It is impossible to speak seriously about Marxism in the West without incorporating the role of Christianity in each social formation. “Western Marxism has taken a historic distance from the concrete experiences of socialist transition in the Soviet Union, China, Viet Nam, and Cuba.”
I would recommend reading this and sending this to any radlibs/DSA/anarchists you know
This article accepts, wholesale, the idea of a coherent "west", and also doesn't negotiate the large fault line between Catholicism and American Protestantism, which are hugely different.
What I found valuable though was that if Allende, if Sankara, if Hampton and the Panthers, if Ho and Mao, if Lenin, etc. were defeated, either through violent rupture or long-term rot and co-optation, then we should not praise them for their nobility, their sacrifice, their innocence, their willingness to play by the rules. If we are serious about taking and holding power, then there must be serious measures made to do so. Defeat is failure. As noble and inspirational as we might find movements of the past, they have all failed to kill Capitalism. Each and every one. The fact that the USSR no longer exists is a failure of that project. We must examine why it was defeated, or why there was social rot and fundamentally broken institutions, and plan to resist those things in the future.
This article accepts, wholesale, the idea of a coherent "west", and also doesn't negotiate the large fault line between Catholicism and American Protestantism, which are hugely different.
What I found valuable though was that if Allende, if Sankara, if Hampton and the Panthers, if Ho and Mao, if Lenin, etc. were defeated, either through violent rupture or long-term rot and co-optation, then we should not praise them for their nobility, their sacrifice, their innocence, their willingness to play by the rules. If we are serious about taking and holding power, then there must be serious measures made to do so. Defeat is failure. As noble and inspirational as we might find movements of the past, they have all failed to kill Capitalism. Each and every one. The fact that the USSR no longer exists is a failure of that project. We must examine why it was defeated, or why there was social rot and fundamentally broken institutions, and plan to resist those things in the future.
are they doing those things for the proletariat, or are they bourgeois virtues?