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cal moment. Unhappily, the pages where this demonstration is under–
taken mix murky critical abstraction with cliches about nineteenth
century history. Analyzing Verne teaches Macherey nothing he did not
already know, vitiating his claim that literature is somehow specially
revealing, second only to the blazing light shed by marxist "scientific"
analysis.
The trouble here, hardly disguised, is that Macherey is devoted
first of all to his theory. He can go on for pages decreeing what
literature must or must not be on purely theoretical grounds, without
once looking to see what it is. He devotes a chapter to a half dozen
insignificant newspaper articles by Lenin on Tolstoy, claiming that
they pose and solve all the problems of literary criticism. Lenin's essays
are not wrong or stupid, just meanly narrow. He does not really care
about Tolstoy, he only cares about politics and denouncing the
Vekhists, whoever they were. Macherey evades this evasion by writing
about Jules Verne, a disposable author he does not have
to
care about.
Verne is just an example. Despite some good pages, the book's flaw is
that it wants to
use
literature, to sign it up for the Party. Literature's
victory is that dogmatists should still feel the need to make the attempt.
DONALD G. MARSHALL
WINNERS AND LOSERS
THE ZERO-SUM SOCIETY: DISTRIBUTION AND THE POSSIBILI–
TIES FOR ECONOMIC CHANGE. By Lester C. Thurow.
Basic Books.
$12.95.
In "an economy that has a substantial zero-sum element,"
Massachusetts Institute of Technology economics professor Lester
Thurow informs us, "for every winner there is a loser." Even when the
burdens of progress are smaller than the overall benefits, they always
generate losses for certain individuals or groups . The income distribu–
tion is altered, in ways which hurt someone. What makes the American
economic predicament so unyielding, however, is that loss allocation
can no longer be mediated through political institutions: potential
"losers" can safeguard their interests by blocking economic growth
