MARXIST AND OTHER THOUGHT IN THE LIGHT OF THE GORBACHEV REVOLUTION

Examines the sources and implications of Mikhail Gorbachev's policies insofar as they have been policies of liberalization. It is principally argued that Marxism has been a Western phenomenon and thereby a vehicle for the export of Western Enlightenment values to Third World countries but also to the Soviet Union itself. The nature and role of Marx's analyses are considered in that light. So also are the status of nationalism in the USSR, the historical meaning and promise of socialism, the role of the legal-economic nexus in the social reconstruction of reality in the USSR and in Central and Eastern Europe, the relevance to those developments of the emerging new European and world systems, and the relevance of all these for social economics.