Re: marxism & (under)development

[Louis N Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 10 Apr 1996, Doug Henwood wrote:

> The exchanges with the PCP crowd, and about Peru, Maoism, and sex, should
> lead to some serious discussion about the relation of Marxism to the level
> of economic and social development. Maybe all the attempts to revise
> Marxism to apply to semi-literate, semi-industrialized agrarian-rural
> societies - and the enthusiasm of First World radical intellectuals for
> such a project - have been mistakes after all. Educated aristocrats like AO

Louis: Semi-literate? Many of the most illiterate campesinos I met in
Nicaragua had a better understanding of world politics than the Columbia
undergraduates I am surrounded by. The deeper problem lies in the
inability of underdeveloped countries to move forward economically in a
world economy dominated by capitalism. There is something like an end of
an era, the era of anti-imperialist revolutions in underdeveloped
nations. When Victor Tirado, a Sandinista, discussed this openly, he got
hammered for his "pessimism." Yet I keep coming back to what Lenin said
about the Soviet Union. If it didn't get help from revolutions in Western
Europe, it would "perish."


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