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I belong to that generation of anarchist propagandists who, reared on such books as Roger Baldwin's collection of Letters from Russian Prisons (1925) and G.P. Maximoff's The Guillotine at Work: Twenty Years of Terror in Russia (1940), felt nothing but contempt for those secure academics in Western universities, whose hard-to-read books, sprinkled with quotations from Marx, Lenin and Stalin, were required reading for generations of students in British universities.
This explains why I failed to read the works of David Harvey, from his Social Justice and the City (1973) onwards. I probably missed a lot, but I am convinced that the retreat from every kind of socialist ideology all over the world has much to do with the experience of Marxist dictatorship as well as with that of West European state socialism, and I would love to hear Marxist academics acknowledging their culpability in this.
David Harvey, who is professor of Georgraphy at Johns Hopkins University, admits that times have changed. He explains that the collapse of the Wall was,
the last nail in the coffin of any sort of Marxist credibility even if many a Marxian persuasion had long distanced themselves (some long ago as the Hungerian uprising and still more with the crushing of the Czech Spring in 1968) from actual existing socialism of the Soviet-Chinese sort.
But he still holds on to his Marxism, even though he remarks that the "grand (and in my view unfortunate) divisions between anarchists and Marxists over the years has in part been over the appropriate scale at which oppositions should be mounted and the scale at which an alternative social form should be envisaged and constructed."
This isn't the way I would express the difference, but Harvey tells us that ever since 1971 he has run either a course or a reading group on Marx's Capital Vol. 1, and has consequently seen many changes among course members, and that the graduate student audience has largely disappeared. "Marx is, in short, largely written off as the weaver of an impossibly huge masternarrative of history and an advocate of some totally impossible historical transformation." So much of this book is devoted to proving to us, in the typically opaque language of Marxists, that Marx was right.
But...