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The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism
In The Purity Fetish and the Crisis of Western Marxism , Carlos L. Garrido provides a comprehensive development of his concept of the purity fetish, tracing the outlook to the Eleatic school of Ancient Greek philosophy, and showing how it has appeared in 20th century Western Marxism and in contemporary U.S. socialism. In every form the purity fetish takes in Western Marxism's politics, Carlos argues that one finds not only the failure to obtain truth, but also the inability to create a revolutionary movement
" This book will soon become a must-read for anyone who is serious about the socialist road and the goal of communism ."
- Roland Boer, professor at Renmin University of China, Beijing. Author of many books, including the recently published Socialism with Chinese Characteristics (2021) and Friedrich Engels and the Foundations of Socialist Governance (2021).
" This book is a healthy antidote to the widespread infantile leftism that infects the American left ."
- Thomas Riggins, retired philosophy teacher (NYU, New School, et. al), chief editorial counselor at the Midwestern Marx Institute and author of Reading the Classical Texts of Marxism (2022) and A Critical Reading (2022).
" This book—a clarion call for the collective project of building socialism—should be widely read and discussed !"
- Gabriel Rockhill, Founding Director of the Critical Theory Workshop / Atelier de Théorie Critique & Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University. Author of many books, including Counter-History of the Untimely Interrogations into Globalization, Technology, and Democracy (2017) and Interventions in Contemporary History, Politics, Aesthetics (2016).
" In adroitly dissecting the philosophical underpinnings of what passes for Marxism in the academy... Carlos Garrido demonstrates the importance of theoretical education in dialectical materialism for the class struggle in the contemporary conjuncture ."
- Helmut-Harry Loewen, veteran anti-apartheid and anti-fascist campaigner in Western Canada, Associate of the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University and a retired University of Winnipeg lecturer in sociology and criminological theory.
"Garrido’s accessible philosophical discussion is indispensable for understanding much of the Western left’s inability to think dialectically, to truly follow Hegel and Marx rather than just invoke them, to understand the struggle for socialism as it is, rather than as it might be in the politically juvenile imaginations of so many."
- Radhika Desai, Professor at the Department of Political Studies and Director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. Author of many books, including Geopolitical After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire (2013), Karl Polanyi and Twenty First Century Capitalism (2020), Revolutions (2020), Japan’s Secular Stagnation (2022), and Capitalism, Coronavirus and A Geopolitical Economy (2022). With Alan Freeman, she co-edits the Geopolitical Economy book series with Manchester University Press and the Future of Capitalism book series with Pluto Press.
"Garrido's book is a valuable tool in the struggle to build a symbiotic relationship of solidarity, comradeship, respect and mutual learning between the Western left and the socialist world."
- Carlos Martinez, independent researcher and political activist from London, Britain. He is the co-founder of No Cold War and Friends of Socialist China, and the author of The End of the Lessons of the Soviet Collapse (2019) and No Great On the Continuities of the Chinese Revolution (2022).
" This book will soon become a must-read for anyone who is serious about the socialist road and the goal of communism ."
- Roland Boer, professor at Renmin University of China, Beijing. Author of many books, including the recently published Socialism with Chinese Characteristics (2021) and Friedrich Engels and the Foundations of Socialist Governance (2021).
" This book is a healthy antidote to the widespread infantile leftism that infects the American left ."
- Thomas Riggins, retired philosophy teacher (NYU, New School, et. al), chief editorial counselor at the Midwestern Marx Institute and author of Reading the Classical Texts of Marxism (2022) and A Critical Reading (2022).
" This book—a clarion call for the collective project of building socialism—should be widely read and discussed !"
- Gabriel Rockhill, Founding Director of the Critical Theory Workshop / Atelier de Théorie Critique & Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University. Author of many books, including Counter-History of the Untimely Interrogations into Globalization, Technology, and Democracy (2017) and Interventions in Contemporary History, Politics, Aesthetics (2016).
" In adroitly dissecting the philosophical underpinnings of what passes for Marxism in the academy... Carlos Garrido demonstrates the importance of theoretical education in dialectical materialism for the class struggle in the contemporary conjuncture ."
- Helmut-Harry Loewen, veteran anti-apartheid and anti-fascist campaigner in Western Canada, Associate of the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University and a retired University of Winnipeg lecturer in sociology and criminological theory.
