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7/23/2019 Communists in Situ

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communists in situ About

leberwurst proletariat

The Universality of Marx

by cominsitu

by Loren Goldner

(The following article originally appeared in New Politics, 1989 an oldie but goodie)

A strange anomaly dominates the current social, political and cultural climate !orld capitalism

has for o"er fifteen years been sin#ing into its worst systemic crisis since the $%&'s, and onewhich in its biospheric dimensions is much worse than the $%&'s At the same time, the social

stratum which calls itself the left in urope and the *+ is in full retreat n many ad"anced

capitalist countries, and particularly in the *+, that stratum increasingly suspects the world

outloo# of -arl .ar/, which postulates that capitalism brings such crises as storm clouds bringthe rain, of being a 0white male1 mode of thought +tranger still is the fact that the relati"e

eclipse of .ar/ has been carried out largely in the name of a 0race2gender2class1 ideology that

can sound, to the uninitiated, both radical and "aguely .ar/ian !hat this 0discourse1 (to use itsown word) has done, howe"er, is to strip the idea of class of e/actly that element which, for

.ar/, made it radical3 its status as a uni"ersal oppression whose emancipation re4uired (and wasalso the #ey to) the abolition of all oppression

This 4uestion of the status of uni"ersality, whether attac#ed by its opponents as 0white male1, or0urocentric1, or a 0master discourse1, is today at the center of the current ideological debate, as

one ma5or manifestation of the broader world crisis of the waning 6'th century
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The writings of .ar/ and ngels include assertions that the 4uality of relations between men and

women is the surest e/pression of the humanity of a gi"en society, that the communal forms of

association of peoples such as the North American ro4uois were anticipations of communism,and that the suppression of matriarchal by patriarchal forms of #inship in ancient Greece was

simultaneous with the generali7ation of commodity production, that is, with proto8capitalism

.ar/ also wrote, against the nlightenments simple8minded linear "iew of progress that, shortof the establishment of communism, all historical progress was accompanied by simultaneous

retrogressions 9ut most of this is fairly well #nown: this is not what bothers contemporaries

!hat bothers them is that the concept of uni"ersality of .ar/ and ngels was ultimatelygrounded neither in cultural constructs nor e"en in relations of 0power1, which is the currency in

which todays fashion trades

The uni"ersalism of .ar/ rests on a notion of humanity as a species distinct from other species

by its capacity to periodically re"olutioni7e its means of e/tracting wealth from nature, andtherefore as free from the relati"ely fi/ed laws of population which nature imposes on other

species 0Animals reproduce only their own nature1, .ar/ wrote in the $;


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and +ung Bhina, which during the same centuries probably towered o"er both of them ne

would also ne"er #now, reading +aid, that in the $&th century the flower of slamic ci"ili7ation

was irre"ersibly snuffed out by a 0te/t1 of .ongol hordes (presumably also riental) whole"eled 9agdad three times !ere +aid somehow transported bac# to the wonder that was slamic

ci"ili7ation under the Abbasid caliphate, the Arabs and Persians who helped lay the foundations

for the uropean @enaissance would ha"e found his culturalism strange indeed, gi"en theimportance of Plato and Aristotle in their philosophy and of the line of prophets from .oses to

Cesus in their theology +aids te/t8 bound "iew of the hermetically8sealed relations between

societies and in world history (which for him does not meaningfully e/ist) is the 4uintessentialstatement of a culturalism that, which a pretense of radicalism, has become rampant in the past

two decades

.artin 9ernal has written a boo# called 9lac# Athena which current fashion li#es to lump with

+aids, e"en though it rests on the opposite "iew of the relations between cultures, and does notdeny the e/istence of progress in history 9ernals boo# is sub8 titled 0The Afro8Asiatic @oots of

