Date: Fri, 26 Sep 1997 15:00:28 -0400 (EDT) From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena) Subject: M-I: Jim Blaut on proletarians (fwd from moderator) To marxism-international: The following message "bounced" to the moderators (non-member submission from Rakesh Bandhari). You're subscribed, aren't you, Rakesh? Louis Godena ________________________________________________________- Date: Fri, 26 Sep 1997 14:20:59 -0800 To: marxism-international-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU From: bhandari-AT-yuma.Princeton.EDU (Rakesh Bhandari) Subject: Re: M-I: proletarians (from JBLAUT) Jim sent this post to me privately which he has asked me to forward to the list. My much awaited reply follows. Rakesh Rakesh: Here is a short supplement to my first posting, responding to your important question conerning the role of the proletariat in social revolution, combined with comments on your later postings re proletarians. Rakesh, as you know, I am a "Third Worldist" Marxist all the way, and this informs, perhaps determines, my view of the issues under discussion here (and others). My thirdworldist Marxism itself emerges from a few basic ideas (as well as experience in classical colonies and neocolonies). First, as I argue in *The Colonizer's Model*, *1492*, and elsewhere, I believe that social evolution was proceeding somewhat evenly across the Eastern Hemisphere (on a continental scale), and Europe managed to break through to ca[italism -- ahead of the pack, so to speak -- and then prevent other societies from doing so as a result only of the wealth obtained in colonialism, initially in the Americas (percious metals, later slave-plantation profits). In arguing this position, I refute Brenner, Laclau, and the others who claim (a) that the rise of capitalism was internal to Europe and (b) colonial profits were somehow not capital accumulation (they falsely call it "exchange" and bleat about "feudalism"). (You might enjoy my essay "Robert Brenner in the Tunnel of Time" in *Antipode: A Radical J. of Geography*, around 1995. I could post a copy if you're interested.) Secondly, I am aware of serious limitations in classical (M & E's) Marxism based on the fact that M&E knew almost nothing about the world outside of Europe and Anglo-America, except what they read in the colonialist press, books, and govt. reports. (Krader is off the wall, a mystic, a believer in "Oriental despotism" and all that crap.) But I think these Eurocentric limitations do not threaten the core stucture of Marxist theory. (Class struggle indeed is the main motor of history. European capitalism was brilliantly analysed by Marx. Etc.) However, they vitiate important though non-essential parts of the theory. Examples: M&E's view of peasants was based on their direct encounters with the reactionary petit-bourgeois peasants of France and other areas of W. Europe. (Marx's late comments on the Russian peasantry are only the barest beginning of an analysis.) Peasants in the world at large tend to be tenants, not landowners, and in other respects do not conform to M&E's concept. (Their remarks on India are taken from bourgeois-colonialist sources and are written for bourgeous readers, although their understanding of communalism in the villkage was brilliant. See Irfan Habib in *Enquiry.*) Example: M&E didn't understand the massive significance of colonialiosm for capitalism -- because it was consistently minimized in the bourgeois sources -- and did not realize how rapidly it set class development and national forms of cl;ass struggle, into motion. Given these and other limitations of classical Marxism, we need to (1) see how later Marxists have eliminated some of the eurocentrisc errors in the theory, and (2) re-examine the class nature of the non-European *and* the European world. As to the former, I think Lenin made a huge contribution. (For my views, see *The National Question: Decolonizing the Theory pof Nationalism*, and an article about to come out in Science & Society, "Evaluating Imperialism." Also Third World scholars whose work is generally not assigned to students in the US, with the excpetion of carefully selected and sanitized snippets from CLR James. I refer to James, Rodney, Williams, Nkrumah, Cabral, WEB DuBois, Amin, Alavi...and many others. They hgave, for instance, redefined slavery, peasants, colonial capitalism. I think that modern Marxists manipulate concepts in such a way as to make the working class of advancecd capityalist countries seem much more revolutionary than they are, and the working classes elsewhere much less so. This business of inferring class consciousness from the concept of exploitation as given in Capital and from th austere idea of the organic composition of capital -- this is crap. In non-European societies, the workers are workers (as i discussed in my previous posting). What Marxists are forgetting is the absolutrely fundamental fact that workers do not make social revolutions if they are economically comfortable. The wporkers who are suffering are most likely to do so. Hence the most revolutionary workers -- proletarians -- TODAY are in the poor countries. These folks are, as Lenin said, super-exploited. Workers everywhere are exploited, but to find their potential for revolutionary action you don't run up formulas on fixed and variable capital: you find out about infant mortality and life expectancy and rates of decline in real income. European (majority) workers will gain class cxonsciousness and move when they begin to suffer, as they will before long. By the way, the theory of "articulation of modes of production" has applicability in very few places:almost everywhere capitalism has interpenetrated all pre-existing forms of production such that all (?) of them yield capital for accumulation or welfare for the reproduction of the working class. And the majority of humans are within the capitalist mode of production in sensu strictu. In struggle Jim Blaut --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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