The Marxists are being attacked by the Chinese. Or so they think, says this story from the New York Times:
According to the Marxist Internet Archive (www.marxists.org),
an online community that produces and organizes an ever-growing Marxist
library, the wheel has turned full circle. People at the site believe
that computer attacks primarily from China are jeopardizing its ability
to provide Marxist texts, perhaps forcing the library to stop providing
material in Chinese.“We are not 100 percent sure this is the Chinese government; there are
a lot of possibilities,” said Brian Basgen, who has worked on the
archive since 1990. But he noted that the archive has been temporarily
banned by the Chinese government before, about two years ago. “There is
a motive,” he said. “They have done it to us in the past. What they are
doing is targeting just the Chinese files.”
Basgen doesn’t find it ironic:
While some might find it odd that the government created by Mao’s
Communist Revolution would be behind an effort to deny access to the
texts so important to its founding, Mr. Basgen said he did not. “It is
ironic for people who don’t know what is going on in China,” he said.
“The Chinese so-called Communist government has nothing to do with
Communism. It has been going toward capitalism for a long time.”
And,
to be strictly accurate, the Marxist archive does not even consider Mao
a true Marxist. He is considered a “reference writer,” along with Adam
Smith, Josef Stalin,
and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, among others. Mao failed a key question, Mr.
Basgen said: “Did he serve to liberate working people?”
Now there’s an interesting standard for determining a Marxist—whether the person served to liberate working people.
That would make Sam Walton a communist. And any of the folks mentioned in this post as well.
Castro, no.