Blassical Bi"ili7ation1, and is an attempt to show precisely how gyptian (and therefore African)

and Phoenician (and therefore +emitic) cultures influence the Gree# achie"ement in anti4uity?or 9ernal, this is not an attempt to tri"iali7e the Gree# brea#through, but rather, as he states

from the outset, to restore it to the true dimension which modern racist and anti8+emitic

classicism had obfuscated, by setting it against its real bac#drop of dialogue with other cultures

f +aid had titled his boo# 0The >ellenistic @oots of slamic Bi"ili7ation1 or 0The slamic @ootsof the uropean @enaissance1, he would be much closer to 9ernal than he is, but then he would

ha"e written a different, and far better boo#, one not li#ely to become popular in the 0era of

?oucault1

n such a climate, then, it is 4uite refreshing to read +amir Amins uroocentrism, a boo# by angyptian .ar/ist intellectual whose criti4ue of !estern ethnocentrism, including actually

urocentric "ariants of .ar/ism, is not made from a relati"i7ing discourse of cultural0difference1 incapable of ma#ing critical 5udgments Amins criti4ue of urocentric .ar/ism isnot aimed at the latters (unfulfilled) aspirations to uni"ersality, but rather on the premise that

such .ar/ism + NT *ND@+AL N*G> Amin see#s a 0way to strengthen the

uni"ersalist dimension of historical materialism1 >e has plenty of problems of his own, thoughthey are of another order 9ut his boo# has merits which should be highlighted before people

read no further than the title and assimilate it too 4uic# to the genre established by +aid (whose

world "iew Amin characteri7es, drawing on the earlier criti4ue by +ade# Calal el8A7m, as0pro"incial1

Amin, who understands the 0species1 dimension of .ar/s thought, belie"es many

unfashionable things >e belie"es that there has been progress in world history, that such

progress ob"iously antedated the emergence of the !est, that the social formation thatengendered @enaissance urope was re"olutionary, uni4ue in world history, and superior to any

that had preceded it, and that its achie"ements, including science and rationality, had laid the

foundations for further historical progress, which must clearly go 9ENF the !est

n the first section of the boo#, presenting an o"er"iew of the mainly .editerranean 0tributary1(pre8capitalist) societies prior to the @enaissance, Amin lays out a theory of successi"e


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inno"ations, from ancient gypt onward, which were brea#throughs for humanity as a whole,

and which made possible further uni"ersal brea#throughs 0The uni"ersalist moral brea#through

of the gyptians1, writes Amin, 0is the #eystone of subse4uent human thought1 Later, in ancientGreece, there was 0an e/plosion in the fields of scientific abstraction1 in which 0empiricist

practice as old as human#ind itselffinally came to pose 4uestions of the human mind that

re4uired a more systematic effort of abstraction1 The accomplishments of ancient gypt,moreo"er, later e"ol"ed to an all8encompassing metaphysics that furnishes >ellenism, and later

slam and Bhristianity, with their point of departure, as the thin#ers of the period themsel"es

recogni7ed1

ne might 4uarrel, e"en substantially, with the specific emphases of Amins account of thecreation, o"er se"eral millennia, of what he characteri7es as the general synthesis of 0medie"al

metaphysics1 in which the (.oslem) A"erroes, the (Cew) .aimonides and the (Bhristian)

A4uinas without 4ualms read, criti4ue and borrowed from each other 9ut Amin is certainly rightthat the origins of urocentrism came from reading out of history the common astern

.editerranean origins of the medie"al era in which slam was long superior to barbaric !estern

Bhristendom, and out of which the capitalist !est emerged This artificial isolation of the Gree#brea#through from its broader conte/t made it possible to forget both the earlier phase in ancient

gypt and particularly the later contribution of >ellenistic Ale/andria upon which both

Bhristianity and slam drew so hea"ily, and later transmitted to urope n Amins "iew, it was

precisely the bac#wardness of urope relati"e to the slamic .editerranean that made the ne/tbrea#through possible there, where it did not ha"e to confront the sophisticated medie"al

metaphysics of slam And presumably no one will call Amin an 0rientalist1 when he notes 0the

reduction of human reason to its single deducti"e dimension1 by Bhristian and slamicmetaphysics and when he regrets that 0contemporary Arab thought has still not escaped from it1

