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Louis Proyect wrote

One important point to make about Helena Sheehan’s political odyssey — from a conservative Catholic upbringing through the radicalism of the US left in the 1960s and early 70s, on to Official Sinn Fein and the Communist Party of Ireland, and then into the Irish Labour Party — is that it demonstrates with crystal clarity the importance of the theory of state capitalism for revolutionary politics.
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full: http://socialistreview.org.uk/449/navigating-zeitgeist
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Helena Sheehan's earlier book "Marxism and the Philosophy of Science: A Critical History" is a must-read by a remarkable person, a chronicling of the dialectics of nature debate, beginning with Engels and Marx's ideas on the developmental history and the structure of natural science. Sheehan describes their impact on 20th century historians and philosophers of human and other natural sciences. She has chapters on the Marxism of the 2d International, that of Russian Marxism and pre-revolutionary debates, the debate that took place in the period following the October Revolution, and the Dialectics of Nature debate during the Comintern period. In the 2017 afterword, when this book originally published in 1985 was republished by Verso, among other things she discusses the crucial role of Bukharin in the shaping of the debates, in works that have subsequently come to light, and Bukharin's cri de couer for socialist humanism. Sheehan writes with much feeling for Marx's view of science in a "more contextual, sociohistorical" context, probing into the role of ideology in relation to science and the philosophy of science. She has informative profiles of the major discussants in this debate, including not only Engels and materialism and dialectics but Liebnecht, Kautsky, Max Adler, the Polish Marxists, the Russian Machists , Plekhanov, Lenin, Trotsky, Pavlov, Lysenko, Lukacs, Korsch and the neo-Hegelian revival, Gramsci, Bernal, JBS Haldane, Joseph Needham, Maurice Cornforth, and most interestingly, the brilliant flash of intuition and intense study on the part of the ill-fated Christopher Caudwell, killed in his first battle encounter in Spain, then the Frankfort School, Lefebvre, Brecht, Reich, Hook, Eastman and Hermann Muller. A fascinating read, and one which among other things prompted in me a new appreciation of the need to jettison the linear in favor of a dialectical approach to our most important theoretical/practical problems, and not only in science - an immense but essential task.

In her new book among other topics she tells the story about writing this book and the political climate in which she conducted her research in the International Lenin School in Moscow.
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