I’m reading through some of our literature (namely Socialism, Utopian and Scientific) and I really get the sense that many of our intellectual forebears think that everything important in philosophy happened in Europe. Granted, European philosophy is necessarily of primary relevance in a critique of early capitalism, but when Engels traces the history of these strains of thought (materialism, dialectics, etc.), they all go back to ancient Greece. I find this suspicious.
Is this a consequence of lopsided education, either of the target audience or of Engels himself? Have non-western Marxists grafted dialectical materialism onto Asian or African philosophy? Are there analogous movements within these cultures that dovetail nicely with Dialectical Materialism? Or do they more or less take Engels at his word here? Maybe I’m misinterpreting something.
i am not a historian, but i can try to open the conversation with something.
this reminds me of the zapatistas struggle, some of whom were particularly excited with ideas of marxism and socialism, but the reality was that indigenous populations had no real need for these type of structures or ideas. marcos of the ezln has a video out somewhere where he talks about his experience with that in organizing a militant struggle giving birth to what people called neozapatismo, a sort of democratic confederalism like rojava. still leftist/socialist, but seems to be a liberal favorite of sorts in strange contorted ways. ap/bbc/vice news all have a lot of zapatista coverage. the ned organizations network, and their faux anarchist outlets, all really love zapatista coverage too.
with that being said, some of marxism was born out of a study of indigenous populations and trying to form that understanding of communal social structure into a populist economic/state structure. so it seems like it fits really well around the world, because it’s a general theory with many ways of it being applied. considering the western conservative nationalists, mostly liberals, still have to demonize socialism weekly over a century later is very telling of just how popular and powerful the framework is. so even tho marx and engels were eurcentric, most of their studies were of european revolutionary history, so it’s expected, but the theory of marxism is generalized and abstracted away from that
so gives rise to the meaning of the phrase /communism will win/, and to tie that back to dialectical materialism, it means that capitalism was a new idea which had a definitive start, and will have a definitive end. but communism is eternal, as all it does is identify communal social structures as they have already existed for thousands of years. from some of the terminology of thesis/antithesis ideas, communism is constantly reborn, coming again, to be applied to our material conditions, it’s never losing or dying, only being subjugated to exploitation