Comradeship // Freechat

I can't speak to all uses of it, but the way I understand the term, it can be a way of describing somebody who is all theory and no practice, to put it one way. They can talk the talk, but when it comes to walking the walk, they're more apt to level criticisms at AES states than they are to make sacrifices and take risks toward creating one of their own.

This, in my mind, does not include everyone in the west who is lacking in practice, like it's some kind of Revolutionary Contribution Meter you have to keep full in order to speak on matters of liberation. People can have various reasons for that, some of them to do with disability or locale, that makes it abnormally difficult to participate in revolutionary organizing.

To me, it is specifically a criticism centered around people whose notion of theory is largely derived from the purity of not having had to test it against reality. Thus it's easy for them to call China revisionist or say Lenin good, Stalin bad, because they're viewing the circumstances based on what they think should have happened, rather than what were the material possibilities afforded to the people making the decisions at the time.

In this meaning, it is a facet of ultra-leftist, but it's not only that because an ultra-leftist can be elsewhere than the west. You could maybe say it is ultra-left + western chauvinism which creates the "western marxist". "Western marxist" would mean a lot more beyond insult or criticism if the west were to produce an AES state. But "western culture" in the imperial core is deeply tied up in colonization and imperialism, so it's hard to imagine a western AES state that is western in the cultural sense yet not compromised by chauvinism. It seems easier to imagine a successful western AES state as practicing eastern marxism with some tweaks for western conditions.