Amins criti4ue of urocentrism is not, as we said, the latters affirmation of modern capitalisms

uni4ueness and, for a certain historical period, (now long o"er) its contribution to humanprogress >e aims his fire at capitalisms rewriting of history to create an imaginary 0!est1which could alone ha"e produced its brea#throughs 9y re5ecting the attempt to disco"er

uni"ersal historical laws that would accurately situate the !ests achie"ement with respect to all

the societies who helped build its foundations (in the way that 9ernal does for ancient Greece)the !est created a powerful ideology denying the global historical laws that produced it, thereby

undermining the "ery uni"ersal character of its achie"ement, and 0eternali7ing1 progress as

uni4ue to the !est, past, present and future n Amins own words, worth 4uoting at length3

0The dominant ideology and culture of the capitalist system cannot be reduced solely tourocentrism 9ut if urocentrism does not ha"e, strictly spea#ing, the status of a theory,

neither is it simply the sum of the pre5udices, errors and blunders of !esterners with respect to

other peoples f that were the case, it would only be one of the banal forms of ethnocentrismshared by all peoples at all times The urocentric distortion that mar#s the dominant capitalist

culture negates the uni"ersalist ambition on which that culture claims to be founded

nlightenment culture confronted a real contradiction that it could not o"ercome by its own

means ?or it was self8e"ident that nascent capitalism which produced capitalism had unfolded inurope .oreo"er, this embryonic new world was in fact superior, both materially and in many

other aspects, to earlier societies, both in its own territories (feudal urope) and in other regions


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of the world (the neighboring slamic rient and the more distant rients) The culture of the

nlightenment was unable to reconcile the fact of this superiority with its uni"ersalist ambition

n the contrary, it gradually drifted toward racism as an e/planation for the contrast between itand other culturesThe culture of the nlightenment thus drifted, beginning in the nineteenth

century, in nationalistic directions, impo"erished in comparison with its earlier

cosmopolitanism1

n light of the abo"e, it goes without saying that Amin has no use for slamic fundamentalismand other Third !orldist culturalisms, which he diagnoses as an anti8uni"ersalist pro"incialism

e/isting in counterpoint to the pro"incialism of +aid and of the post8modern critics of 0white

male thin#ing1 (Amin does not use the latter term: do) This conflation of 0white male1 withthe humanist uni"ersalism produced by world history actually reproduces dominant ideology by

denying that the @enaissance was a brea#through in a broader human history and by failing to

recogni7e the contributions of 0non8whites1 to #ey aspects of 0!estern1 culture, as 9ernalshowed in 9lac# Athena (9ernal lea"es to blac# nationalists the problem of putting together his

corroboration of the African dimension of ancient gypt, which they ha"e always maintained,

with his claim that it had an important influence on Gree# culture, which they ha"e alwaysdenounced as 0white1) Neither urocentric pro"incialism nor anti8!estern pro"incialism draws

much solace from a truly uni"ersalist approach to history

9ut despite these undeniable strengths of Amins urocentrism, Amins boo# is deeply flawed by

its own baggage, of 4uite another type !hat Amin gi"es brilliantly in his diagnosis, he ta#esaway clumsily in his prescription for treatment apply to him the same criti4ue he applies to the

uro8centrists3 he is not uni"ersal enough >is own uni"ersalism is not that of the global class of

wor#ing people e/ploited by capitalism, but that of an ideologue of Third !orld autarchy >e

sets out 0to strengthen the uni"ersal dimension of historical materialism1 but winds up onlypresenting in slightly modified language the #ind of .ar/ism whose debacle in the $%H's

helped to spawn post8modernism in the first place Amins uni"ersalism is not that of theinternational wor#ing class and its allies, but that of the +TAT The post8modernists point ofdeparture is their assertion that all uni"ersalism is necessarily a concealed apology for power, as

in the power of the state Amin, unfortunately, will not disabuse them

!ho is +amir AminI >e is perhaps best remembered as the author of the two8 "olume

