George Novack (1905–1992)

Two leading Marxist scholars discuss the causes of individual and collective alienation in both the West and the Soviet bloc. They argue that alienation is not an external condition of humanity and explain how it can be overcome.

Defending Marxism against critics seems to be the goal of Novack's 1972 version, which was reprinted in 1973 with a different cover. John Dewey's essay was included because Dewey headed the Dewey Commission - (the "Commission of Inquiry into the Charges Made against Leon Trotsky in the Moscow Trials") was initiated in March 1937 by the American Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, a Trotskyist front organization. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dewey_Commission

Some ten years later, the show more Dewey Commission was cited in great detail, when in an open letter to the British press dated 25 February 1946, written by George Orwell and signed by Arthur Koestler, C. E. M. Joad, Frank Horrabin, George Padmore, Julian Symons, H. G. Wells, F. A. Ridley, C. A. Smith and John Baird, among others, it was suggested that the Nuremberg Trials then underway were an invaluable opportunity for establishing "historical truth and bearing upon the political integrity" of figures of international standing. Specifically they called for Rudolf Hess to be interrogated about his alleged meeting with Trotsky and that the Gestapo records then in the hands of Allied experts be examined for any proof of any "liaison between the Nazi Party or State and Trotsky or the other old Bolshevik leaders indicted at the Moscow trials...".

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/dewey/ show less

12/13/21