Re: What is to be done in Argentina

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

my feeling is that for a book to have a big impact, it has to "fall on a fertile field." That is, the societal situation -- including the balance of class forces -- has to be such that people are looking for the kinds of ideas that the book presents. 

------------------------
Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine




> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jurriaan Bendien [mailto:bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Tuesday, August 05, 2003 10:05 AM
> To: PEN-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: Re: [PEN-L] What is to be done in Argentina
> 
> 
> > do you think that writing a book can have that big an effect?
> 
> Whether or not a book has a "big effect", depends I think on numerous
> factors, and a publisher would affirm this:
> 
> - its content and form
> - who wrote it
> - the life and doings of the author
> - the specific context it is written in, or written for
> - who it is written for
> - how the book is marketed
> - whether it is bought in order to read it, or for some other 
> reason or
> fashion (a book might have an effect which has nothing to do 
> with its real
> content, or it might sell lots of copies without its content 
> influencing
> anybody very much).
> 
> I have commented on the anthropology of the uses of books as cultural
> artifacts already once before on Marxmail, referring to postmodernist
> culture. If you consider Marx's book Capital, it had very 
> little readership
> in the 19th century, and if it did, this owed more to Marx's political
> engagements or reputation probably. It became a hit in, of all places,
> Russia. Pamphlets or short books by Kautsky, Lafargue, 
> Engels, Mehring,
> Bebel, Jaures, Lenin etc. were far more popular, and there 
> were literally
> hundreds in that genre.
> 
> Rosa Luxemburg, Isaac Deutscher and Ernest Mandel all 
> remarked upon the
> fact, that even among selfstyled Marxists in the 1920s, 
> Marx's magnum opus
> had mostly not been read beyond the first volume or extracts 
> thereof (it
> wasn't exactly holiday reading of course), never mind digested and
> understood. Only after the founding of the Marx-Engels Institute and
> subsequently the transformation of Marxism into a state 
> ideology, were large
> quantities of the book sold.
> 
> To this day, communication theory remains a very much 
> under-researched topic
> in Marxist circles.
> 
> References:
> Ernest Mandel, The place of Marxism in history
> Paul Dukes, October and the World
> 
> (According to the Guiness book of records, the bestselling 
> book of all time
> is the Bible, the highest circulation magazine is the US 
> Parade, and the
> honour of the highest circulation attained by a newspaper went to
> Komsomolskaya Pravda selling just under 22 million copies in 1990.)
>