The centre-left French daily had a big splash on Communism in their book section yesterday (5th February 2010). Theory versus practice and similar.
French books and translations reviewed included:
Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek: L'idée du communisme.
Slavoj Žižek:Après la tragédie, la farce!
Yves Citton: Storytelling et imaginaire de gauche
Michael Christofferson: Les Intellectuales contre la gauche
Tristram Hunt: Engels. Le gentleman révolutionnaire
Plus smaller reviews on other aspects of Communism as a theory or ideology.
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The review that intrigued me most was the one of the last book listed, a translation from the English. This review, entitled
Friedrich Engels, la révolution en champagne did a fair hatchet job on Engels. A quote or two:
Quote:
(...) Engels comme un philosophe austère, sévère, voire un brin pontifiant. Eh bien pas du tout! Ce fils d'un homme d'affaires (...) était en effet un joyeux drille. Partout il vécut, à Berlin, à Manchester, à Bruxelles, il fit la fortune des cabaretiers, la joie des jolies femmes et le délice des cancaniers.
(...) les pages que Tristram Hunt consacre aux vingt ans qu'Engels passa à la tête d'une filature de coton é Manchester sont particulièrement savoureuses.
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The review goes on to mention that this clubbing and owning bourgeois revolutionary also said, when asked about why he read the hardly revolutionary journal "The Economist", pointed out that he was not so naïve to consult the socialist press when looking for advice on financial operations.
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However, another little article in this book section mentions that one French publisher has sold 8,700 copies of "The Communist Manifesto" in 2009. "Das Kapital" was re-issued in 2008 as a two-volume job. They sold 7,200 copies of [each volume of] the book by June 2008 of an original edition of 8,000 and in 2009 a further 3,000 copies were printed.
What does this suggest about the political consciousness of the younger generation, not old enough to remember detailed descriptions of how Communism gripped youth in the 1960s and 1970s? Do we have another generation of gullible middle-class armchair revolutionaries from bourgeois homes who are going to put their faith in Marxism-Leninism and other infantile disorders?
I hope the books listed above awaken an interest in both France and elsewhere of the true nature of the Communist ideology which only seems to be taken seriously nowadays in North Korea.