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Something that left/Marxist academics often do is focus on the “fork in the road” theory of radical failure. If “we” hadn’t picked up the wrong ideas, chosen the wrong terrains I’d struggle, accepted reformism, moved away from class, “the left” would have advanced sooner
Oddly for Marxist analysis, this diagnosis is extremely idealist, perpetually forgetting to ask how it came to be that people en masse opted for “the wrong ideas”
Any such analysis which doesn’t allot a great deal of space to the global counter-insurgency, the Jakarta Method from the 60s, induced stall or breakdown of anti-systemic & communist projects from 1978-1989, wars of globalization in the 1990s —-
Then post-2001 domestic “anti-terror” counterinsurgency paired with ONG containment and enfoldment & shattering of state-capitalist projects in the Arab periphery 2003-2020 is not going to be able to say much useful about why wrong ideas ascend in popularity
For my money the most soulful & elegant & materialist & moving account which touches on this is Richard Levin’s “A View from the Trough,” although I’m sure there are others that are as good which I haven’t read https://www.questia.com/magazine/1G1-18681563/a-view-from-the-trough
