I'm a political science grad student in another country, but I was just thinking recently about how I'm not too knowledgeable about academics and public intellectuals that talk about the same broad fields I'm interested in, but with respect to Kerala/writing in/speaking to a primarily Malayali audience. Does anybody have any suggestions? Unfortunately, I can't read Malayalam, so book suggestions, unless the book is in English/has been translated, wouldn't be of much help to me. Best case would be if there are youtube videos of the person speaking, either in a lecture setting or even a more informal one.
Thanks in advance, guys!
"Do you know," said Porthos, "that to twist that damned Milady's neck would be a smaller sin than to twist those of these poor devils of Huguenots, who have committed no other crime than singing in French the psalms we sing in Latin?"
"What says the abbe?" asked Athos, quietly.
"I say I am entirely of Porthos's opinion," replied Aramis.
"And I, too," said d'Artagnan.
We've all witnessed the cliched argument before. A Western state intellectual refers to one of the former or existing ML states as a repressive, stifling dictatorship. Immediately, leftists object that the West has backed some of the most thuggish and brutal despots of the 20th Century, that the term is loaded or propaganda, and the exchange goes on ad infinitum.
However, its no secret that one of the foundational notions of Marxist (particularly ML) discourse the "dictatorship of the proletariat". This isn't some surface level "gotcha" analysis, it's clear what is implied by such a term when it's spoken by Lenin.
"The dictatorship of the proletariat, i.e. the organization of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of suppressing the oppressors, cannot result merely in an expansion of democracy... We must suppress them in order to free humanity from wage slavery, their resistance must be crushed by force..."
"When we are reproached with having established a dictatorship of one party and, as you have heard, a united socialist front is proposed, we say, "Yes, it is a dictatorship of one party! This is what we stand for and we shall not shift from that position..."
"Dictatorship is rule based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws. The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws".
When bourgeois commentators criticize socialist states, they typically are referring to things like expropriation of property-holding classes, the campaign against the kulaks (propertied peasants), free speech suppression, one-party rule and generally "political violence". Is it not that case that any ML worth his/her weight, ought to fully agree that said states were/are "dictatorships", on these terms, without equivocation? If this isn't the case, why not?
If it matters to anyone, I am a socialist, a bit of a vulgar Marxist, and am asking this both in good faith and out of interest in simple intellectual honesty.
Post WWII histography has questioned the existence of feudalism as a distinct economic system in medieval Europe, and economic historians, in digging into English history, in trying to understand the roots of the Industrial Revolution, have established medieval England in particular as a market-based economy.
Given the role of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in Karl Marx's theory, how have Marxist intellectuals (such as Slavoj Ε½iΕΎek) responded to this revised view? (If they have at all).
Especially if what palmer said is true...that the senior 6 of the q12 run the show. Those guys are gonna be around for a while.
