Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Justin Schwartz wrote:
>
> >What's wrong with being Eurocentric?
>
> As the widely beloved Slavoj Zizek once pointed out (in response to a
> questioner who accused him of being Eurocentric), during the struggle
> against apartheid, the ANC resolutely stuck to universalist
> Englightenment values - the kind that are often denounced as
> Eurocentric - while it was Buthelezi, in the pay of the CIA, who
> liked to talk about the superiority of "African" values.
Enlightenment values rule OK!
...
Well, it'd be OK if they did, anyway ...
And as for eurocentrism, well, I reckon the regulationists probably have
something to tell us about that: "Hence modes of regulation and their objects
can be seen as structurally coupled and historically co-evolving and no a
priori primacy should (or could) be accorded to one or other. Because
capitalism is underdetermined by the value-form, each mode of regulation
compatible with continued reproduction imparts its own distinctive structure
and dynamic to the circuit of capital –
including distinctive forms of crisis and breakdown. This implies that there
is no single and unambiguous 'logic of capital' but, rather, a number of such
logics with a strong family resemblance. (9) Each of these will be determined
through the dynamic interaction of the value-form (as the invariant element)
and specific modes of regulation and accumulation strategies (as the variant
element) (cf. Jessop 1990a: 310-11)."
We're talking 'variant forms' here. One such complex was fated to give us
today, and one wasn't. That doesn't imply any centrism but what happened.
Nothing moral, nothing ethnic - nothing anything. Except that the particulay
institutional structure that marked Britain and The Netherlands in the 16th
century has us by the short-and-curlies even now. Like anything else, that's
good and bad. If you use 'enlightenment values' as your measuring stick, it's
getting on for bad about now.
Which is all, in their many ways (some rather hard to take, but there's
something to learn in 'em all), that those non-western-Europeans thought at
the time ...
Institutionally and modernistically yours,
Rob.
