Hi Carrol:
>The ongoing critique in scholastic circles of "euro-centrism"
>more and more appears as a member of that large family of
>ideological persuasions generally called "post-modernism,"
>defined here as a purely academic compensation for the
>material defeats the movements of the '60s Karl and Frederick
>described this sort of maneuver rather well in *The German
>Ideology*. If we can no longer (or so it seems) win real
>battles against racism and imperialism, we can invent
>specialized areas of scholastic dispute in which we can
>win brilliant battles against imaginary opponents. The trick
>is to reverse cause and effect, and by attacking the effects
>(which exist purely in the superstructure of rarified
>scholastic dispute) we can soothe feelings wounded by
>our inability to oppose effectively the victories of racism
>and imperialism of the last few decades.
>
>Along with other postmodern jargon, "eurocentrism" needs
>to be retired from our vocabulary, since it acts only to deflect
>attention from the ills it pretends to name.
Typical criticisms of "Eurocentrism" take the trans-historical
existence of the concept of "Europe" for granted, as much as
"Eurocentrists" do (even though pre-capitalist denizens of the area
which has come to be called "Europe" did not think of themselves as
"Europeans"). For instance, "Eurocentrists" often argue that
capitalism arose in "Europe" and attribute its emergence to the
absence of constraints specific to "Europe," while
"anti-Eurocentrists" counter by saying that, but for constraints put
on the rest of the world by colonialism & imperialism, capitalism
would have arisen & developed elsewhere. Both "Eurocentric" and
"anti-Eurocentric" accounts assume that human beings, given a chance
(=absence of constraints, whether the constraints are imagined to be
"backward non-European culture & society" in "Eurocentric"
explanations or colonialism & imperialism in "anti-Eurocentric"
ones), were *destined* to develop a capitalist mode of production; as
Ellen Wood puts it in _The Origin of Capitalism_, they assume that
"capitalism had existed, at least in embryo, from the dawn of
history, if not in the very core of human nature and human
rationality....If the emergence of a mature capitalist economy
required any explanation, it was to identify the barriers that have
stood in the way of its natural development, and the process by which
those barriers were lifted" (16).
Minus the assumptions that naturalize the emergence of capitalism,
both "Eurocentrism" and "anti-Eurocentrism" should become irrelevant.
We may begin by noting that capitalism did not arise in an
ill-defined abstraction called "Europe"; it originated in England,
*nowhere else*: "Feudalism in Europe, even in Western Europe, was
internally diverse, and it produced several different outcomes, only
one of which was capitalism" (Wood 67). The rest of the world,
including countries which have become classified as "European,"
became capitalist "only as they came within the orbit of an already
existing capitalist system and the competitive pressures it was able
to impose on its political, military, or commercial rivals" (Wood
67). "Europe" didn't give rise to capitalism; capitalism &
imperialism, with their concomitant international division of labor
and inequality, have created the concept of "Europe." Just as modern
slavery created racism and races.
Both "Eurocentric" and "anti-Eurocentric" accounts of the origin of
capitalism obscure the specificity of capitalism, by suggesting that
"capitalism represents not so much a qualitative break from earlier
forms as a massive quantitative increase: an expansion of markets and
a growing commercialization of economic life" (Wood 12). Andre
Gunder Frank's _ReOrient_ is a good example of the consequence of
losing sight of what makes capitalism what it is.
Yoshie
