The metropolitan Left suppressed Soviet-supported revolutions’ material solidarity after the 1980s shift

Evidence

By the 1980s, this global configuration was undergoing a historic seachange. The post-revolutionary states which grew out of the socialist currents of anti-colonial nationalism had been contained and consigned to the worst kind of ossification of the productive forces. Anti-communist ideologies which had permeated most of the new radicalisms were now mobilized to prove that socialism does not work. … As the metropolitan Left came to shelve its identifications with post-revolutionary societies of Indochina and Southern Africa, that memory, and what it had meant for the oppressed peoples of Asia and Africa, was simply suppressed; the subsequent Gorbachev years were to help that willed amnesia greatly. What remained was the memory only of the failures, the distortions, the bureaucratization; that there had also been other kinds of solidarities no longer mattered. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 149

Categorization

• QUESTION: Useful for the reader’s materialist critique: Ahmad dates a willed amnesia about Soviet material support — worth cross-checking dates/causality (Brezhnev-era revolutions, later apartheid crisis) against other sources on the 1980s shift toward postcolonial discourse theory.
• SEED: Angle: the timing correspondence between the metropolitan Left’s ‘cultural turn’ toward essentialist identity politics and its simultaneous shelving of material solidarities — i.e., discourse-first theory as compensation for lost material commitment.
• XREF: connects to: Metropolitan leftists suppressed memory of Soviet-backed anti-colonial victories — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 149; Metropolitan anti-communist leftists blamed Vietnam’s material collapse on socialism itself — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, 134; Left-wing authoritarianism disappeared because the left’s radical moment ended — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 2989 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Metropolitan leftists suppressed memory of Soviet-backed anti-colonial victories #expands (0.92) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 149
• A domestic-focused metropolitan Left has abandoned the core socialist project of anti-imperialism #expands (0.85) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 595
• Left-wing authoritarianism disappeared because the left’s radical moment ended #corroborates (0.80) — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 2989
• Metropolitan anti-communist leftists blamed Vietnam’s material collapse on socialism itself #exemplifies (0.75) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 134