"Garrido’s accessible philosophical discussion is indispensable for understanding much of the Western left’s inability to think dialectically, to truly follow Hegel and Marx rather than just invoke them, to understand the struggle for socialism as it is, rather than as it might be in the politically juvenile imaginations of so many."
- Radhika Desai, Professor at the Department of Political Studies and Director of the Geopolitical Economy Research Group at University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada. Author of many books, including Geopolitical After US Hegemony, Globalization and Empire (2013), Karl Polanyi and Twenty First Century Capitalism (2020), Revolutions (2020), Japan’s Secular Stagnation (2022), and Capitalism, Coronavirus and A Geopolitical Economy (2022). With Alan Freeman, she co-edits the Geopolitical Economy book series with Manchester University Press and the Future of Capitalism book series with Pluto Press.
"Garrido's book is a valuable tool in the struggle to build a symbiotic relationship of solidarity, comradeship, respect and mutual learning between the Western left and the socialist world."
- Carlos Martinez, independent researcher and political activist from London, Britain. He is the co-founder of No Cold War and Friends of Socialist China, and the author of The End of the Lessons of the Soviet Collapse (2019) and No Great On the Continuities of the Chinese Revolution (2022).
122 pages, Paperback
Published March 20, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
February 20, 2024
Carlos Garrido’s polemic shows a tremendous misunderstanding of Marx’s critique of political economy. While his critique of ‘socialists’ that comprise the Western Left in his text, who cry about authoritarianism and only defend dead revolutionaries is fair, he plays the role of a campist defending eastern ‘socialism’ from western ‘capitalism.’ Throughout the text he quotes from Deng Xiaoping, a man whose attempts to reconcile socialism with markets and generalized commodity production even turned Mao against him on several occasions. His defense hinges on his misunderstanding on socialism. He never addresses the modes of production and there different relations to production. Capitalism being private property, generalized commodity production, wage labor, surplus extraction, and value form economics. Socialism being the free association of free and equal producers which entails the complete abolition of capitalist relations. Capitalist relations to production are found in China and every other self proclaimed AES state. All capitalist states by nature of expanding their productive forces can be said to be ‘building socialism,’ the point however is a society cannot be socialist before socialism is built!
For a full critique see the link below:
https://open.substack.com/pub/sweeney...
For a full critique see the link below:
https://open.substack.com/pub/sweeney...
April 9, 2023
Carlos has a phenomenally deep understanding of Western Marxism, and it’s place in American history. I have seen this “purity fetish” many times throughout my years, it has been something I have been indoctrinated in and had to overcome myself, and it is refreshing to see it so adequately dismantled.
I think his direction with this text is spot on, and serves as a fundamental need in the West. Socialism is not, and has not, been perfect. We NEED to divorce from this utopian way of thinking, get back to our roots, our love for our country, and finally actualize the freedoms from the shackles of oppression that our forefathers had fought for.
Eagerly awaiting more work from Carlos in the future.
I think his direction with this text is spot on, and serves as a fundamental need in the West. Socialism is not, and has not, been perfect. We NEED to divorce from this utopian way of thinking, get back to our roots, our love for our country, and finally actualize the freedoms from the shackles of oppression that our forefathers had fought for.
Eagerly awaiting more work from Carlos in the future.
June 6, 2023
Great piece of writing. Combat ultra-leftism and right opportunism!
October 13, 2024
The Purest Trash
Form: This needs an editor. Mr. Garrido has an annoying habit of showing off his vocabulary in Latin, Greek and Chinese. Did you know that demos means "common people", and kratos means power? You will after reading this because he tells you on page 40 and again on page 70! Here's a fun sentence: "If the last four decades - wherein China has drastically raised its population's living standards and lifted 800 million people out of poverty - has taught us anything, it is that China's usage of markets as a shouduan to fuwu socialism works."(pp.60-61) Did you know that substance is ousia in Greek and substantia in Latin (p.12)? Very cool, Mr. Garrido!
