In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

134 the minnesota review it's bad, artificial, too derivative of master poet Cardenal, too prosaic, too propagandistic, etc." After reading a bunch of these poems you get the impression that to write something in a non-W. C. Williams plain-speaking mode might be akin to an ideological crime. But these are small quibbles, especially when the alternative is the sophisticated alienation of something like U. S. post-modernism. In communism, Marx remarked, there will be no poets as such; only people who, among other things, will write poetry. Poesía de taller points in that direction; it is a beginning, like all beginnings naive and wonderful at the same time. Note: Except for the Pring-Mill Cardenal anthology, none of the texts reviewed here is readily available commercially. Social Text 5, with Baker's Dalton translations, may be ordered from Social Text, Box 5565, Madison, WI 53705; Scully's Dalton collection from Curbstone Press, 321 Jackson St., Willimantic, CT 06266; Nicaragua in Revolution: The Poets Speak from Marxist Educational Press, c/o Anthropology Department, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455; Voices from Nicaragua from Voces desde Nicaragua, 341 1 W. Diversey St., Chicago, IL 60647. The Pitt Poetry Series, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, is about to bring out Carolyn Forché's translations of Garibel Alegría, a Salvadoran feminist revolutionary poet. Forché's own The Country Between Us is poetic internationalism in the best sense: conversational poetry recycled through Central America to (one of ) its sources in the U. S. popular democractk tradition. Susan Meiselas' extra-ordinary collection of photos of the Nicaraguan revolution, Nicaragua, with a textual collage by Claire Rosenbery (Pantheon, 1980), belongs alongside the books reviewed here. In Nicaragua there is a slogan that goes: Nicaragua venció, El Salvador vencerá, Guatemala seguirà (Nicaragua won, El Salvador will win, Guatemala will follow). I am aware I have not said anything about the poetry of the Guatemalan revolution here. Robert Marquez's invaluable, but now outdated, Latin American Revolutionary Poetry (Monthly Review, 1974) has a few examples, including Otto Rene Castillo's magnificent and useful satire, "Apolitical Intellectuals." JOHN BEVERLEY Stanley Aronowitz. 77ie Crisis in Historical Materialism: Class, Politics, and Culture in Marxist Theory. New Yorker: Praeger, 1981. 372 pp. $25.95 (cloth); $10.95 (paper). From some points of view, Stanley Aronowitz's The Crisis in HistoricalMaterialism is an insider's book. A common theme of the essays that comprise it is the critical examination of Marxism: at the level of assumptions, at the level of prediction, and at the level of practice. Thus the book proceeds along at least two lines: Inside Marxist discourse himself, Aronowitz surveys the field, asking about the failure of Marxism to predict the development of capitalism. Aronowitz is relentless in pursuing the forms by which Marxist theory, rightly or wrongly, in its various permutations, has developed adequate or inadequate understandings of the current situation. He considers, among other required issues: how to account for the continued health and welfare of capitalism (only here is the analysis slightly dated); why are the groups that embody revolutionary activity today rither excluded from Marxism or discounted; how does the family contribute to or detract from the reproduction , and hence the continued hegemony, of late capitalism; and what is the relationship of 'knowledge industries" to the organization and operation of capitalism as Marx represented it. Working within the Marxist intellectual tradition. Aronowitz interrogates central theoretical developments and outlines how and where additions and transformations are justified. To an outsider this is a masterly display. Other Marxist theorists may 135 reviews find particulars with which to quarrel, or, more likely, find the treatment ofsome positions too terse to be entirdy satisfactory. At the same time Aronowitz proceeds along another line, that of discourse, somewhat from the viewpoint of one who exercises critical external judgment. He introduces and continues to conduct himself as a Marxist, while at the same time critiquing the discourse of Marxism. The epigraph which opens Part I reads: "Theorists have interpreted Marxism in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." In this capacity Aronowitz almost acknowledges his activity as evaluating Marxism as a mode or system of...

pdf

Share