File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1995/95-02-28.000, message 163


Date: Fri, 17 Feb 1995 13:45:27 -0500 (EST)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Re: re: Populism


On Fri, 17 Feb 1995, Christopher A Fons wrote:

> ... For example could not the reasoning follow that because the
> Zapatistas are fighting primarily for land for petty producers should we
> support agra-buisnesses that revolutionize production and eliminate the
> reactionary peasantry or because NAFTA is going to crush the fuedal like
> corpratist Mexican state should we support it? 

Louis Proyect:

This question has been around for a long time. Post-colonialists like 
Edward Said have criticized Marx's support for the "social revolution" 
the English were instituting in the "backward" feudal villages of Hindustan.

If one's model of Marxism is based on a schematic notion of stages that 
represent "onwards and upwards" progress throughout history (barbarism, 
feudalism, capitalism, socialism), then one can conclude that Marx was 
simply cheering on the "progressive" English capitalists struggle against 
the benighted Asiatic mode of production. This type of caricature might serve 
people like Fukuyama and Alvin Toffler, but it is not essential to Marx's 
writings.

I suggest that a more subtle, and more accurate, reading of Marx is not 
one based on such schematic approaches. For Marx, capitalism was a 
process that destroyed existing traditional social relations--based on 
religious, clan and ethnic ties--and replaced them with ones based on the 
cash nexus, on exchange value. This process is irreversible. His goal was 
not to celebrate it but to analyze it and to offer an alternative that 
would better serve humanity: socialism.

In fact, the confrontation between Zedillo and the Zapatistas, the 
machinations between the Wall St. banks, Washington and the Mexican 
ruling-class is something that appears ripped out of the pages of the 
Communist Manifesto. This is something that comrade Chris Burford alluded 
to the other day. I suggest that a re-reading of the Communist Manifesto 
would be in order for everybody on the list.


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