Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 10:54:58 +1100
From: donna matahaere <donna.matahaere-AT-stonebow.otago.ac.nz>
Subject: Re: Western factory workers...faceless and docile?



>Louis Godena
>
>PS: I'm already finding this damnable 3-post rule to be a nuisance.   While
>we're on the subject of "retreat"--be they workers or intellectuals--some
>mention should be made of Marx/Engels and their unfortunate theories of
>African and Oriental ignorance and superstition.   Without ever formally
>systematizing it,  Marx and Engels came very close to having two distinct
>theories of history,  one for Europe,  the other for the Rest.    In the
>West,  all class-endowed societies are in the end said to be unstable and
>bound to perish through their own contradictions,  so guaranteeing eventual
>salvation;  in the East,  genuine stagnation is possible and obtains,  as
>does the primacy of coercion over production,  which inhibits the liberation
>of mankind through growth of productive forces and the consequent
>adjustments of society.    So the East,  in a real sense, can only be
>liberated by the West.    This continuing Eurocentrism of Marxist thought
>(Satre,  remember, considered the dialectic to be a European
>specialty--though extended to others by a sort of *mission dialectisante*)
>may account for some of the moral/historical alienation from it that we are
>witnessing in the developing world,  and which forms the gist of Zeynep's
>admirable post.
>
>L.G.

This is an International-list-thing right? I am glad L.G. brought this up
even as an aside. It speaks volumes about the connections between marxism
and colonial imperialism. It seems to me that terms like 'working-class'
that are assumed to be just-there disguise a much larger reality. Reading
some of the posts I can't help but be reminded of a sort of old world
nostalgia for a time when the subaltern was easily identified and
oppression was framed in simple language as us/them a situation that then
justified its own production. I also wonder at the those connections
between colonialism and the industrialisation of Europe, and ensuing
workforce? What is the relationship between workers freedom and the
position of indigeneous peoples under colonialism?

donna