C. Wright Mills (1916–1962)

While C. Wright Mills does an interesting analysis of Marxist-Leninist theory in this book, it is a terrible disappointment to find out that only 150 pages are written by him. The other 300 pages (two thirds of the book) are extracts from classical texts of the left by Marx, Engels, Bernstein, Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Khrushchev, Mao, Guevara, and others.

The extracts that Mills has included in this book are fairly good (ranging from classical marxist-leninist introductory texts to many different revisionists of the post-Stalin era), but there is very little analysis on them. It is hard to understand the goal that Mills had in mind with this book, other than, perhaps, introduce the liberal and sectarian US-audience of the '60's to a theoretical overview of Marxism, without all the propaganda of the era. But is this enough of a contribution from a man who is regarded as one of the fathers of modern sociology? I think he falls short, and the event of his sudden death, the same year this book was published, left what would have been a very rich discussion out of the question.

Also, Mills might not explicitly admit his bias against Stalin, but he is not very subtle either in under-representing him and other Stalinist authors and going to lengths to let critics of Stalinism and the early soviet years to explain themselves: about 50 pages are dedicated to this, including a rather large section of Trotsky's "Revolution Betrayed".

All in all, despite that this can be considered to be only slightly above the traditional western criticism of Marxism, I think I'd recommend to anyone interested in Mills', the thinker, to read the first 150 pages and then move on. There are better introductory programs to Marxist thinkers out there than this one.… (meer)