This response is a total mischmasch. There's nothing here that should be the basis for hope for a revival of Marxism.
LouPaulsen <LouPaulsen at attbi.com> wrote: jks: "Third, I can think of no instance in history when an ideology or movement that has suffered the kind of defeat Marxism has suffered has made a comeback.
> Oh, I can think of several. The rise of Alexander the Great, which put an
end to all experiments with democracy in the Hellenic world.
Ancient democracy was not a movement, and it was totally extinbguished, never to rise again. Modern democracy, attained in part two thousand years later, is a very different creature.
> The overturn of the Roman Republic.
Which returned when?
> The consistent and complete defeat of the slave
rebellions in Sicily and Italy.
And your point? Finally you have a movement, but slavery was "abolished" by serfdom, which was not ended for 1500 years, and the slave revolts were not on ideology, least of all the pop-frontism of the moview Spartacus.
> The feudal counterrevolution in 13th- and
14th-century Italy (you won't see any more of that bourgeois rule crap!)
Apparantly you are taking me to argue against the possibility of progress. On the contrary, I've even defended in print the idea of a long term historical tendemncy towards increasing emancipation. But there's not a movement here comprabvle to Marxism, an ideology taht took a spoecific organizational form with a kind of vocabulary. The triumph of bourgeosi rule was not anything like anything that the Ghibellines would have recognized.
> The English Restoration of 1661. The Congress of Vienna, which pretty much
put an end to the ideology of the French Revolution. And where did Radical
Republicanism go after 1876?
The English Revolution was crushed. It was completed -- perhaps -- by Thatcher, 300 years later, though the monarchy remains. The Good Old Cause died. As to Republicanism, it never suffered the sort of defeat that Marxism has; also it was never that sort of supposedly herent ideology. The Congress of Vienna may have squileched Republicanism in Europe, but (a) there were mass Republican movements throughout the 19th century, including certain events in 1848 that inspired you know who, and (b) there was always the US. If the USSR had survived the events of 1989-91, and gobne froms trength to strength, we'ds have a different world.
The long and short of it is that your examples show at best that progress is possible, but not that old defeated ideologies rise to triumph again under their old names, with all their apparatus intact. In fact, whether you have real examples of total defeat (the Roman Slave Rebellions, the English Revolution), the evidence cuts against you. Other of your examples involve cases of millennia of "lag" and none of them involve revival of the defeated ideology.
> In any case you have to distinguish between defeats suffered by classes,
parties, governments; and refutations of particular tenets of particular
schools of Marxism; and the "defeat of Marxism", as a paradigm.
No doubt, but all schools of Marxism have been defeated, smashed, driven to the sidelines. This has been a major defeat for thew orking class, as well for the parties and governments and states that attempted to embody what they saw as Marxism. As a result, there are no such parties. govts, states, or mass movements that aspire to cosntituting a Marxisn order so called. It's absurd at this point to say, My own variant of Marxism has not been defeated because it has not been tried. That is idealism, a failure to see "the real movement."
jks
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