Date sent: Wed, 29 Oct 1997 11:02:44 -0500
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From: Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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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
