Date: Thu, 30 Jan 1997 10:43:35 -0500
From: dhenwood-AT-panix.com (Doug Henwood)
Subject: Re: M-I: Foucault on USSR


At 3:21 PM 1/30/97, Gary MacLennan wrote:

>And I believe  they would have if the German revolution had succeeded.  But
>Foucault can never acknowledge pre-Thermidor Russia for that would mean
>endorsing Bolshevism.  So anarchists and liberals and reactionaries  and
>defenders of the post 28 Russian regime all share a common interest.  They
>must deny the link between Bolshevism and progressivism.

Oh it's worse than that. On pp. 135-6 of Knowledge/Power, writing about
Marx and Lenin: "Rather than searching in those texts for a condemnation of
the Gulag, it is a matter of asking what in those texts made the Gulag
possible, what might even now continue to justify it, and what makes it
intolerable truth still accepted today.... [We must give] up the politics
of inverted commas, whether damning or ironic, round Soviet socialism in
order to protect the good, true socialism - with no inverted commas - which
alone can provide a legitimate standpoint for a politically valid critique
of the Gulag. Actually the only socialism which deserves these scornful
scare-quotes is the one which leads the dreamy life of ideality in our
heads."

Doug

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Doug Henwood
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