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January 29, 2006
Staline et la révolution
Jean-Pierre Juy who I met through Antonia, my colleague, lent me Staline et la révolution: Le cas espagnol by Pierre Broué. Pierre was a fairly well-known French historian, an expert on Trotsky, revolutionary history of Europe in the 20th century, and so forth. According to Jean-Pierre, most of Pierre's work has not been translated to English. Indeed Amazon seems only to have his book on The German Revolution in English. The rest is in French.
Pierre passed away recently. Jean-Pierre helped set up a retrospective yesterday and this morning at the Institute for Political Studies over at the campus in Gières. I'd never heard of Pierre Broué until Antonia suggested I go to to the retrospective. I went to a couple hours of that. It turned out to be geared for people who know European 20th century history better than the average American (me). Tim and Diane told me they wanted to go along. I think it was a wise decision to leave them at home.
This book gave me the same trouble as the retrospective. If I understand this correctly, part of Pierre's contribution to analysis of events from the historical materialist's point of view is that you fail to tell the full story when you examine history abstractly, outside its social context. In other words you need to know the people you're writing about. So he apparently investigated his subjects quite thoroughly, writing about them when he felt he'd understood the context. (Although one of his colleagues yesterday said his knowledge was both wide and deep enough you had to be pretty good to catch him out when he was extrapolating or making something up to support an argument.)
What I glean from Staline et la révolution is a weak version of what went into writing it, as somebody who doesn't know C at all reading K&R in a hurry. Still Pierre paints a convincing picture of how Stalin's bureaucracy managed in mid 1930s Spain to crush the very sort of thing the communists were supposed to be trying to hasten, according to Marx et al. I put the book down thinking that idealism mixed with organized violence, even "resistance" is probably almost always a poison cocktail.
Posted by Mark at January 29, 2006 11:21 AM
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