Accumulation on a !orld +cale, which, li#e urocentrism and most of his other boo#s, ha"ebeen translated and published, not accidentally, by .onthly @e"iew Press >e might be less

charitably remembered as one of the more outspo#en apologists of the Pol Pot regime in

Bambodia in the years $%H=8$%H;, persisting e"en when it became #nown that the -hmer@ouges near8 genocidal policy had #illed $ million of Bambodias ; million people Bambodia is

in fact an e/ample of Amins strategy of 0de8lin#ing1, which repeated unhappy e/perience has

taught him to call a 0national popular democratic1 strategy, since neither the +o"iet *nion norBhina nor Pol Pots Bambodia can be plausibly characteri7ed as 0socialist1 (Bambodia,

significantly, is not mentioned once in urocentrism)

Amin belongs to a constellation of thin#ers, including 9ettelheim, Pailloi/, mmanuel and Andre

Gunder ?ran#, who wor#ed off the ideas of 9aran and +wee7y and who became #nown, in thepost8!orld !ar period as the partisans (not of course uniformly agreeing among themsel"es)


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of the 0monopoly capital1 school of .ar/ism The 0.onthly @e"iew1 school, which had its

forum in the publishing house and 5ournal of the same name, e"ol"ed from the $%


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Amins theory ta#es from .ar/s notion of permanent re"olution only the 0wea# lin#1 aspect

Amin thin#s that 0de8lin#ing1 sa"es the wor#ers and peasants of the de8lin#ed country from the

bloody process of primiti"e accumulation imposed by !estern capitalism, but it only legitimatesthat same process, now carried out by the local 0anti8imperialist1 elite The wor#ers and peasants

of Bambodia, for e/ample, learned this lesson the hard way Amins theory also 0de8lin#s1 the

wor#ers and peasants of the Third !orld from the one force whose inter"ention (as the early9olshe"i#s understood) could spare them that ordeal3 the international wor#ing8class mo"ement

(Amin thin#s socialist re"olution by wor#ing people in the !est is essentially a pipedream: he at

least has the honesty to say so Amins theory, finally, lin#s the wor#ers and peasants in the 0de8lin#ed1 countries, under the auspices of 0national popular democracy1 (he does not dare call it

socialism, as he and others used to) to .ao, Pol Pot and their possible future progeny, who

substitute themsel"es for !estern capitalists and carry out that accumulation under the rhetoric

of 0building socialism1 That is why it is appropriate to call Amins theory that of a Third !orldbureaucratic elite, and his uni"ersalism a uni"ersalism of the state

All of this is stated only allusi"ely in urocentrism: Amins boo# Fe8Lin#ing (which appeared in

?rench in $%;=, and which will soon appear in nglish) is more e/plicit n the latter boo# atleast, Amin gingerly raises the 4uestion of Bambodia, where he spea#s (as such people always

do) of 0errors1, but nowhere does he say why 0de8lin#ing1 will wor# any better the ne/t time

ne can therefore only regret that +amir Amins spirited defense of some of the most important

aspects of .ar/, so maligned in the current climate of post8modern culturalism, as well as hismuch8needed attempt to go beyond urocentric .ar/ism, con5ugates so poorly with his

0national popular democratic1 strategy of de8lin#ing 0National1 and 0popular1 were also words

central to the language of fascism, and none of the regimes Amin has praised o"er the years for

0de8lin#ing1 ha"e a trace of democracy about them The ne/t brea#through in world history hasto go 9ENF the e/ploitation which characteri7es world capitalism, in the 0periphery1 ANF

in the 0core1 @ecent history has seen enough cases where 0de8lin#ing1 has led to autarchicmeltdowns that ha"e tragically led millions of people in places li#e Poland, the +o"iet *nion,Bhina and Bambodia to thin# that !estern capitalism has something positi"e to offer them t

doesnt 9ut neither does +amir Amin

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