[lbo-talk] The Ideology Problem

[Carrol Cox]

I'm not invoking "true" Marxism vs "false" Marxism. I am talking about
the mere label: to what extent were the social revolutions/movemnts of
the last satwo centuries "inspired" by what their partiicpants would
have thought of as Marxism? And I answer as I did before: They were not
in any sense Marxist movements. The richness of Soviet thought in the
1920s (until Stalin closed it down) consisted in a wonderful scramble to
find out what Marxism was. And that was also the richness of left
intellectual thought in the U.S. in the 1970s. The social movement was
over. Only in the last stages of it had we begun to call ourselves
Marxist, and we did this without having the slightest idea what it
meant. You can't begin to understand these movements until you get rid
of the notion that at ANY STAGE, early or late, they were "inspired by
Marxism." They weren't even 'inspired' by socialism until they had
almost run their course, and then it was more of a label indicating
solidarity than it was of the content of their thought.

CVarrol

SA wrote:
> 
> Carrol Cox wrote:
> 
> > But no social movement has _ever_ been _inspired_ by Marxism. Rather
> > social movements (including the Russian Revolution) come from a whole
> > complex of "inspirations" and as they gain momentum _some_ elements of
> > that movement adopt Marxism as making most sense of what they are doing.
> >
> 
> Carrol, this is a red herring. They may have become Marxist early or
> late. Either way, the Marxism adopted by the movements in question was
> not what shag is thinking of as Marxism. It more resembled what she
> thinks of as "Enlightenment Liberalism."
> 
> SA
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