Word: marxist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Such heretical thoughts are heard often enough these days to raise an insistent question: Can the system they are erecting still be called Marxist? It is far more than a matter of semantics. Marxism has demonstrated dramatic power to shake the world, and thus any debate as to what it does and does not consist of is of paramount importance...
...question, however, is far from easy to answer. Since Marx died in 1883, his admirers have written innumerable explanations of his work. They have frequently, and often fanatically, denounced one another as revisionists or worse. But Bertell Ollman, a professor at New York University and an avowed Marxist, observes that "Marx had very little to say of a concrete nature about socialism," the transitional society that would follow the revolution Marx preached. (In strict Marxist terminology, "Communism" is the ideal stateless society to be reached as an ultimate goal.) The only way to get a definitive opinion on the features...
...version of Marxist thought that eventually won out, because it achieved power, was Marxism-Leninism, after V.I. Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution. According to Lenin, Marx's call for a "dictatorship of the proletariat" meant that a tightly organized Communist Party was to be the exclusive dominating force in transforming society. Among the millions attracted by this prescription were two young Chinese, named Mao Tse-tung and Deng Xiaoping, who saw in it a way to change their country from a weak, backward state pushed around by foreign powers to a mighty modern nation. Deng has remained...
...N.E.P. as a strategic retreat. Stalin put an end to it and launched the Soviet Union on a nearly total collectivization of agriculture and nationalization of industry. Stalin's system became the dominant version of Marxism, if only because the U.S.S.R. for decades was the sole significant officially Marxist state and remains its most powerful...
...main contributions to Marxist theory was to stress the role of the peasants, rather than the industrial workers exalted by Marx. Another was the doctrine of perpetual revolution, which reached chaotic extremes during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that began in 1966. Party bureaucrats and intellectuals were banished to factories and into the countryside to "learn from the people" by working with their hands, and teenage Red Guards rampaged through China assaulting supposed "bourgeois rightists." One was Deng, who was paraded through Peking with a dunce cap on his head and mocked as a "capitalist roader...