IN FROM THE COLD

We are witnessing the renaissance of Marxism on an international scale, says The Guardian newspaper.

This is not so much a new post  but rather a 'heads up' on a recent article in The Guardian and which will probably be of interest to the growing number of people fed up with mainstream New Zealand politics  and the lack of any real political alternatives to the neoliberal status quo.

in 'Why Marxism Is On the Rise Again', Stuart Jefferies outlines how Marxism has emerged as a political force to fill the vacuum left by the collapse of  both Stalinism and Social Democracy.

Marxism, in the West at least, has developed largely off-stage but is now gaining wider political attention.It's no coincidence that this comes at a time of revolution in the Middle  East  and mass struggles in the West.

Jefferies quotes a young English student:

"The point is that younger people weren't around when Thatcher was in power or when Marxism was associated with the Soviet Union," she says. "We tend to see it more as a way of understanding what we're going through now. Think of what's happening in Egypt. When Mubarak fell it was so inspiring. It broke so many stereotypes – democracy wasn't supposed to be something that people would fight for in the Muslim world. It vindicates revolution as a process, not as an event. So there was a revolution in Egypt, and a counter-revolution and a counter-counter revolution. What we learned from it was the importance of organisation."

Continues Jefferies:

This, surely is the key to understanding Marxism's renaissance in the west: for younger people, it is untainted by association with Stalinist gulags. For younger people too, Francis Fukuyama's triumphalism in his 1992 book 'The End of History' – in which capitalism seemed incontrovertible, its overthrow impossible to imagine – exercises less of a choke-hold on their imaginations than it does on those of their elders.