It was only when I came to Mao Zedong's writings and the experience of the Chinese Revolution that I could begin to reappraise Stalin, the USSR, and the world communist movement as a whole. Later my utopianism became more nuanced and sophisticated as I studied philosophy formally. As a young man, a teenager just coming to Marxism, I remember people would say, "but Socialism didn't work," and I would reply, with a fine mixture of youthful optimism and naivete, "but it was never really tried!" Any scientific socialist should be able to see such a statement for the utopianism that it is. I read Adorno, Jameson, and Critical Theory. I came from a petit-bourgeois intellectual Marxism, distanced from practice and tied in rather closely to to the humanist/individualist ideologies of the U.S. It is a weapon for communists to use in the ideological front.įor a long time I didn't understand Comrade Stalin. For us, working in the United States where anticommunism is so institutionalized, it is an important book. This book by Ludo Martens of the Worker's Party of Belgium, Another View of Stalin (EPO, Antwerp: 1994.), is pretty incredible.
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