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to stress the aggressive expansionist nature of Soviet Marxism. In the 1960s, possibly influenced by the experience of the Vietnam War, which led many Americans to critically reflect on their own nation’s policies and history, a ‘revisionist’ school of Cold War historians emerged. Figures like David Horowitz, From Yalta to Vietnam (a significant title) tended to stress the defensive nature of Soviet foreign policy, and the aggressive character of US policy; a clear reversal of roles. In more recent times a new school of ‘post-revisionists’ have come to the fore
and solidarity as the new revolutionary subject. It was, crucially, also revolutionary thought and praxis from the Global South – Fanon, Cabral, Césaire, Guevara and Mao among others – that dislocated left politics from their Communist Party moorings and decentred both Soviet Marxism and Europe in the radical imagination of May ’68 militancy. 22 The trajectories and local translations of anticolonial
that ‘show[ed] historical development as a process, brought about by conflicting social forces; whereas [Kuczynski] can only discern a succession of neatly labelled social orders’.59 Rather than adopting the crude and reductionist stageism that Kuczynski had learned from orthodox Soviet Marxism, in particular Plekhanov and the Soviet historian Mikhail Pokrovsky,60 in which one mode of production succeeds another – feudalism to capitalism in this case – Hill had presented an account of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England that contained varieties of economic and
rediscovered in the 1960s, as the grip of Marxism on the left began to loosen. Anarchism had never gone away, but now, as students from Paris to Berkeley stockpiled cobblestones and reached for their paintbrushes, it chimed with an urgent and confrontational politics. The importance of anarchism ran deeper than simply inspiring a penchant for disorder and sloganeering, however, and also offered more positive aspects than a dissection of the paradoxes and barbarities of Soviet Marxism. Under the stress of war decades earlier, anarchists had developed critiques of the state