Samuel Farber - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Samuel Farber

Duke University Press eBooks, 2019

The SHAFR Guide Online, Oct 2, 2017

Duke University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020

Jews and Leftist Politics

Isaac Deutscher's concept of the “non-Jewish Jew” has been adopted by many secular leftist Je... more Isaac Deutscher's concept of the “non-Jewish Jew” has been adopted by many secular leftist Jewish intellectuals as a badge of identity. Defined by a universal and humanist outlook that is rooted in Jewish thought, his is a construct that draws inspiration from Jewish thinkers such as Baruch Spinoza, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Rosa Luxemburg, Sigmund Freud, and Leon Trotsky, whom he sees as revolutionaries of modern thought who transcended their Jewish background. In what perhaps is the most lucid passage of his provocative essay Deutscher attributes their exceptional breadth to the fact that as Jews they lived in the boundaries of various civilizations, religions, and national cultures and were born and grew up on the boundaries of various epochs. Their minds matured where the most diverse cultural influences crossed and fertilized each other, and they inhabited the nooks and crannies of their respective nations, living in society but not being part of it. This was, Deutscher avers, what enabled them to lift their gaze above their own community and nation, beyond their times and generations, and to strike mentally into wide new horizons and far into the future (27). Although an apt description of the real, historical phenomenon of Jews that revolutionized thought and society, Deutscher includes himself in his depiction of the “non-Jewish Jew” and thus reveals his subtle but clear sense of dissociation, his attempt to put a distance between him and the Jewish world he left behind. For the secular, universalistic Jew that may be understandable in the context of the world in which Spinoza, Heine, Marx, and Luxemburg lived, but it was much less so in 1958, the year when Deutscher wrote this essay, only thirteen years after the end of the Holocaust and the Second World War. This dissociation became all the more conspicuous against the background of a Freud and a Trotsky, who having witnessed the rise and consolidation of the German antisemitic regime (they died in 1939 and 1940, respectively) expressed their unequivocal solidarity with the persecuted Jews.

Hispanic American Historical Review, 2020

Sin Permiso: República y socialismo también para el siglo XXI, 2008

Samuel Farber, The Politics of Che Guevara: Theory and Practice (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016) ... more Samuel Farber, The Politics of Che Guevara: Theory and Practice (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016) pb 162pp. + xxvi. ISBN: 978-1608466016In 2017, the world will mark the 50th anniversary of Ernesto 'Che' Guevara's death in Bolivia. This anniversary will inevitably reawaken interest in Guevara's life and legacy, and it will almost certainly yield the most extensive reassessment of Che since the late 1990s, when the publication of three major biographies coincided with the 30th anniversary of Guevara's execution. With The Politics of Che Guevara: Theory and Practice, Samuel Farber has in effect inaugurated this reassessment ahead of schedule, and if his book is any indication of what to expect in 2017, the reconsideration of Che will prove very disappointing indeed. Rather than undertaking a serious analysis of Che's political thought, Farber's book offers a careless, highly tendentious account of some of Guevara's ideas, together with an unequivocal condemnation of the Cuban Revolution.Readers will find little to admire in Farber's portrait of Guevara. According to Farber, Che's vision of socialism consisted in 'a new class system based on state collectivism' (119). In addition, Che was partly responsible for the lack of press freedoms in Cuba (71); he 'played a key role in inaugurating a tradition of administrative, nonjudicial detention subject to no written rules or laws' (74); his political views may have led to the execution of innocent people in the first months of the Revolution (73); he worshipped Stalin in his early years of politicisation (94) and essentially remained a Stalinist until the very end; his political outlook was hopelessly undemocratic (xviii, 117); he accepted patriarchy (36); he was puritanical (72); he was politically tone-deaf and lacked 'political instinct' (46); and he had a 'cold and distant personality' (53).Most of these propositions are, like the specific claims that I discuss below, untenable. If Farber holds otherwise, it is because he has chosen to ignore much of what Guevara himself said and wrote, just as he has chosen to ignore practically all of the scholarship on Guevara published in Cuba. To be sure, Farber devotes considerable attention to Guerrilla Warfare, 'Socialism and Man in Cuba', Guevara's analysis of his experience in the Congo (Pasajes de la guerra revolucionaria: Congo) and the notebooks published under the title Apuntes criticos a la economia politica; and he cites numerous other works as well. Yet Farber has disregarded much of the material included in Escritos y discursos, the standard, nine-volume edition of Che's works, and he seems to have made no effort to consult the seven-volume El Che en la Revolucion cubana (ECRC), the single most comprehensive collection of Guevara's speeches, articles, interviews, talks, etc., which runs to more than 3,500 pages.Anyone who has read widely in either of these multi-volume collections of Guevara's works will realise at once that Farber's exposition of Che's thought is wholly unreliable. Take, for example, Farber's claim that Che's conception of socialism 'ignored the hierarchical division of labor' (67-8): one finds numerous passages in Guevara's works (e.g., ECRC, III-547, IV-136 and IV-344; Roman numerals refer to volume numbers) that show this statement to be false. One can likewise find many passages (e.g., ECRC, III-455, IV-341 and IV-599) that demonstrate that Che did indeed accept Marx's view that 'the principle of "from each according to his ability and to each according to his work" was the one appropriate to "socialism"', contrary to what Farber claims (78). …

Dedication. Acknowledgements. Major Events in Russian History 1917--1924. Introduction. 1. The Ri... more Dedication. Acknowledgements. Major Events in Russian History 1917--1924. Introduction. 1. The Rise and Decline of Democratic Soviets. 2. The Fate of Workers Control and Trade Union Independence. 3. Freedom of the Press. 4. Repression. 5. Socialist Legality. Part II: Before Stalinism: Political Alternatives. . 6. Revolutionary Alternatives to Mainstream Bolshevism. 7. After the Civil War: Lenina s NEP as an Alternative (1921--1923). Epilogue. Bibliography.

La visita del papa Benedicto XVI a Cuba, en marzo de 2012, ha marcado el punto mas alto en el ace... more La visita del papa Benedicto XVI a Cuba, en marzo de 2012, ha marcado el punto mas alto en el acercamiento entre el regimen liderado por Raul Castro y la Iglesia catolica. Crecientemente, la curia encabezada por el cardenal Jaime Ortega se va transformando en un agente mediador reformista �y una especie de baluarte moral conservador�, en un contexto de incertidumbre marcado por las reformas economicas y elenvejecimiento de la elite posrevolucionaria. El hecho de que la Iglesia disponga de los unicos espacios y medios no estatales autorizados plantea, ademas, algunosdilemas para las izquierdas criticas, como ya ocurriera en Polonia en la decada de 1980.

Hispanic American Historical Review, 2019

Nueva Sociedad, 2012

espanolEl Leon Trotsky construido por Leonardo Padura �sin perdida de rigor historico� es en part... more espanolEl Leon Trotsky construido por Leonardo Padura �sin perdida de rigor historico� es en parte el Trotsky que el novelista cubano necesita para articular una critica al propio devenir antiutopico del socialismo en la isla caribena. Asi, el viejo revolucionario ruso se arrepiente de las medidas mas duras tomadas por los bolcheviques luego de la guerra civil, y una de las facetas de su pensamiento resaltadas por la novela es su defensa de la libertad artistica. Padura es, sin duda, un exponente del ambiente cultural e intelectual de la transicion cubana, que brega por la democratizacion sin abandonar el pais y cuya independencia de criterio va en paralelo a la independencia economica que logro mediante la publicacion de sus obras fuera de Cuba. EnglishWithout losing historical rigour, the Leon Trotsky constructed by Leonardo Padura is in part the Trotsky that the Cuban novelist needs to articulate a criticism of the very becoming of anti-utopic socialism in the Caribbean island. Thus, the old Russian revolutionary repents the harshest measures taken by the Bolsheviks after the civil war, and one of the highlighted facets of his thinking is his defence of artistic liberty. Padura is, without doubt, an exponent of the cultural and intellectual environment of the Cuban transition �which struggles for democratization without abandoning the country� whose independence of judgement goes in parallel with the economic independence that he achieved by publishing his works outside of Cuba.

Review of Radical Political Economics, 1982

Material and non-material work incentives policies in the capitalist and Communist systems consti... more Material and non-material work incentives policies in the capitalist and Communist systems constitute ideologies and practices of order. A study of the schools of Scientific Management and Human Relations in the U.S.A. and of material and moral incentives in the Communist world demonstrates how they all assume a basic harmony of interests between workers and their employers and managers, ignore the fact that work incentives are used in combination with coercion, and obscure the relationship between the workplace and society as a whole. The conditions under which these different approaches are predominant in the capitalist and Communist systems are also analyzed.