Word: marxist
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Kolakowski then attacks the sacred Marxist dogma of historical determinism. History is not predictable, he insists. This destroys the basis of the Soviet demand for blind obedience on the ground that whatever the party bosses decide to do is part of society's inevitable movement toward the overthrow of capitalism...
...Marxist protagonists of "political realism," Kolakowski retorts: "Your values change drastically every day, and every day they are proclaimed eternal. This is the worst kind of relativism of values, for it buries historical thinking as well as the immutable and lasting achievements of mankind...
Clearly, the Marxist-materialist bosses of Hunan's "people's government" are afraid of ghosts-or of a restless undercurrent of anti-Communism that has resulted in a China-wide crackdown against dissenters of all kinds. At first, ran the Peking account, Taoists Li Kwei-ying (a woman) and Chiang Chang-en were given eight-year sentences. They received death sentences only after Hunan's "masses protested against too light punishment...
...alongside the Bolsheviks during the Russian civil war. The story continues with Tito's years (1928-34) in the jails of what by then was Yugoslavia (he found prison "just like being at a university," and for the first time had the leisure to read and to argue Marxist dialectics-with his fellow convicts). Before Tito was ready for his famous World War II role as the ruthless partisan fighter against not only the German invaders but his anti-Communist countrymen, he served a tough apprenticeship as a Communist underground agent, using false names and passports, surfacing occasionally...
...that Tito managed instinctively to play off against each other. When he needed strength for his rebellion against Moscow, the man with peasant roots and romantic flair could draw on his people's patriotism; when he needed strength to subdue his own turbulent people, the practiced conspirator and Marxist dialectician could draw on Moscow police methods. If more of the world could understand the brutality of this ideological alliance-which persists despite very real political rifts-Communism everywhere would have a tougher time wrapping itself in national flags...