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prism of their shared hostility to the Vietnam War: they were co–
founders of Resist. Whitfield is wide of the mark when he tries to
draw an analogy between Macdonald's mocking the "LibLabs" of the
Henry Wallace campaign and Chomsky's assault on the Kennedy
technocrats, men who were openly disdainful of the "softheaded Lib–
Labs." Whitfield soft-pedals Chomsky's apologetics for Japan's World
War Two barbarism and fails to mention the Faurisson affair except
by referring to Chomsky's "mildly perverse interpretation of World
War Two." Can we imagine Macdonald, antinationalist that he was,
the critic of Trotsky and bureaucratic collectivism, serving, as has
Chomsky, as an apologist for the North Vietnamese and Pol Pot?
Macdonald repeatedly changed his position in the face of new facts;
Chomsky, driven by an irrational hatred for America as the sole
source of evil in the wo:-Id, has tried to change the facts in order to
hold on to his position.
Meyer Schapiro once wrote to Macdonald, "A prophet, dear
Dwight, is not judged, like a ballplayer by his batting average, but
rather by the impact of his expressed convictions on people's think–
ing and acting. And in that sense, you yourself were for a time a
prophet." A compelling consideration of the prophet and his prophe–
cies awaits another author and another book.
FRED SIEGEL
MARXIST DILEMMAS
MARXISM AND MORALITY.
By
Steven Lukes.
Oxford University Press.
$15.95.
Academic life is littered with large books on small subjects
- warmed-over theses grinding away like the mills of God, slowly
reducing some tiny issue to intellectual dust.
Marxism and Morality
is
just the opposite, a brisk little book on a very large topic.
If
it isn't
the last word on its subject, it is certainly one of the best. Steven Lukes
takes off from a familiar paradox. Marx was bitterly hostile to "ethical
socialism"; he denounced Proudhon's appeals to "eternal justice"; he
told the authors of the Gotha program that their talk of rights was
