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this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2023
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politics
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To be completely fair, even Marx concluded similarly, and it took about 130 years of new theory and new evidence on top of it to get to where we are now.
Absolutely. Thats why i understand that assumption persisting particularly in the West.
IIRC towards the end of his life Marx was beginning to think about these sorts of questions and the revolutionary potential of what we now call the global south (he focused on Asia and Russia) but then he very rudely died before getting the chance to really write about it.
I've read some about that, and also how Marx gave some serious thought to ecological issues and their interaction with capital/socialism. Still, Marx, thinking as hard as he did on stuff like this did think that, so we can give some grace to Metropolitan leftists for reaching a similar conclusion.
Yeah I definitely agree with you there. It's understandable for a great number of reasons-not just intellectually, but the fact we, as socialists and humans, want meaning in our lives and to make meaningful change. The idea that we're stuck in a society structured so hard against revolution-and that we are therefore impotent and cannot contribute to the meaning we have given ourselves in life-is difficult to tolerate. I mean what do you do if your whole life purpose is for nothing? Even beyond the intellectual side of things, it's easy to get into denial with it and try to rationalise some way in which you have a meaningful role to play in the events to come.
I don't really know what the answer to this is. I want meaning in my life but how do you get it in a place like, say, the UK? You either suck up that copium and pretend you can convince the masses or you just wallow in pity at your impotence-I haven't thought of any other options yet so I just swing between these two.
To be fair to Marx though, he lived through a time of revolutions where it looked like France and Germany were about to pop any day. Places in the imperial core during Marx's time did have things like frequent uprisings, like the revolutionaries in Paris were what inspired the writing of the manifesto.
Marx had high hopes for the USA too, but that was a standard opinion at the time. Lots of German socialists came to the US to start little utopian experiments in places like Ohio.