Episode 392 of RevolutionZ uncovers and visits a half-century-old file on my computer to address a surprisingly urgent question: are we building new revolutionary ideas, or just renting space in inherited ones. I recently rediscovered the text of my 1974 book What Is To Be Undone? written when the arguments between Marxism-Leninism, Maoism, anarchism, and other currents were not academic history but living fuel for organizing. Reading my own early investigations as the Sixties slipped into the Seventies feels like opening a time capsule and realizing the contents still impact what people believe is possible.
On the same day, a friend pointed me toward Gabriel Rockhill’s Who Paid The Piper Of Western Marxism? and the storms around his claim that contemporary revolutionary theory drifted into a “respectable” left alignment with capitalism and imperialism. I share a long excerpt from Rockhill laying out his case: a purge of dialectical and historical materialism, class analysis pushed aside by culturalism, and a call to rebuild a disciplined, organized left that can actually win. We agree on the need to rejuvenate anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist struggle, but we very seriously diverge on whether the path forward is a return to classical Marxism-Leninism and democratic centralism or a break from their limits.
From there, I grapple with a personal and political test: was my younger and then on-going self part of the problem Rockhill describes, or was I trying to learn from past failures to strengthen future movements. Along the way I revisit blurbs from Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, and Herb Gintis, reflect on the dangers of sectarian dismissal, and end with Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages” as a reminder that clarity sometimes comes from letting go of certainty.
This episode begins another sequence of episodes whose number of entries depends on what seems the case. Me then and now: a deluded, deceived, sell out CIA symp rejector of Marxism Leninism, or me then and now a sincere whipper snapper trying to overcome past ideological problems on the way to a better society?
Is our ideological problem anti anti imperialism, as Rockhill asserts, or is it that in going forward from the Sixties we actually retained too much from dead men's minds? This episode is a scene setting opening shot on the way to aggressively and hopefully definitively determining which way we need to orient our thinking Back to classical Marxism Leninism, or forward to a participatory self managing future.
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