7 Mar 98 20:08:01 -600 7 Mar 98 20:07:52 -600 Date: Sat, 7 Mar 98 20:08:43 From: "Manjur Karim" Reply-To: To: psn-seminars@csf.colorado.edu Subject: The Manifesto and Eurocentrism Unlike Clayton Bagwell, I found Eugene E. Ruyle's article to be a major contribution to the way we need to analyze the Manifesto. Identifying the Eurocentrism of the Manifesto is not the same as a rejection of Marxism as a theory and as a guide to praxis, but an attempt to reconstitute the validity of Marxism in today's postcolonial context. The Eurocentric character of the Manifesto is evident in its assesment of the progressively destructive character of capitalism and a rather unfortunate view of the "traditional' societies, which the piece by James Petras posted by Louis Proyect has demonstrated. But more importantly, on a deeper level, (recognizing, after poststructuralism, the distinction between the deep and the surface is not a straightforward thing any more) also in its overall view of history as an Eurocentric affair. This is not obviously a superficial "good guy bad guy" question, but a question of general epistemology, a larger weltanschauung embedded in a European sense of unilinear progress and Enlightenment. This is why I also found Andre Gunder Frank's paper so relevant as a challenge to the philosophy and paradigm of history contained in the Manifesto. Reading Frank and Ruyle side by side with the Manifesto was an immensely pleasurable experience. By the way, whether we agree with Frank or not, and I don't in its entirety, labeling Frank's view as pomo, as a previous post did, is rather unfortunate. Actually, let me confess, as far as the overarching methodological overtone of Frank's work is concerned, and I am not necessarily talking about the present article, I wish he was a little engaged with a postmodern storyline, was less inclined to accept an unproblematic distinction between science and ideoogy so easily. But that's a different story itself. Comeing back to the more immediate issue, as Kevin Anderson, however, has shown in his post, Marx's perspective of the non-western part of the world was not a a static one. It indeed evolved dialectically and creatively. One instance of that change, immediately relevant to the the present focus of the present seminar, is the 1882 prefeace to the Russian edition of the Manifesto that Marx and Engels wrote. As far as I know, that was the last preface to an edition of the Manifesto that Marx wrote before his death. Let me quote "The Communist Manifesto had as its objet the proclamation of the inevitability impending dissoulution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia we find, face to face with the rapidly developing capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina (vilage community), though greatly undermined, yet a form of the primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution as constitutes the historical evolution of the West? The only answer to that possible today is this: if the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting-point for a communist development." Going beyond the Manifesto for a minute, I think it is important to recognize the contradictory relation that Marx had with the Eurocentric enlightenment project. Marx was definitely a child of Enlightenment, but Marxism, on the other hand, is the most original attempt that came out of the West to go beyond the Enlightenment agenda. Marxism, embedded in Western epistemology and history, manages to deconstruct the totality of modernity more radically than any postmodern thinker that I can think of. It is the simultaneous entrenchment and rupture that Marx represented in his relationship with modernity that make third world trouble makers like us to go back to Marx over and over. I find Bagwell's statement "the story of capitalism as told in the Manifesto would have the same essential character regradless from which continent it might spring, for it is the story of the conflict beween labor and capital, the dialectic of capital" quite undialectical. Marx never saw capitalism as a transhistorical, transspatial phenomenon. Marx's understanding of capitalism is nothing if not historicized. About the "story" of capitalism, Marx and Engels, in the preface to the German edition of 1872 of the Manifesto stated " The practical application of the principles will depend, as the Manifesto itself states, everywhere and at all times, on the historical conditions for the time being existing..." However, "the general principles laid down in this Manifesto are" not "on the whole as correct today as ever" either, as M/E argued in the same preface. Any careful look at the structural reality of late capitalism will show that. Of course, that does not mean that the Manifesto is irrelevant. It only shows, like any other philosophy, Marxism is defined by its own timespace, and historicizing/terrritorializing of Marxism is probably the most Marxist act that we can undertake. I don't find Bagwell's uncritical acceptance of the Manifesto's rhetorical emphasis on class struggle being the driving force of history very convincing either. If we want to understand "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle" as a historically verifiable "objective" statement, we will have to be frustrated. History is a lot more complex, lot more messier affair than that. Engels himself recognized that in a footnote of the 1888 English edition of the Manifesto "That is all written history. In 1847, the pre-histrory (itself an unfortunate Eurocenric expression- Manjur), the social organization existing previous to recorded history, was all but unknown. Since then Haxthausen discovered common ownership of land in Russia, Maurer proved it to be the social foundation form which all Tutonic races started in history, and by and by village communites were found to be, or to have been the primitive form of society everywhere from India to Ireland...." Even in Western societies, the nature of class conflict was not like the way Marx described it in the opening sentences of the Manifesto. As the Polish Marxist Leszek Nowak pointed out, whether it is in the transition from slavery to feudalism or a transition from feudalism to capitalism, the slave and serf revolts were only secondary to intraclass conflicts beween the old and new rulling classes. Class politics needs to be priveleged, but not as a manifestation of an intrinsic essence of some metahistory, but as a historicized, dialectically ( discursively/ concretely), pragmatically constituted project. As Marx deconstructed the classical political economic notions of value, capital, or labor and reconstructed them in different combinations, we need to recognize the processes through which class is continuously structured and destructured in relation to other frames of beings and identitities, such as race, gender, experince of coloniality, and so on. Finally, I am curious about Bagwell's emphasis on the dialectical materialist reading of history. What is a dialectical materialist reading any ways? As we all know, diamat is a concept neither introduced by Marx, nor by Engels, but by Plekhanov. Thanks to the Stalinist distortion of Marxism, the phrase "dialectical materialism" carries an enormous historical and theoretical baggage. Manjur Karim