Theory and Praxis

Reflections on the Colonization of Knowledge

Murzban Jal, Jyoti Bawane

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000028997
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This book proposes a New Enlightenment – a new way of looking at the non-Western world. Breaking new ground, the essays chart a course beyond Eurocentric discourses (which completely ignore the contributions of Asia, Africa and Latin-America) and forms of nativism (which are usually ethnocentric discourses).

The volume:

• Focuses on the historical aspects of knowledge-production and its colonization;
• Examines the genre of multilinear histories that displaces hegemonic Eurocentric discourses;
• Enlarges the scope of multilinear historicism whereby Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas are drawn in a new humanistic knowledge system;
• Studies how colonization is resisted in both the non-Western and Western world.

Lucid and engaging, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of social theory, education, politics and public policy.

Part I

Reflections on history

1 Beyond unilinear evolutionism

Rethinking Marx’s relevance for the non-Western world

Peter Hudis

The difference: Marx’s Marxism and post-Marx Marxism

A fundamental contradiction has pervaded Marxism in the non-Western world: the difference between Marx’s Marxism and post-Marx Marxism. The difference is most of all reflected in the embrace of unilinear evolutionist models of historical development embraced by Marxists in both the Western and non-Western world. Sometimes referred to as the two-stage theory of revolution, the notion that socialism can be reached in a developing country only if it first endures an extended period of capitalist industrialization has been upheld by an array of political tendencies, from Social Democrats and liberals to Stalinists and independent socialists. Far from being a distant or outdated historical issue, the unilinear model of development continues to have a powerful hold on many thinkers and activists today. It is reflected in the South African Communist Party and African National Congress’s (ANC’s) imposition of a bourgeois-democratic stage upon South Africa, Evo Morales’s notion that a “national-capitalist development” model based on resource extraction is the necessary prerequisite for any subsequent move toward socialism in Bolivia and the Chinese government’s embrace of the neoliberal market as what will supposedly one day deliver “genuine socialism” (or even communism!) to that land.

It has long been assumed that a unilinear model of development was integral to Marx as well. Did he not repeatedly argue that socialism could only come into existence on the basis of the material conditions created by capitalism? Did he not suggest in his 1853 articles in the New York Tribune that India (and countries like it) needed to suffer through the colonialist imposition of capitalist social relations before they could be ready for socialism? And did not Marx write in the first German edition of Capital (1867), “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future”? Based on these and other sources, it would seem that Marx was no less a unilinear evolutionist than his mentor Hegel, who posed Western Europe as the source of historical initiative and progress in his Philosophy of History. Edward Said’s comment about Marx’s 1853 writings on India sums up an attitude that has become dominant in many discussions of Marx’s view of the path to socialism in the non-Western world: “In article after article he returned with increasing conviction to the idea that even in destroying Asia, Britain was making possible there a real social revolution… . Though Marx’s humanity, his sympathy for the misery of the people, are clearly engaged, in the end it is the Romantic Orientalist vision that wins out.”¹

In recent decades, however, a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of Marx’s understanding of the path to socialism in the developing world has emerged that has seriously challenged the premises upon which Said’s judgment was based. The publication of many of his previously neglected writings on India (beginning with his defense of the Sepoy Rebellion in the late 1850s and continuing with his renewed studies of India over the next two decades) indicates that Marx moved away from the modernist assumptions that guided several of his brief articles of 1853 in the New York Tribune.² Even more importantly, the publication of his Ethnological Notebooks – a massive study of indigenous peoples of North America – as well as his ‘Notebooks on Kovalevsky’, ‘Draft Letters to Vera Zasulich’ and related notes and writings on Indonesia, China, Russia, North Africa and Australia from the last decade of his life – has led many to argue that Marx developed a distinctively multilinear view of human development that bears little resemblance to how he has often been portrayed by many of his most fervent followers and critics.³ This re-examination has extended to a deeper understanding of how Marx’s evolving views of the non-Western world impacted the development of his greatest theoretical work, Capital. As Kevin Anderson painstakingly shows in Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies, Marx’s comment in the first German edition that “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future” was not his last word on the matter. In the French edition of Capital (1872–75), written after he had learned Russian and became better acquainted with conditions in the developing world, he revised the sentence to read, “The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to those that follow it on the industrial path, the image of its own future.” Moreover, in the same French edition, he specified that Capital’s analysis of the historical tendency of capitalist accumulation is limited to Western Europe. Whereas in 1867, he singled out the destruction of communal property relations and their transformation into capitalist private property in England as “the classic form” of capital accumulation, the French edition reads: “But the basis of this whole development is the expropriation of the cultivators. So far, it has been carried out in a radical manner only in England: therefore this country will necessarily play the leading role in our sketch. But all the countries of Western Europe are going through the same development”. Marx here once again restricts the scope of Capital’s analysis to a delineation of Western European developments instead of claiming that offers some universal formula of social development.⁴

