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.
Though Marx, Engles and the other founding Marxists built the ideology from the framework of European academia, Lenin’s contributions made Marxism easier to adapt to national dialectical materialism, by reforming Marxism to work in a Russian context. As a result, when a leader formates Marxism to work for their national struggle, they reform it to their philosophy and worldview. ML-MZT is simply Marxism from a Chinese perspective, Juche is Marxism from a Korean one. “Castroism” is Marxism from a Cuban perspective, and so on and so forth.
Which, really has to make you think. If it’s “revisionist” to reform Marxism to work within the framework of your own culture’s way of seeing things, are the so-called “anti-revisionists” just mad that non-Europeans wanted to make Marxism work for them without needing to colonize their culture?