Word: marxist
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WORCESTER-Students who have occupied the president's office at Clark University here for the last eight days to press their demands for increased Marxist instruction began negotiating yesterday with a committee of faculty and administrators...
...that all four men were rather unorthodox Communists. None of them felt entirely comfortable with the corpus of Marx's thought, much less with the Stalinist Communist Party of the USA. Eastman and Burnham were both Troskyists who regarded Stalin as a Slavophilic counter-revolutionary, and neither accepted the Marxist account of the inevitable progress of history. Herberg was a member of the small Lovestoneite faction of the CPUSA, a bitter anti-Stalinist, and an exponent of "American exceptionalism"--the view that the US would have to follow a path to socialism different from that envisioned by Marx. Dos Passos...
...fact, the conversions are not easy to explain, although one can perceive traits in the young Marxists that might have been critical in the transition to the old conservatives. Diggins acknowledges such traits, while regarding them as secondary. Eastman was a skeptic who rejected Marx's dialectic view of history even as he remained committed to establishing the kind of order that Marx regarded as inevitable. He later became convinced that workers would fare better under capitalism than they had in Stalin's Russia, which as the years passed became harder and harder to dismiss as an aberration. Eastman wrote...
...most arresting characteristic common to all four men during their radical years was their inability to accept the whole of the Marxist conception of the world. None of them were convinced of the validity of Marx's interpretation of history, which Marx regarded as central to his entire construction. They had other doubts--Burnham and Dos Passos about the role of art, Herberg about the existence of objective, material reality, Eastman about Marx's epistemology, among others. If there is a single explanation for their conversions, it is that each man began with substantive disagreements with Marx and only gradually...
Western experts offer several theories for the massive Soviet buildup: 1) to counter potential trouble along the 4,500-mile border with Russia's Marxist archenemy, China; 2) to maintain hegemony over Eastern Europe; 3) to overcome an "inferiority complex" vis-à-vis the U.S. that was aggravated when Moscow had to back down during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis; 4) to provide additional arms for its adventurous clients abroad...