The Progress Publishers Library 110 - Marxism and the Renegade Garaudy

The title announces the verdict before you open the book. Built on the frame of Lenin's pamphlet against Kautsky, "renegade" is not a description but a charge: apostasy rather than error. The man in the dock was by any measure the most important philosopher the French Communist Party ever produced. Roger Garaudy sat on its Political Bureau, directed its Centre for Marxist Studies and Research, and was for two decades the party's public face in the dialogue between Marxists and Christians and its chief theorist of a Marxist humanism. He was not a marginal heretic but the intellectual centre of the largest Communist party in Western Europe - until it expelled him in 1970. The immediate cause was Czechoslovakia: he had condemned the crushing of the Prague Spring, gone on to champion a pluralist parliamentary road and a socialism with a human face, and turned his criticism on the Soviet model itself. This is Moscow's reply, and it is worth reading closely because it is a better book than most of its kind. Khachik Momjan quotes his opponent constantly and by the page - some seventy-five separate references to Garaudy's actual books, among them Marxism in the Twentieth Century, The Turning-Point of Socialism, Lenin, and the post-expulsion volumes of 1971. A reader can check the charge against the text, which in this literature is rare. The word Eurocommunism never appears; it was not yet current. But that is what the book is fighting, and that is what makes it a document worth having. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.