What do you think of this essay? For me personally on the one hand i can see it contains a lot of idealism and is not exactly written from a Marxist materialist perspective, but on the other hand i think there is a lot there that westerners, especially liberals and ultra-leftists, would do well to start thinking about more.
Excellent critique. I had some of the exact same thoughts. Of course the comments about Stalin immediately threw up red flags for me that this author is still buying into a fair bit of anti-communist propaganda. Also, thank you for finding the right words to describe what was bothering me so much about the underlying assumptions of this article. I called it idealism but really it’s more like you said a sort of “benign” orientalism or liberal racism. What is entirely missing from it is proper class analysis.