Content: Rather than reading this book, save your time and imagine a sea of strawmen. The thesis is:"Western Marxists seek a pure form of socialism, a pure proletariat, a pure national-historical past, but in the impossibility of such a purity arising, the lose the potential to actualize or defend any socialist revolution."(p.1) By "Western Marxists" he means Trotskyists... and Maoists... and Left-Communists... and everyone really. It's almost as though Mr. Garrido is incapable of telling them apart because he is totally unfamiliar with them. You even don't have to be in the West to be a Western Marxist, the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and the Communist Party of the Philippines qualify just as well (although of course he never mentions them), and Stalin would be a Western Marxist because he didn't support Yugoslavia's "market socialism" revisionism.
Chapter 1: The Philosophical Grounds of the Purity Fetish
For someone who edited a book on dialectical materialism (ie selected articles from marxists.org), Mr. Garrido struggles at its application. Does Mr. Garrido express himself poorly (yes!) or does he really believe that everyone who thinks China is capitalist is literally a follower of the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides (maybe?)? "The Western Marxist fixation on purity, staticity, homogeneity, etc. can be traced back to ancient Greek philosophy..."(p.5), "This essentialism, undeniably, is an inheritance of the Parmenidean philosophy of permanence."(p.9)
This chapter is ironically the most idealist history of dialectical materialism one could imagine. Heraclitus was dialectical, Parmenides was metaphysical. "However, Heraclitus would lose - at least until the arrival of Hegel and Marxism - the worldview battle against Parmenides."(p.6) There is no mention of how the class struggle or the struggle for production influenced philosophy, ie why slaveowners and feudal lords were inclined to promote metaphysics and idealism, or why the bourgeoisie is inclined to promote metaphysics and idealism sometimes (in analyzing how societies change) and dialectics and materialism other times (for example in biology). For Mr. Garrido Mao's contribution to our understanding of dialectical materialism isn't even worth mentioning, which is telling, because throughout the entire book he is repeatedly incapable of determining what is the principal and secondary aspect of almost any given contradiction or of determining what is the principal contradiction.
For two infinitely better books on dialectical materialism check out Elementary Principles of Philosophy and for more depth, the essential Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science
Chapter 2: The Paradoxes of Western Marxism and Chapter 3: China and the Purity Fetish of Western Marxists
Rather than making a concrete analysis of concrete conditions to determine whether China is socialist, meaning whether the principal aspect of the contradiction is socialist development or capitalist development, or whether it is the Chinese bourgeoisie who is oppressing the Chinese proletariat or the Chinese proletariat who is oppressing the Chinese bourgeoisie, Mr. Garrido repeatedly throws his hands up and says "It's contradictory! It isn't static, it's developing! It's in motion! The productive forces are developing! etc".
Imagine we are in my car, and I tell you we are on a road-trip to the North Pole. We drive for several hours when you notice that we are driving towards the setting sun, and in fact we have been driving this direction, West, the entire time. You confront me and I tell you "Our road trip is contradictory! Our car isn't static, it's moving! We are in motion! We are going faster than ever! etc." Everything is contradictory, everything is in motion, nothing is static, and saying so is not an analysis, it is dialectics in form and metaphysics in essence.
"The Chinese bourgeoisie lifted 800 million people out of poverty" by privatizing and redistributing communal capital and land and by inviting in foreign capitalist "investment" (imperialism).(Eisenman xxiv) "The Chinese bourgeoisie had to decollectivize (carry out a coup and return to the capitalist mode of production), because the communes were a failure": the communes, meaning socialism, substantially improved agricultural productivity, life expectancy and basic education during their 20 years of existence.(Eisenman xxiii) Apparently economic power can be completely delinked from political power, which implies that Chinese people have some kind of essential quality (idealism) that makes them immune to being bribed by their capitalists.
You can flip to almost any pair of pages in this section and find Mr. Garrido puking up nonsense. Page 54: "Reform and Opening Up developed as a necessary phase in the Chinese revolutionary process, wherein an overly centralized economy... stifled development and necessitated reforms...". It was Deng and the capitalist roaders who wanted greater centralization through trusts directly under the party bureaucracy, the communes were extremely decentralized.(Eisenman p.49-56)
Across, on page 55, even more nonsense: "Far from being a national liberation war [sic, he means a war of national liberation] [WWI] was a war amongst empires fighting to colonize greater and greater parts of the world." The entire world was already colonized, WWI was a war to redivide the colonies. Brush up on your Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism Mr. Garrido! If he does so he might realize that since China exports capital... oh no!
