I was digging through some notes I wrote while I was in bed after my car crash in February. These notes come from probably mid or late March and are somewhat hard to decipher because I was writing predominantly with my left hand (maybe exclusively I do not remember)

My brother happened to see this book at the library Book Sale that said Marx on it and bought it for 50c or something like that that, specifically for me. At the time I set it aside because I was not able to sit up long enough to read. But I came back to it a little later for want of anything better to do..it was that or watch Family Feud reruns.

The book is arranged as a series of essays, all by the author Robert C Tucker and the preface is dated 1968. I looked him up and apparently the old bird is still around at 90-something. He has a fairly impressive academic resume (PhD, Harvard, Princeton, etc) and sources term him a "Sovietologist". I'm not sure what that means but apparently his work on Stalin is still considered important and relevant -- mostly I think it was biographical but I did not dig too deeply into Tucker's other works.

There is a review of Philosophy and Myth In Karl Marx, also written by Tucker, on Marxists.org. Without searching too diligently I don't know if any of Tuckers works are available online (none are included on my DVD copy of the Marxist Internet Archive either). I did not find the review very helpful at all and do not recommend it. The only significance is that it is the book preceding the one I am reviewing as part of a series. I believe there was a third in the series as well, but I have no knowledge about either of the two I am not reviewing.

However, Tucker states early on -- in the preface I think -- that Philosophy and Myth is his attempt at uniting youthful and "mature" Marx. I'm somewhat familar with this debate, but even Tucker concedes it is only marginally important to the work I'm discussing so it shouldn't make a big difference. I will note that Tucker takes the occasion many times to reassert some of the conclusions he reached in the first book. However controversial they may or may not be, they are fairly transparent and it is easy to extricate these from the work at hand without losing much content-wise and so to consider the issue of Marx's "continuity" separately at some other time.

I read this book over the course of several days as it is 200 pages or and quite briskly written and paced, so I don't necessarily claim that I extracted every insight possible from it but I felt I was more or less on the same wavelength as the author in terms of taking his meaning throughout the essays. Whether I agreed with him I will leave for slightly later in my (multi-part) review.

ASIDE: I am posting this mainly because I happened to find the notes I made and so am not sure if there is anything of especial value to be gleaned from the book or not. My ulterior motive is thinking of ways to approach "dry doctrine" in a way that is more palatable to people like Dancing Bear on ProgIndy. END ASIDE

I was not at all familiar with Tucker before picking up this book. I will leap ahead to a small part of the conclusion and tell you that while I found the discussions engaging for the most part, I think I gathered more on the "flavor" front than any other -- there are many references to Marx and Engels that lend historical context and color along with a great many selected quotes that I normally found to be evocative without being placed too far out of their textual framework. But that last observation is a problem: while Tucker brings scholarly credentials he is quite the libertine when it comes to introducing exceedingly contentious points of order in the loosest of manners, which is quite irritating. It doesn't really go beyond irritating however, because almost every other Marx "scholar" I've read is far more..assertive..in this regard.

Lastly for concerns that globally pervade the book, many criticisms are lobbed against such targets as Lenin, and the Soviet Union/Soviet Marxism but they are almost exclusively shots across the bow rather than well-formed critical observations. They are doubly shallow for someone who places "sovietologist" at the center of his CV/resume. Luckily the ideological tenor of these interludes is easy enough to gloss over, as they need seem to strike to the quick or the heart of the beast and are typically quite brief, depending on which essay you are reading.

I am cobbling toghther my notes on the first chapter right now, and re-reading bits here and there where I have confused myself so I should be finished with that presently.

PS there are 7 chapters and my thoughts on each comprise about one or two paragraphs each so don't expect some kind of sprawling "commentary", ha