy-editing of this book is appreciably less laudable.)
The study ends by presenting the dialectic as a theory or method "in need of
continual modification and renewal." And that serves as link, or as one link among
several, with the material of the Unknown Dimension, for the interwar Marxists
treated therein were engaged precisely in that task. Following two introductory
essays by the editors, the theoreticians are treated in three "generations": Andrew
Arato on Lukacs, David Gross on Ernst Bloch, Mihaly Vajda on Karl Korsch,
Romano Giachetti on Gramsci, and Stanley Aronowitz on the Council Communists
(target of Lenin's Left-Wing Communism); then Bertell Oilman on Wilhelm Reich,
Martin Jay on the Frankfurt School, Shierry M. Weber on Walter Benjamin, and
Jeremy J. Shapiro on Marcuse and Habermas; and, for the postwar period, Jean-
Claude Girardin on Sartre, Alfred Schmidt on Lefebvre, Mario Montano on Gal-
vano Delia Volpe, Robin Blackburn and Gareth Stedman Jones on Althusser, and
Dick Howard on Majlet and Gorz. The essays maintain a high standard and,
taken together, provide a convincing demonstration of the book's thesis that these
are the places to look for the most authentic continuation of Marx's project.
LYMAN H. LEGTERS
University of Washington

WHAT MARX REALLY SAID. By H. B. Acton. New York: Schocken Books,


1971. x, 148 pp. $1.95, paper.
This book is a welcome paperback edition of a work first published in 1967. Al-
though the title of the book (one in the What They Really Said series) is rather
presumptuous, the content forms a good and reliable short guide to Marx's main
ideas. Professor Acton begins with a chapter oh the origins of Marxism, and
continues with sections on Marx's materialism, his theory of historical materialism,
his economic theories, and his views on the state and revolution. Since the book
is a short one, the treatment is necessarily selective, and Acton has wisely chosen
to devote most space to a consideration of Marx's materialist conception of history.
He gives a succinct and clear account of Marx's ideas and raises the well-known
problems of Marx's periodization of history and particularly of the relation of basis
to superstructure. The attention paid to historical materialism means that the book
does not similarly emphasize Marx's early philosophical writings or his more
political works.
In his interpretation Acton relies—quite reasonably—on the better-known
works of Marx such as the Communist Manifesto and Capital; there is little, if
any, mention of works such as the Grundrisse or Theories of Surplus Value, which
can give a different impression of Marx's views. This choice of sources sometimes
leads Acton to be slightly unfair to Marx—for example, when he says that Marx
did riot anticipate the increasing importance of leisure in the lives of working
men (a subject dealt with at some length in the Grundrisse).
All in all, this small book can be well recommended for those wishing to get
a general review of Marx's ideas in a short space.
DAVID MCLELLAN
Canterbury

https://doi.org/10.2307/2495435 Published online by Cambridge University Press

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