> Date sent: Wed, 29 Oct 1997 11:02:44 -0500
> Send reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> From: Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: Marx on colonialism
Project writes:
> The real culprit in all this teleological
> totalitarianism was not Marx, nor Hegel. Nor the Enlightenment thinkers
> before Hegel. Nor Descartes who got the whole totalitarian rational-thought
> campaign going. You have to go back to Plato who put Reason on a pedestal
> and started the mechanisms that led to the Gulag Archipelago.
This statement is both wrong in fact and theory. The Gulag was a
creation of Stalin, whose ascendancy to power was made
possible, to a large degree, by Lenin's creation of a
highly centralized political party - as Trotsky had predicted back
in 1903. (Yes, I know about the letters. But up until them, Lenin
relied, without much complaint, on Stalin's hard, merciless, callous
political methods.
Wrong in theory because it makes no sense
for a Marxist to hold a philosopher responsible for a major
historical happening like totalitarianism. Project is adopting an
idealist position in line with Platonism by holding "Reason"
responsible for totalitarianism!
Project:
> Marx was wrong in adopting the Asiatic Mode of Production as the key to
> explaining British domination over India, China et al. More recent research
> puts the rest of the world on roughly the same level as Western Europe
> prior to the age of colonialism. I especially recommend Janet Abu-Lughod's
> "Before European Hegemony 1250-1350". What Marx did say about India is not
> simply that capitalism was going to civilize the barbaric Indians. He
> thought that capitalism was revolutionizing the means of production, but
> that genuine PROGRESS was achievable only through socialism. The 2nd
> International enshrined the view that Great Britain was "civilizing" India,
> but Marx's writings tended to have much more tension around the question of
> the British role.
Without downplaying the scholarly merits of Abu-Lughod's book - a book
whose views are consistent with Ajit's critique of the AMP - I don't
think she ever convincingly demonstrates that Europe was merely on the
same economic level as Asia. But I am ran out of time now, so
that's all I can say. ricardo
>
> There have been attempts by the Analytical Marxists to breathe new life
> into the British "civilizing" mission thesis, especially from John Roemer:
>
> "There are, in the Marxist reading of history, many examples of the
> implementation of regimes entailing dynamically socially necessary
> exploitation, which brought about an inferior income-leisure bundle for the
> direct producers... Marx approved of the British conquest of India, despite
> the misery it brought to the direct producers, because of its role in
> developing the productive forces. Thus, the contention is proletarians in
> India would have been better off, statically, in the alternative without
> imperialist interference, but dynamically British imperialist exploitation
> was socially necessary to bring about the development of the productive
> forces, eventually improving the income-leisure bundles of the producers
> (or their children) over what they would have been."
>
> The following paragraph in Marx's 1853 article, "The Future Results of
> British Rule in India", presents a more richly dialectical presentation of
> the possibilities India faced after England's conquest.
>
> "All the English bourgeoisie may be forced to do will neither emancipate
> nor materially mend the social condition of the mass of the people,
> depending not only on the development of the productive powers, but on
> their appropriation by the people. But what will they not fail to do is lay
> down the material premises for both. Has the bourgeoisie ever done more?
> Has it ever effected a progress without dragging individuals and people
> through blood and dirt, through misery and degradation.
>
> "The Indians will not reap the fruits of the new elements of society
> scattered among them by the British bourgeoisie, till in Great Britain
> itself the now ruling classes shall have been supplanted by the industrial
> proletariat, or till the Hindus themselves shall have grown strong enough
> to throw off the English yoke altogether."
>
> What could be clearer? Marx adds an enormous proviso when he talks about
> the "progress" that capitalism brings. Unless there is socialist
> revolution, capitalism has done nothing except revolutionize the means of
> production. This has nothing to do with the ameliorative scenarios
> developed by Oxford dons like G.A. Cohen and John Roemer.
>
> Marx's understanding of the problems facing India under colonial rule,
> while flawed, are by no means like the imperialist apologetics found in
> "economist" readings. Marx was for socialism, not telegraphs, railways and
> smokestacks.
>
> Louis Proyect
>
>
>
>
>
