Abstract
This chapter begins by explaining why Marxian thought is relevant today, focusing on what has changed in the century since the Russian Revolution. Attention is paid to advances in technology, to the increasing centrality of the environmental crisis, and to the lessons learned from earlier revolutionary experience. Also considered are political contrasts between the current leading powers and the sites of socialist revolution in the early to mid-twentieth century. The experience of specific revolutions (Russian, Chinese, Cuban) is briefly discussed. Also addressed are Marx’s own activism and the history of the US Left. A final topic is the interplay between democratic structures and vanguard-type leadership.
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Notes
- 1.
John Bellamy Foster, The Ecological Revolution (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2009), ch. 9; Paul Burkett, Marx and Nature: A Red and Green Perspective (Chicago: Haymarket, 2014 [1999]), ch. 9.
- 2.
See Michael Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010); Richard Wolff, Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket, 2012).
- 3.
See Victor Wallis, Red-Green Revolution: The Politics and Technology of Ecosocialism (Toronto: Political Animal Press, 2018), esp. ch. 4.
- 4.
Karl Marx, “Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association” (1864); available in many collections, but see Marcello Musto, ed., Workers Unite! The International 150 Years Later (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014).
- 5.
Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974), 3–24; Michael Lebowitz, The Contradictions of “Real Socialism”: The Conductor and the Conducted (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012).
- 6.
William Hinton, Fanshen: Documentary of Revolution in a Chinese Village (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1966).
- 7.
William G. Rosenberg, Bolshevik Visions: First Phase of the Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984).
- 8.
See the 2019 Netflix documentary, American Factory, about a Chinese-owned manufacturing enterprise in Ohio.
- 9.
https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2018/11/students-assaulted-amid-crackdown-on-marxist-activism/. For background, see Jude D. Blanchette, China’s New Red Guards: The Return of Radicalism and the Rebirth of Mao Zedong (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).
- 10.
See Al Campbell, “Updating Cuba’s Economic Model: Socialism, Human Development, Markets and Capitalism,” Socialism and Democracy, 31:1 (March 2017).
- 11.
Capital, vol. 1 (Moore & Aveling translation) (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959), 301.
- 12.
See Victor Wallis, Democracy Denied: Five Lectures on U.S. Politics (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2019).
- 13.
Michael Zweig, The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret, 2nd ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012).
- 14.
- 15.
Witness the opposition of the Democrat leadership to having one of the party’s 2020 nomination debates focus on the candidates’ environmental agendas.
- 16.
See reports by the Union of Concerned Scientists on solar power (https://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/our-energy-choices/renewable-energy/environmental-impacts-solar-power.html) and on wind power (https://www.ucsusa.org/clean-energy/renewable-energy/environmental-impacts-wind-power).
- 17.
For fuller discussion, see Wallis, Red-Green Revolution, ch. 1.
- 18.
Ian Angus, Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016).
- 19.
See Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists during the Great Depression (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990).
- 20.
Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Black against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2013), 292.
- 21.
Samuel P. Huntington, “The Democratic Distemper,” Public Interest, no. 41 (Fall, 1975), 36.
- 22.
For fuller discussion, see Wallis, Democracy Denied.
- 23.
The work of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) is particularly significant in this regard.
- 24.
- 25.
See the discussion of intersectionality in Wallis, Red-Green Revolution, ch. 8.
- 26.
“Finally, in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour,… a small section of the ruling class cuts itself adrift, and joins the revolutionary class” Communist Manifesto, Part I.
- 27.
See Victor Wallis, “Ordeals of Whistleblowers in a ‘Democracy,’” https://www.commondreams.org/views/2015/11/20/ordeals-whistleblowers-democracy.
- 28.
See Lenin, What Is to Be Done? (1902), Section II.
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Wallis, V. (2020). Marx After a Century of “Real Socialism”. In: Socialist Practice. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35066-6_2
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