File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9710, message 622


Date: Thu, 30 Oct 1997 13:37:05 -0500
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: Genocide against the Yanomami


The other day I posted a piece on David's Harvey's presentation on the
Communist Manifesto to the Brecht Forum which disavowed Marx's use of the
term "barbarism" to describe India, etc. I also posted the piece on PEN-L,
which has led to an interesting discussion there. I crossposted Sid's piece
on 19th Century India--reconsidered.

In the course of the discussion, somebody has just posted the following:

In the last two years of his life Marx was engaged in an intensive study
of pre-industrial cultures coming under colonial rule.  The first
comprehensive collection of his so-called "ethnological notebooks" will be
published next year by Yale, under the title "Property and Patriarchy."
The editor is David Smith, a sociologist at the University of Kansas.
Smith, who recently lectured here about this, finds that Marx frequently
expressed his dismay at the social destruction underway, and his sense
that something valuable was being wiped out by European civilization.
According to Smith, Marx was especially impressed by the gender equality
he found in tribal societies.  This text will represent Marx's most mature
thinking on colonialism.  Smith's editing project is huge, since
apparently Marx composed these notes rather chaotically in six languages.
I think this may be a very important resource from an historical and
political standpoint, and may require us to revise our thinking about what
a "marxist" position is on this subject.

My remarks to PEN-L on this post:

Yes, I heard Kevin Anderson of "News and Letters" and author of "Lenin and
Hegel" speak on the notebooks and their importance at a Socialist Scholars
Conference a couple of years ago. The talk was provocatively titled "Marx
as Multiculturalist." It whetted my appetite for their publication.

Kevin stressed that the Marx of the notebooks is nothing like caricature of
him that we get from some post-Colonialists, etc. I suspect that their
publication will provide a missing link to Lenin's writings on the colonial
world, which can by no stretch of the imagination be interpreted as a
mandate for the "civilizing" mission of Western Europe.

Louis Proyect



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