To Michael (5 January 1958)
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[31] My dear brother[1] -
A 17 page letter (plus enclosure) mailed beginning of December and addressed to you[r] university address must have got lost – what a pity. I was elaborating on my old discussion with Mises, on the “young Hegel” (G. Lukacs, 1948[2]); the early Marx (“New Reasoner” n°2) and similar topicalities. Also I warmed you off your Lenin myth concerning Marx's 1875 'Critique of the Gotha Programme'. It was translated by P. Struve into Russian about 1893 or 94 and became focal to Lenin's early work on the Program of the Russian Soc.-Dem. Party, which he drafted in prison, starting with 1895.
Thanks for the Norman Cohen book. He makes out a case for the very late start of social revolutionary movements under the aegis of popular milleninism. This is both new and important (ca. 1380 A.D., pages 209, 213 ff.)
Interest in Ilona's is on the increase. W. Auden is undertaking to look the position in the U.S.; the Canadians are well started; a selection of some half-dozen show pieces are supposed to be published soon in a literary periodical. […] Maybe I have been overfeeding on Hegel these days, which has made unduly partial to Marx.
[32] …
Please do write soon again -
P.S. on Lenin. You may be of course right (newly published letters or something - in scholarship everything is possible) but expresly looked up 'State & Revolution' and found the jibes against bourgeois scholars unrelated to this matter. Or did you simply rely on a 'reliable informant'? In that case he did you a bad turn, so it looks to me.
On the Mises conundrum there’s a very interesting comment in Maurice Dobb’s Introduction to the second edition of his own monograph on USSR economy. He gives valid reasons why good economics (i.e. of his own non-Marxian sort) do not apply to the Soviet economy! (He had bean called to account by the C.P. for his neo-classical economics. He insisted on keeping to it, and proceeded to explain why it would not fit Russian conditions anyway. This important paper has been overlooked, I am afraid.) (Incidentally, his econ. history of capitalism ondition is ______ous).
Editor's Notes
Letter Informations
Reference:
KPA: 57/08, 31-32