China isn't socialist. Watch Ascension (2021) and How Yukong Moved the Mountains (on youtube) back to back without changing your mind. Stop eating what the Chinese bourgeoisie is feeding you and read Rethinking Socialism: What is Socialist Transition? and for statistics Red China's Green Revolution: Technological Innovation, Institutional Change, and Economic Development Under the Commune
Chapter 4: The Fettering Role of the Purity Fetish in US Socialist Organizing
"In the U.S., the purity fetish, which overwhelmingly dominates the outlook of most communist organizations, presents a fetter for the actualization of the subjective factor."(p.103) Is this a concrete analysis of concrete conditions? Which organizations, Mr. Garrido? Mr. Garrido must either be unfamiliar with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, The Communist Party USA, The Party of Communists USA, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, etc, or, more likely, he wrote this book because he is compelled by both his own enormous ego and by the compulsion to spread his shitty revisionist ideas far and wide.
In this chapter we have Three Forms the Purity Fetish Takes in the US.
1. Rejection of Actually Existing Socialism: Not only can he not identify the principal aspect of the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in China, Cuba, etc, but he also can't identify the principal contradiction among a given set of contradictions. Rejecting "AES" is #1 because... they will save us! The Chinese bourgeoisie will save us from the US bourgeoisie! Mao said "In the fight for complete liberation the oppressed people must rely first of all on their own struggle and then, and only then, on international assistance," but Mr. Garrido is only capable of reading the titles of Mao's essays so he wouldn't know that (I'm sorry Mr. Garrido but Oppose Book Worship isn't in favor of jettisoning communist theory, it's in favor of investigating before spouting nonsense, which ironically you are awful at).
2. Rejection of 'Backward' Workers: Again, where is Imperialism and the labor aristocracy? Page 82: "[Communists] must learn how to organize all workers irrespective of the differences the ruling class foists on the working masses to divide them." It would be nice to win over all proletarians but there are advanced, intermediate and backwards proletarians, and a limited number of communists, so it makes more sense to unite with the advanced first to win over the intermediate, and either win over or isolate the backwards. Saying "we must win over all workers" is like saying "I'm going to eat this entire banquet in one bite!" Mr. Garrido is incapable of using dialectics to find the contradictions within anything in any useful or meaningful sense, including the US masses.
3. Rejection of National Past: Was Thomas Jefferson mostly bad or mostly good? Doesn't matter, he was contradictory so we should embrace him as a revolutionary!
Conclusion
Mr. Garrido is "a PhD student and instructor in philosophy". Mr. Garrido is a member of the American "Communist" Party Plenary Committee. On page 103 Mr. Garrido says "all efforts should be made to have the working class - not the [Professional Managerial Class, ie academics] - become the center and soul of [communist organizations]." I am happy to know that at least on this we can all agree: the state of the US communist movement would be improved if Mr. Garrido took his own advice and left it!
Form: This needs an editor. Mr. Garrido has an annoying habit of showing off his vocabulary in Latin, Greek and Chinese. Did you know that demos means "common people", and kratos means power? You will after reading this because he tells you on page 40 and again on page 70! Here's a fun sentence: "If the last four decades - wherein China has drastically raised its population's living standards and lifted 800 million people out of poverty - has taught us anything, it is that China's usage of markets as a shouduan to fuwu socialism works."(pp.60-61) Did you know that substance is ousia in Greek and substantia in Latin (p.12)? Very cool, Mr. Garrido!
Content: Rather than reading this book, save your time and imagine a sea of strawmen. The thesis is:"Western Marxists seek a pure form of socialism, a pure proletariat, a pure national-historical past, but in the impossibility of such a purity arising, the lose the potential to actualize or defend any socialist revolution."(p.1) By "Western Marxists" he means Trotskyists... and Maoists... and Left-Communists... and everyone really. It's almost as though Mr. Garrido is incapable of telling them apart because he is totally unfamiliar with them. You even don't have to be in the West to be a Western Marxist, the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and the Communist Party of the Philippines qualify just as well (although of course he never mentions them), and Stalin would be a Western Marxist because he didn't support Yugoslavia's "market socialism" revisionism.
