Book Review of 'The Value of Nothing' by Raj Patel

[themediumdog]

Link is: angeleconomics.blogspot.com/2010/01/review-of-value-of-nothing-by-raj-patel.html. At 'Angel Economics' blog.

"There is no such thing as the contemporary Left. Instead, there are many hundreds of ribbons, flapping violently in the turbulence and blasts of air that form as capitalism speeds, Mach 4 or 5 now, to...the next quarter of financial results. Seen from afar, the ribbons might look small, but each of them is enough to consume millions of campaigners and dozens of supporting organizations (your heart sinks when you see the thin gatherings and the clattering pennies actually available). But although these ribbons sometimes come together to wave in a great undulating snake, it is always only in reaction to events (a war, a summit, a particularly outrageous injustice). There is no cross-weave actually holding them together, and they soon fall apart again, each dancing their solitary little death. As the Germans might have put it a couple of philosophical generations ago, there is no Idea."

etc

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

This is perhaps something I can relate to as a British dweller. However, it is certainly not true in terms of worldview. One only has to look at Nepal, India and much of Latin/South America to see that veritable Socialist ideas are still alive, and their genuine popularity rife within the working masses.

It does seem that the inability of Socialists to produce revolution in the more developed nations has been down to our own inadequacy - perhaps also due to the submissivness of much of the left to the USSR during its existence - in fostering comradeship and co-operation between tendencies which we must recognise will probably always be mutually existing.

As a novice in the understanding of Marxist literature, i'd also like to enquire as to whether there has been any substantial alteration to Marx's writings relating to the establishment of the period of bourgeois 'democratic rule', to then be replaced by a workers' revolution. It seems that the 20th century is proof that things did not pan out in quite the way Marx thought, in that revolution now, after perhaps just less than a century of established 'democratic' rule by the bourgeoisie, seems farther than ever in the more developed countries.