Bertell Ollman

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Bertell Ollman (b. 1936) is a professor of politics at New York University. He teaches both dialectical methodology and socialist theory. He has written and edited books including Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, Social and Sexual Revolution: Essays on Marx and Reich, Dialectical Investigations, How to Take an Exam...and Remake the World, and most recently Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx's Method. He was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

He is also the creator of Class Struggle, the world's first Marxist board game, and from 1978-1983 was president of Class Struggle, Inc., the company that produced and marketed the game. In 1978, after being offered and then denied the chairmanship of the Government Department at the University of Maryland College Park, he became the principal in one of the most important academic freedom struggles of the last half century. True Confessions of a Marxist Businessman (2002) offers an autobiographical account—missing neither the politics or the humor—of both struggles. In 2001, he won the first Charles McCoy Life Achievement Award from the New Political Science section of the American Political Science Association.

[edit] Works

Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (Cambridge U.P., l97l; 2nd ed., l976). This book has gone through thirteen printings, sold close to 30,000 copies, and been translated into Spanish, Italian, and Korean
Studies in Socialist Pedagogy, co-ed (Monthly Review Press, l978)
Social and Sexual Revolution: Essays on Marx and Reich (South End Press, l978)
Class Struggle Is the Name of the Game: True Confessions of a Marxist Businessman (Wm. Morrow Pub., l983); 2nd expanded ed. entitled Ball Buster? True Confessions of a Marxist Businessman (Soft Skull Press, 2003)
The Left Academy: Marxist Scholarship on American Campuses, co-ed., vol. I (McGraw Hill, l982)
The Left Academy..., co-ed., vol. II (Praeger Pub., l984)
The Left Academy..., co-ed., vol. III (Praeger Pub., l986)
The U.S. Constitution: 200 Years of Anti-Federalist, Abolitionist, Feminist, Muckraker, Progressive, and Especially Socialist Criticism, co-ed. (N.Y.U. Press, l990)
Marxism: an Uncommon Introduction (Stirling Pub., New Delhi, l99l)
Dialectical Investigations (Routledge, l993) A French translation is forthcoming
Market Socialism: the Debate Among Socialists, ed. and co-author (Routledge, l998). A Chinese translation appeared in 2000
Dialectics: the New Frontier, co-ed. (Special Issue of Science and Society, Fall, l998); an expanded version of this issue will soon be published as a book
How to Take an Exam...and Remake the World (Black Rose Books, Montreal, Spring, 200l)
BALLBUSTER? True Confessions of a Marxist Businessman, 2002 (Soft Skull Press, 2002)
Dance of the Dialectic: Steps in Marx's Method (Univ. of Illinois Press, 2003). Turkish translation has been completed in February 2007 by Cenk Saraçoğlu and published by Yordam Publishing / İstanbul and a Chinese translation is being prepared.

[edit] Trivia

He appeared on "Hannity & Colmes" to face the accusation that as Sean Hannity's professor in the 1980s, he had given him a lower grade for being a conservative and a supporter of Ronald Reagan. Ollman was not actually Hannity's professor, but still he used the opportunity to plug Amy Goodman's Democracy Now on FOX News.
In 1991, Bertall Ollman published the following remarks in a journal published by the American Political Science Association, appearing after the USSR had collapsed:

“Paradoxically enough, the objective conditions for socialism in the USSR are now largely present, but because of the unhappy experience with a regime that called itself ‘socialist’ the subjective conditions are absent . . . on the other hand . . . the Soviet Union might be saved by a socialist revolution in the West as our capitalist economy goes into a tailspin.”