Sources on how marxism-leninism adapted itself to local cultures?

by marl_karx0

I am building a historiography, but it is hard to come across. Do you know about any sources in that regard.

Especially interested in anti-colonial struggles.

Questions I aim to answer are:

  • How easily is marxism exportable, how well can it be adapted to local contexts?
  • How did its proponents "advertise" the new ideology? Where did this "new" attach itself to the old?
omegadarlin

These are some sources we looked at in a grad level course on communism and empire:

  • Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005)
  • Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001)

Hope this helps, and sorry if you've already come across these in your research!

ShadowsofUtopia

In Philip Short’s biography of Pol Pot ‘Anatomy of a Nightmare’, he spends a not insignificant amount of time explaining how Marxism/Leninism was adapted by the Khmer Rouge for their purposes.

crrpit

If you're interested in pre-Cold War stuff, there's a substantial literature on the Communist International (Comintern) and various regional/national/global communist movements, including in a colonial context. But by far the best book I've read on this recently (discussing the interwar period but with very obvious connections to later anti-colonial/Marxist movements) is Michael Goebel's Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism (Cambridge, 2015).