So The West just collectively acts like it never happened huh?

  • @Shrike502
    link
    41 year ago

    It does improve a lot, although I think I should apologize for being perhaps too harsh. Perhaps you are correct to use complacency in the meaning that people have simply expected the contradictions to just resolve the conflict, for the capitalist countries to just gradually collapse and for communism to win.

    In this sense, yes - I do believe they’ve underestimated the organized neoliberalism. Both in terms of its ability to artificially prolong the lifespan of capitalist countries (i.e. the petrodollar system) and it’s ability to influence superstructure (and thus - the economic basis).

    Likewise with the ML and generally leftist groups in the west. Without the guidance of principled Marxists (and with USSR also deviating from it), it was easy for them to fall prey to infiltrators, opportunists and other tendencies.

    I get a sense we are speaking of the same things, but in different terms, that’s all.

    • @redtea
      link
      41 year ago

      No need to apologize at all! You were polite and I appreciate the criticism. Please continue to challenge me if I say anything that does not sound right.

      I’m now wondering whether an ML critique of the Western left since the 1970s is crucial to rebuilding it effectively. Nowadays I mostly hear arguments in favour of rebuilding the unions, as if the West’s problems are solely due low Union membership. That is important, but it’s only one part of the puzzle.

      There are lots of folk tales about militant Trotskyists in the 80s and the May 1968 movement up to Mitterrand in France, etc. These stories were built into a new narrative around Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn that the ‘left’ was on the rise again.

      Still, I fear the western left will keep failing and keep falling to chauvinism unless it fully understands what happened in the last 40 years: (i) by failing to see that Marxism-Leninism is needed; and (ii) in failing to see how the ‘left’ became fragmented and weak.

      I agree with you. I’d say that a resurgence of effective Western leftwing movements can only follow an analysis of

      neoliberalism. Both in terms of its ability to artificially prolong the lifespan of capitalist countries (i.e. the petrodollar system) and it’s ability to influence superstructure (and thus - the economic basis)

      And of how

      ML and generally leftist groups in the west[, w]ithout the guidance of principled Marxists (and with USSR also deviating from it), it was easy for them to fall prey to infiltrators, opportunists and other tendencies.

      Do you (or others) know of any good texts that synthesise these issues?

      I think Stuart Hall may have written about this. The blurb for his Road to Renewal sounds relevant:

      …these essays show how Thatcher has exploited discontent with Labour’s record in office and with aspects of the welfare state to devise a potent authoritarian, populist ideology. Hall’s critical approach is elaborated here in essays on the formation of the SDP, inner city riots, the Falklands War and the signficance of Antonio Gramsci. He suggests that Thatcherism is skillfully employing the restless and individualistic dynamic of consumer capitalism to promote a swingeing programme of ‘regressive modernization’.

      The Hard Road to Renewal is as concerned with elaborating a new politics for the Left as it is with the project of the Right. Hall insists that the Left can no longer trade on inherited politics and tradition. Socialists today must be as radical as modernity itself. Valuable pointers to a new politics are identified in the experience of feminism, the campaigns of the GLC and the world-wide response to Band Aid.

      This could be focused on the British Labour party. Many other books do that and suffer because they then argue that reforming Labour will solve the problem. (I doubt Hall makes that argument.) I might give it a read.

      Alex Callinicos might also discuss politics in the same decades in Against the Third Way (but I think it’s more of a critique of Blairism).