Book Review

BOOK REVIEW TITLE: Marx After Marxism: The Philosophy of Karl Marx Author: by Tom Rockmore 224 pages, Blackwell Publishers Price. US$29.95 Review: By David North (wsws.org) Tom Rockmore, who teaches Philosophy at Duquesne University in Pennsylvania, begins his book Marx After Marxism: The Philosophy of Karl Marx, with the following statement: “It is, or at least should be, obvious that as a political approach Marxism has failed as a historical alternative to liberal capitalism. After the rapid demise of the Soviet bloc in 1989, and the break up of the Soviet Union in 1991, the opposition between totalitarian Marxism and liberal capitalism, a major influence in much of the twentieth century, dissolved. As a result, the modern industrialized world entered into an involuntary Pascalian wager firmly based on liberal economic and liberal democratic principles. At the time of writing modern economic liberalism literally has no real rival in the...

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Terrorist by John Updike New York, Alfred A. Knopf 2006, 310 pp By David Walsh wsws.org Terrorist by American novelist John Updike is poorly conceived and unconvincingly written. It tells the story of a New Jersey teenager, Ahmad Mulloy-Ashmawy, the son of a long-absent Egyptian father and an Irish-American mother, who has chosen Islamic righteousness, “the Straight Path,” in the face of American decay and corruption. Updike sets his 22nd novel in the city of New Prospect, a fictionalized Paterson (home to a large Arab-American population), a depressed industrial town in northern New Jersey. While Ahmad is ostensibly the central figure in the novel, he is strangely static and passive, stiffly reiterating at every opportunity his devotion to the “true faith” and excoriating American moral laxness. Around him circle more active characters: his mother, Terry Mulloy, a nurse and amateur painter; his black fellow high school student, Joryleen Grant,...

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By David Walsh wsws.org American novelist John Updike died January 27 in Danvers, Massachusetts, at the age of 76. The cause of death was cancer. A major figure in American literature for the past half-century (his first full-length novel, The Poorhouse Fair, appeared in 1959), Updike published more than 60 works—novels, collections of short stories, volumes of essays, art criticism and more. Many tributes have appeared in the short time since his death, and the writer is certainly worthy of serious consideration. It would be preferable, however, if the commentary were somewhat more thoughtful and sober. Repeated claims along the lines that Updike was “the greatest novelist writing in English,” “one of the greatest American novelists of the 20th century,” “our time’s greatest man of letters” and so forth tend to obscure the man and his work rather than shed much light. What makes a “great novelist”? A writer...

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Stalin’s Terror of 1937-1938: Political Genocide in the USSR, by Vadim Rogovin By Andrea Peters wsws.org The late Marxist historian and sociologist Vadim Rogovin ‘s book presents a compelling and uncompromisingly political interpretation of the the Stalin had unleashed in 937-38 Stalin’s aim, the author insists, was to eliminate all traces of the substantial Marxist-inspired socialist opposition to his bureaucratic regime. Moreover, Stalin’s fixation on Trotsky was not, Rogovin maintains, an incidental phenomenon that served little more than propaganda purposes. Rather, Stalin perceived the exiled Trotsky as the most significant threat to his dictatorship. He was the personification of a revolutionary program and tradition that the bureaucratic regime was determined to extirpate. The living Trotsky, his active supporters around the world, and, however silent and repressed, his countless sympathizers within the Soviet Union constituted an opposition that Stalin found impossible to ignore. As Rogovin demonstrates, Stalin carried out the...

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Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga, New York: Free Press, 339 pp.

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