Chapter 1: The Philosophical Grounds of the Purity Fetish
For someone who edited a book on dialectical materialism (ie selected articles from marxists.org), Mr. Garrido struggles at its application. Does Mr. Garrido express himself poorly (yes!) or does he really believe that everyone who thinks China is capitalist is literally a follower of the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides (maybe?)? "The Western Marxist fixation on purity, staticity, homogeneity, etc. can be traced back to ancient Greek philosophy..."(p.5), "This essentialism, undeniably, is an inheritance of the Parmenidean philosophy of permanence."(p.9)
This chapter is ironically the most idealist history of dialectical materialism one could imagine. Heraclitus was dialectical, Parmenides was metaphysical. "However, Heraclitus would lose - at least until the arrival of Hegel and Marxism - the worldview battle against Parmenides."(p.6) There is no mention of how the class struggle or the struggle for production influenced philosophy, ie why slaveowners and feudal lords were inclined to promote metaphysics and idealism, or why the bourgeoisie is inclined to promote metaphysics and idealism sometimes (in analyzing how societies change) and dialectics and materialism other times (for example in biology). For Mr. Garrido Mao's contribution to our understanding of dialectical materialism isn't even worth mentioning, which is telling, because throughout the entire book he is repeatedly incapable of determining what is the principal and secondary aspect of almost any given contradiction or of determining what is the principal contradiction.
For two infinitely better books on dialectical materialism check out Elementary Principles of Philosophy and for more depth, the essential Anti-Dühring: Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science
Chapter 2: The Paradoxes of Western Marxism and Chapter 3: China and the Purity Fetish of Western Marxists
Rather than making a concrete analysis of concrete conditions to determine whether China is socialist, meaning whether the principal aspect of the contradiction is socialist development or capitalist development, or whether it is the Chinese bourgeoisie who is oppressing the Chinese proletariat or the Chinese proletariat who is oppressing the Chinese bourgeoisie, Mr. Garrido repeatedly throws his hands up and says "It's contradictory! It isn't static, it's developing! It's in motion! The productive forces are developing! etc".
Imagine we are in my car, and I tell you we are on a road-trip to the North Pole. We drive for several hours when you notice that we are driving towards the setting sun, and in fact we have been driving this direction, West, the entire time. You confront me and I tell you "Our road trip is contradictory! Our car isn't static, it's moving! We are in motion! We are going faster than ever! etc." Everything is contradictory, everything is in motion, nothing is static, and saying so is not an analysis, it is dialectics in form and metaphysics in essence.
"The Chinese bourgeoisie lifted 800 million people out of poverty" by privatizing and redistributing communal capital and land and by inviting in foreign capitalist "investment" (imperialism).(Eisenman xxiv) "The Chinese bourgeoisie had to decollectivize (carry out a coup and return to the capitalist mode of production), because the communes were a failure": the communes, meaning socialism, substantially improved agricultural productivity, life expectancy and basic education during their 20 years of existence.(Eisenman xxiii) Apparently economic power can be completely delinked from political power, which implies that Chinese people have some kind of essential quality (idealism) that makes them immune to being bribed by their capitalists.
You can flip to almost any pair of pages in this section and find Mr. Garrido puking up nonsense. Page 54: "Reform and Opening Up developed as a necessary phase in the Chinese revolutionary process, wherein an overly centralized economy... stifled development and necessitated reforms...". It was Deng and the capitalist roaders who wanted greater centralization through trusts directly under the party bureaucracy, the communes were extremely decentralized.(Eisenman p.49-56)
Across, on page 55, even more nonsense: "Far from being a national liberation war [sic, he means a war of national liberation] [WWI] was a war amongst empires fighting to colonize greater and greater parts of the world." The entire world was already colonized, WWI was a war to redivide the colonies. Brush up on your Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism Mr. Garrido! If he does so he might realize that since China exports capital... oh no!
