As part of my studies on national liberation and Marxism, I went back to reread some of the Frankfurt school. Interested in how their main thinkers slipped into a reactionary politics. The turn against politics and towards philosophy was part of the problem. The other part.......
.....was their reluctance to engage with the developments in the communist state system, the sniff of disapprobation at the Easterness of the entire Soviet project, a disavowal of the realm of necessity....and then, even more so......
.....was their absolute horror of socialism in the Third World, from China to Cuba. Horkheimer, in 1963, wrote of the ‘exaggerated natiobalisms’ of the ‘backward countries’, meaning the Bandung-NAM bloc. Hard to ignore this in any assessment of their turn away from the world.
The limit of what is known as Western Marxism is their leap from the Second International over Lenin and the entire Third World to an arid philosophical orientation to communism. What is the point of a communist horizon as Idea without political economy.....
....without political organization, without the concrete analysis of the concrete conditions? Absent all this we have a U-turn from Marx back to Kant.
Rereading Perry Anderson on the lineage or Eric Hobsbawm on Marx, it is stunning that there is no full consideration of Lenin and then outwards to Castro. That entire lineage of national liberation Marxism is ignored.
They speak of Marxism but what they mean is Europe.
These studies will appear in a book on Marxism and national liberation. The first fruit of the research is this essay on the internationalist Lenin, published last week by @monthly_review - mronline.org/2020/08/10/the….
The next essay will be on Mao (1926-27) and Mariategui (1928), and their reading of Marxism in distinction to Lukacs’ History and class consciousness (1923). This should be ready in a few months.
Alongside this will be the edited Selected Ho Chi Minh and a companion short biography - both later this year from @LeftwordBooks. I will argue that Bac Ho is a serious Marxist theorist not merely ‘a man of action’.
