File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9709, message 513


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





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