China isn't socialist. Watch Ascension (2021) and How Yukong Moved the Mountains (on youtube) back to back without changing your mind. Stop eating what the Chinese bourgeoisie is feeding you and read Rethinking Socialism: What is Socialist Transition? and for statistics Red China's Green Revolution: Technological Innovation, Institutional Change, and Economic Development Under the Commune
Chapter 4: The Fettering Role of the Purity Fetish in US Socialist Organizing
"In the U.S., the purity fetish, which overwhelmingly dominates the outlook of most communist organizations, presents a fetter for the actualization of the subjective factor."(p.103) Is this a concrete analysis of concrete conditions? Which organizations, Mr. Garrido? Mr. Garrido must either be unfamiliar with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, The Communist Party USA, The Party of Communists USA, the Freedom Road Socialist Organization, etc, or, more likely, he wrote this book because he is compelled by both his own enormous ego and by the compulsion to spread his shitty revisionist ideas far and wide.
In this chapter we have Three Forms the Purity Fetish Takes in the US.
1. Rejection of Actually Existing Socialism: Not only can he not identify the principal aspect of the contradiction between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat in China, Cuba, etc, but he also can't identify the principal contradiction among a given set of contradictions. Rejecting "AES" is #1 because... they will save us! The Chinese bourgeoisie will save us from the US bourgeoisie! Mao said "In the fight for complete liberation the oppressed people must rely first of all on their own struggle and then, and only then, on international assistance," but Mr. Garrido is only capable of reading the titles of Mao's essays so he wouldn't know that (I'm sorry Mr. Garrido but Oppose Book Worship isn't in favor of jettisoning communist theory, it's in favor of investigating before spouting nonsense, which ironically you are awful at).
2. Rejection of 'Backward' Workers: Again, where is Imperialism and the labor aristocracy? Page 82: "[Communists] must learn how to organize all workers irrespective of the differences the ruling class foists on the working masses to divide them." It would be nice to win over all proletarians but there are advanced, intermediate and backwards proletarians, and a limited number of communists, so it makes more sense to unite with the advanced first to win over the intermediate, and either win over or isolate the backwards. Saying "we must win over all workers" is like saying "I'm going to eat this entire banquet in one bite!" Mr. Garrido is incapable of using dialectics to find the contradictions within anything in any useful or meaningful sense, including the US masses.
3. Rejection of National Past: Was Thomas Jefferson mostly bad or mostly good? Doesn't matter, he was contradictory so we should embrace him as a revolutionary!
Conclusion
Mr. Garrido is "a PhD student and instructor in philosophy". Mr. Garrido is a member of the American "Communist" Party Plenary Committee. On page 103 Mr. Garrido says "all efforts should be made to have the working class - not the [Professional Managerial Class, ie academics] - become the center and soul of [communist organizations]." I am happy to know that at least on this we can all agree: the state of the US communist movement would be improved if Mr. Garrido took his own advice and left it!
December 17, 2023
Awesome, great book. Must read for anyone in the west interested in marxist theory and wanting to apply it, definitely not just Americans. The purity fetish is a very recognisable outlook that's well analyzed here with a look at western philosophy and history. Also not a hard or long read, which is nice.
September 4, 2023
Anyone with a hammer and sickle in their social media profile should be required to read this book. American socialists have nothing to lose but the chains of their delusions, so that they can walk the walk and not just talk the talk, when it comes to building socialism.
March 7, 2025
One star removed just due to annoying formatting issues that sometimes make sentences‘ meanings unclear at first glance. I also would’ve put the cited sources as endnotes instead of footnotes (a half page of URLs is ugly to look at). The index formatting is also poorly thought-through (why is Slavoj Zizek listed under „S“ and then Zizek listed again under „Z“?)
I also don’t think the first chapter is in any way necessary or adds anything to the arguments made in the rest of the book. I don’t care if modern misunderstandings of dialectical materialism have their source in Ancient Rome or not.
Ok but minor critiques aside, it’s a solid book with a lot of fair critiques of modern Marxists. Anyone who calls themselves one should give it a read.
I also don’t think the first chapter is in any way necessary or adds anything to the arguments made in the rest of the book. I don’t care if modern misunderstandings of dialectical materialism have their source in Ancient Rome or not.
Ok but minor critiques aside, it’s a solid book with a lot of fair critiques of modern Marxists. Anyone who calls themselves one should give it a read.
September 9, 2024
Fire book I learned a lot
February 18, 2025
“Actually that’s not real socialism 🤓☝🏼” is a cowards way out not using your brain. This book demonstrates that.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews