Book Description

Robert Biel's Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement traces the history of Eurocentric--and anti-Eurocentric--currents in the Marxist-Leninist tradition, arguing that this distortion was key to the development and spread of revisionism, and ultimately to the failures of the communist project, in the 20th century. A work of intellectual history, Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement explores the relationship between Eurocentrism, alienation, and racism, while tracing the different ideas about imperialism, colonialism, "progress", and non-European peoples as they were grappled with by revolutionaries in both the colonized and colonizing nations. Teasing out racist errors and anti-racist insights within this history, Biel reveals a century-long struggle to assert the centrality of the most exploited within the struggle against capitalism. The roles of key figures in the Marxist-Leninist canon--Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao--within this struggle are explored, as are those of others whose work may be less familiar to some readers, such as Sultan Galiev, Lamine Senghor, Lin Biao, R.P. Dutt, Samir Amin, and others. In pursuit of the anti-racist and anti-colonial goal, Biel has made an important contribution to understanding the development of Marxist thought in the 19th and 20th centuries, with strategic implications for our current revolutionary project.