Date: Wed, 15 Oct 1997 11:14:25 -0400 From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu> Subject: Re: M-I: Marx and Lenin Heartfield: >Jim is right of course to say that Marx could not have anticipated the >division and redivision of the world market that Lenin describes. But he >never claimed to be a crystal ball gazer. What he did anticipate was >that the development of capital would increasingly combine destructive >trends with productive ones. Lenin's work is wholly within that >tradition. > A total mish-mash. Marx and Engel's focus was on the nations either undergoing bourgeois revolutions or that had completed them recently such as England, France and Germany. The Communist Manifesto was correct in describing both the destructive and productive aspects of the capitalist system in such countries, which was revolutionary in the 18th and early to mid-19th century. Probably the most outstanding example of the tendency of the capitalist class to act in a revolutionary fashion was the American Civil War, which pitted the industrial north against the slavocracy. Even Lenin's writings are not the final word on the subject of the colonial world. His focus was not on the stagnation of Asia, Africa and Latin America but on the collision between European capitalist powers over the control of markets and raw materials. It was not so much that Lenin was wrong, it was rather that he was preoccupied with the causes of WWI and felt driven to show the inevitability of war in the imperialist epoch. Hence his focus was on British banks and German trusts rather than how Europe underdeveloped Africa, to use the absolutely correct title of Walter Rodney's classic work. We are discussing underdevelopment and Heartfield just does not understand the problem, as should be obvious from the following words from his Revolutionary Communist Party: "Contrary to the impression given by the doom-and-gloom mongers, people in the developed nations are now healthier and living longer than ever before. The improvements in lifespan in parts of the developing world, such as Asia and even Africa, are in some ways even more dramatic... Many of the features of life which are supposed to be deteriorating today have actually improved beyond recognition." This is utter nonsense. I have challenged him repeatedly to discuss a concrete example where "doom-and-gloom" is not an appropriate way to describe Africa and Latin America as a whole. Is he speaking of "dynamic" Brazil where poverty brings nothing but gloom to 75% to 80% of the population and dooms them to neverending misery, as described by Edward Herman: "The remaining 75-80 percent -- the other pole of Brazil's dual society -- live in wretched conditions in huge shantytowns around Rio de Janiero and Sao Paulo, or in numerous poor agricultural communities, and consume a minute fraction of the hot new consumer goods. Many work small land holdings or as part-time agricultural laborers in the countryside; those in the shantytowns provide a reserve army available to the affluent for household service or to the 'modern' sector in factories or as employees of subcontractors in the 'informal market.' A large fraction of this Brazilian majority are without potable water or sewage facilities, have grossly inadequate medical care, and their educational resources are reflected in a 35 percent illiteracy rate -- the percentage of children finishing grade school in this fairly wealthy country approximates that in Haiti and Guinea-Bissau. It is estimated that some 8 million Brazilian children under 14 are homeless and live as beggars, thieves, and prostitutes. Several thousand of them are murdered each year by police death squads, some hired by local businesses to improve the climate for tourism." Brazil is supposedly the most modern and industrialized society of Latin America. If this is what life is like for the overwhelming majority, try to imagine what life is like for people in Peru, Bolivia and Paraguay, countries that lack the sort of capitalist growth that titillates the Living Marxism yuppies. (Or Sloan Rangers, I suppose.) No, Living Marxism is all wrong on the question of third world immiseration. Their basic flaw is that they apply the Communist Manifesto model to countries like Brazil in the 20th century. This misapplication does not take into account the fact that the Brazilian bourgeoisie is a "comprador bourgeoisie". It has neither the social power nor the will to stand up to imperialism. It will sell out the nation's patriotic birthright to development and democracy. The literature that describes this problem includes Samir Amin, Pierre Jalee, Walter Rodney, Andre Gunnar Frank, Eduardo Galeano, etc. They are Marxists, not vulgar Marxists like the Living Marxism crew. The most disgusting aspect of the LM pro-capitalist tilt is that they take the side of the multinational corporations that are destroying the Amazon rain forests. They describe efforts to protect the Yanomami indians who live there from genocide as a desire to keep them in a zoo for the amusement of eco-tourists. What fucking stupidity. When indigenous peoples like the Guatemalan Indians rise up against the native bourgeoisie and multinational corporations in order to defend their village communal lives, this is not an Oxfam conspiracy to defeat the proletarian revolution. It is instead the elementary forms of anti-imperialism that can easily meld with a Marxist program as any fool can figure out. Read "I Rigobertu Menchu" and you will discover how an indigenous woman embraces the Popul Vuh of the Mayas and the economic model of Sandinista Nicaragua at the same time. The LM vulgar Marxists don't speak about the Guatemalan guerrilla movement, since it would undercut their cockeyed notion of imperialism using Indian struggles as a cat's paw against all those good things like industrialization, modernization and technology. Their favorite example is the Miskito indians of Nicaragua who rose up against the Sandinistas. The rebellious indians of the east coast of Nicaragua were visited by some leaders of the American Indian Movement. From these facts they generalize that indian struggles are counter-revolutionary. What they omit is that the main cause of the indigenous uprising on the east coast of Nicaragua was the failure of the Sandinistas to apply a consistent Leninist approach to the nationality question. As soon as the Sandinistas granted autonomy to the east coast indigenous peoples, this contra rebellion died down and was no longer a threat to the revolutionary state. The answer to the Miskito rebellion was sensitivity to the demands of indian peoples and an adroit application of the Leninist program. What LM has to offer is identification with the agenda of multinational corporations raping the forests of Central America and Latin America in the name of "progress". Indian struggles have been and will be an important component of the anti-imperialist movement in the 21st century. It fueled Zapata's struggle against the Mexican bourgeoisie and its North American backers, just as it fuels the Zapatista movement today. Marx was not hostile to the notion of such movements being potentially anti-capitalist as his correspondence with Russian revolutionaries on the question of agrarian communalism prove. Lenin developed a critique of this specific case, but it does not invalidate the basic thesis that precapitalist economic and social formations can play an important role in the fight against capitalism. Furthermore, if the revolutionary movement forces down the throat of such peoples instant modernization, the results can be disasterous as indicated by the experience of Afghanistan, Mozambique, and Ethiopia. The revolutionary movement has to have a nuanced understanding of combined and uneven development which is entirely lacking from the pages of LM. For them, anything that is not packaged in chrome and plastic is reactionary. Their socialism is of the most curious sort. It packages the worship of "progress" found in publications like the Economist or Forbes Magazine in the verbiage of the Communist Manifesto, but at heart it has nothing to do with socialism. Louis Proyect Louis Proyect --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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