Date: Sat, 06 Dec 1997 19:31:14 -0500
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Railways in India


Jurriaan:
>So what are you saying Louis ?  That the Indian people would have been
>better off without railways, or that the railways should never have been
>built ?  Or that progress is not without its social costs ?  Or is this
>related to the story of British imperialism and the cotton trade ?  My
>guess is that Indian people today would be rather happy to have their
>railways, and would prefer railways to no railways.

What am I saying? Essentially that British capitalism in Great Britain was
not the same as British capitalism in India. As Marx said to the Narodnik
Danielson in the 1870s, who had translated Capital into Russian, Great
Britain was a drain on India's development and produced no social benefits.
In other words he had renounced his 1851 views. Furthermore, Marx
specifically rejected Volume One of Capital as a model for Russian economic
development. I posted his 1880 letter to a Russian newspaper here the other
day rejecting such an interpretation. Evidently you did not read it, or
having read it, did not understand it what you read.

>
>I am trying to get the drift of this discussion.  Is Louis now trying to
>discover a sort of Marxist hypocrisy in approving of technological
>developments by imperialist powers in the past while being hostile to
>imperialism in the present ?
>

What I will be saying in much more elaborate detail is that Marx renounced
the sort of "stagist" interpretation some have made of the Communist
Manifesto, Volume One of Capital's chapter on accumulation, and the Herald
Tribune articles on India during the final ten or so years of his life.
Specifically, he considered the replacement of the peasant communes in
Russia by capitalist property relations to be tragic. His  political views
were very close to the Narodnik leaders. 

I will have much, much, more to say on this when I am ready. In the
meantime, suffice it to say that the Living Marxism uses Marx is a pretext
for supporting capitalist property relations in the name of technology,
science and progress. This is not Marxism. It is plain old-fashioned
liberalism of the sort embraced by John Stuart Mill and other capitalist
ideologues.

Louis Proyect



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