Actually, I'd add at least Bolivia to the list. Anti-colonial revolt doesn't explain three hundred years of Bolivian miners in non-stop struggle against their state. Probably also modern chile until the eighties, too.
You're... not a marxist?
I myself have actually read very little marx. I keep putting it off. Mike Davis has definitely inspired me to add the eighteenth brumaire to my reading list, though. I'm excited to be able to call republican voters "fundmanetally like a sack of potatoes", re that tract.
There are plenty of caveats to be made of your description of left and the US. The left has been the mainstream of thought for the black community, and in certain regions at certain times (the industrial midwest from 36-60s), and the mainstream of thought of the insurgent minority of america that was in revolt in the late sixties.
But given those substantial challenges, what I have a problem with is the manner in which today's leftists seem to secretly revel in their irrelevancy, and strive to make their movement smaller, less popular, more isolated. It is analagous to the twenties, when left intellectuals chose literal or figurative exile from a country enthralled with capital, fundamentalist christianity, etc. We can do better.
The only country in the world where the mythical ideal of the Marxist
> tradition -- the working class in class struggle with their own
> domestic ruling class -- has been organic to the working class is
> France, where politics -- from 1789 to 1968 -- approximates that
> mythical ideal the best. Social revolutions on the Left in other
> places have been peasant and/or anti-colonial/neo-colonial ones. That
> is not surprising, for Marx developed his thought by examining Germany
> philosophy, English economy, and _French politics_.
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <../attachments/20070114/ed876a04/attachment.htm>