Date: Sat, 2 Aug 1997 19:49:39 +0100
From: James Heartfield <James-AT-heartfield.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Fw: Carlos Moore


In message <199708021720.SAA07210-AT-indigo.ie>, Karl Carlile
<joseph-AT-indigo.ie> writes
>
>
>----------
>From: Marc Viglielmo <valdo-AT-leahi.aloha.com>
>Newsgroups: alt.politics.socialism.trotsky
>Subject: Carlos Moore
>Date: 20 July 1997 04:43
>
>     I highly recommend two works by the Afro-Cuban author Carlos
>Moore.  
>The first one is a short pamphlet written in 1972, entitled "Were Marx 
>and Engels White Racists?".  It shows, pretty convincingly, the 
>Euro-centric and white supremacist assumptions of both Marx and Engels.
> 

It's unfair to reply to a precis, when you haven't read the original but
Marc's version of these arguments is pretty banal. Alive to the
prejudices of a bygone era, you read your own back into history without
thinking. If by 'eurocentrism' you mean that Marx and Engels were aware
that the greatest advances in social productivity had taken place under
the aegis of capitalist expansion in the West, then no doubt they would
plead guilty - because that is what happened. If you mean that they
endorsed wholesale the domination of what we would now call the South by
the North, then you are in error. Neither Marx nor Engels had a
doctrinaire view on colonial expansion. Rather, they looked at the
question from the standpoint of human development. Marx does allow that
the British Raj facilitated the development of some industry in India
(as anyone who was interested in the real course of event would) only to
criticise more forcefully the Raj precisely from the standpoint that it
stood in the way of human progress thereafter.

The key discussion of colonial domination is contained in Marx and
Engels' many writings on the British rule in Ireland. It is clear that
Marx rejected the Union, precisely because it led to the wholesale
destruction of the Irish economy and it's peasantry (his writings on the
capitalist origins of the famine stand head and shoulders above the
maudlin sentimentality of today's faminology).

Marc is rightly embarrassed by the obvious counter-example of Marx and
Engel's selfless and unstinting solidarity work against the 'slave
owners revolt'. It is ironic that, in the attempt to explain away this
resolute campaign against slavery, Marc deploys a vulgarised version of
Marx's own assessment of the motive power behind the Northern campaign:
that it was undertaken to substitute wage labour for slave labour. But
despite being the author of this part of Marc's argument, Marx was never
so foolish as to draw the formalistic and perverse conclusion that free
labour was not a vast improvement upon slavery. Nor for that matter did
the many American blacks - who new the limitations of their allies in
the North - shy away from a struggle against slavery.

But most of all it is the utterly childish method behind this argument
that really exposes it. Marc cites the merely formal coincidence of
political positions between Marx and the racists, where these are
wrenched out of their contexts to such an extent as to render them
meaningless. This is all the more eccentric when one considers that Marx
was amongst the very first theorists to distinguish between man's
natural being and his social position. ('A negro is a negro. In certain
circumstances he becomes a slave' Capital I, p 717) In that insight lies
the very possiblity of transcending the racial politics of the nineteeth
and twentieth centuries. If Marc and Moore live in a world in which it
is possible to see beyond the colour of somebody's skin then that is in
no small part due to the work of Karl Marx.
-- 
James Heartfield


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