# Slavery Made Simple **URL:** **By** Jeff Riggenbach **Published:** June 1, 1980 --- “Heilbroner’s new book is, inescapably, to find oneself wondering why it was written.” _Marxism: For and Against_, by Robert L. Heilbroner. W.W. Norton \& Company, 186 pp., $9.95. To read Robert L. Heilbroner’s new book is, inescapably, to find oneself wondering why it was written. It breaks no new ground, makes no new points, poses no new questions. It spends the first four of its mere five chapters re-hearsing the familiar sophistries of Karl Marx — his method of historical analysis, which he adapted from Hegel and christened Dialectical Materialism, his “Labor Theory of Value,” his doctrine of the historical inevitability of socialism, and all the dreary rest — then meditates for an equally un-original thirty pages or so in a final chapter on the implications of all the decades of oppression and butchery which have characterized the practice of Marxism in such places as Russia and China. The first four chapters are workmanlike but utterly superfluous. The market is already glutted with popularizations of Marx; there is even a comic book version by the Mexican cartoonist Eduardo del Rio. The final chapter, by contrast, is loose and diffuse and vaguely repetitious, its main ideas all but strangled out of existence by Heilbroner’s sudden retreat into circuitous euphemism and tortuous double talk. These main ideas are worth ferreting out and dwelling upon for a moment, however, if only because of the insight they seem to provide into the real political goals of Marxists. (Including Marxists like Heilbroner, who describe themselves as “for and against” Marxism. His arguments “against” Marx are all related to the latter’s striking failure to predict accurately the historical development of capitalism. They are more properly described as quibbles than as arguments “against.” They are, in fact, scarcely worth mentioning at all.) Like all Marxists, Heilbroner systematically minimizes the crimes of Stalin and Chairman Mao. The Gulag, he writes, is no more fairly representative of socialism than the Inquisition is fairly representative of Christianity; then too, “If Marxism is to be saddled with responsibility for Soviet or Chinese inhumanity, it must also be given credit for the immense material and cultural improvements \[!\] that these regimes have brought to their peoples.” But he goes further. “The creation of socialism,” he writes, “requires the curtailment of the central economic freedom of bourgeois society, namely the right of Jeff Riggenbach is executive editor of LR.