7 - The Global Diffusion of Marxist Thought

Summary

European Marxism diffused widely to other parts of the world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, attracting support from many thinkers whose contributions to Marxist thought about the international dimensions of political economy deserve to be better known. This chapter focuses on some innovative and important Marxist thinkers from Trinidad (C.L.R. James, George Padmore), China (Mao Zedong), India (Manabendra Nath Roy), Indonesia (Tan Malaka), Japan (Kōtoku Shūsui, Takahashi Kamekichi, Sano Manabu), and Peru (José Carlos Mariátegui). These thinkers were important not just because they became well known in their local contexts and, in some cases, in wider international Marxist networks. They also sometimes developed ideas that predated better-known European ones and they often called attention to issues that received less attention in European Marxist debates, such as racial discrimination, Eurocentrism, the relationship between Marxism and Islam, the nature and impact of imperialism outside of Europe, and revolutionary politics in places subject to imperialism.