Marx made this even more explicit in his last decade in his writings on the Russian village commune and the fate of its pre-capitalist social relations. In an 1877 letter to the Russian journal Otechestvennye Zapiski, he explicitly denied that Capital contained a universal theory of historical development applicable to every country:

He absolutely insists on transforming my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-philosophical theory of the general course fatally imposed on all peoples, whatever the historical circumstances in which they find themselves placed … But I beg his pardon. That is to do me both too much honor and too much discredit … success will never come with the master-key of a general historico-philosophical theory, whose supreme virtue consists in being supra-historical.⁵

In his draft letters to Vera Zasulich of 1881, he clearly specified that Russia was not fated to undergo the vicissitudes of capitalist development but could shorten or even bypass the capitalist stage if a peasant revolution based on such indigenous rural forms as the obshchina and the mir was supported by a proletarian revolution in the Western European countries. He and Engels expressed this publicly in the 1882 Preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto, which stated,

Can the Russian obshchina, a form, albeit heavily eroded, of the primitive communal ownership of the land, pass directly into the higher, communist form of communal ownership? Or must it first go through the same process of dissolution that marks the West’s historical development? Today there is only one possible answer. If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that the two complement each other, then Russia’s peasant communal land-ownership may serve as the point of departure for a communist development.⁶

Nevertheless, none of these insights informed the development of Marxism in the first decades after Marx’s death. The standard narrative – adopted most prominently of all by German Social Democracy and the Second International – is that no society can reach socialism without an extended period of capitalist industrialization. The changes that Marx introduced in the French edition of Capital were largely ignored and did not become the basis of subsequent foreign-language editions (all English-language translations of Capital derive from the fourth German edition instead of the French edition – even though Marx held that the latter contains “a scientific value independent of the original”).⁷ Although Engels did important work in issuing Volumes Two and Three of Capital after Marx’s death, neither the Grundrisse nor Marx’s extended studies of non-Western societies in his last decade began to appear in print until many decades later (and some have not even been published to this day).⁸ The orthodox Marxists of the Second International saw little reason to consider the possibility that their unilinear evolutionist perspective – influenced by the work of Darwin more than that of Marx – may have somehow been amiss.

The same is true of those who first embraced “Marxism” in the developing world in the decades after Marx’s death, foremost among them being those in “backward” Russia, which was then considered part of the developing (or even precapitalist) world. Russian Marxism was defined from the outset by a rejection of any suggestion that there was an alternative to a unilinear model of historical development. All of the early Russian Marxists, from Plekhanov to Lenin, argued that Russia could reach socialism only through an extended period of capitalist development.⁹ In part, this dogmatic insistence flowed from the fact that Russian Marxism arose and took shape through a struggle against the very tendency that argued for skipping the capitalist stage – the Narodniks. That Marx was actually closer to the Narodniks than the “orthodox” Marxists (which he largely detested) was simply ignored – in part, because texts such as the letter to Zasulich were suppressed by Plekhanov and were unknown, as was his letter to the editorial board of Otechestvennye Zapiski (it was not published until after the Russian Revolution of 1917).¹⁰ But that hardly explains everything, since everyone had access to the 1882 Preface to the Russian edition of the Communist Manifesto, in which the possibility of a non-linear path to socialism in a developing country was clearly stated.¹¹

I contend that there is a different reason that orthodox Marxists (as well as many others) have been so wedded to a unilinear model of historical development: namely, it is easier to impose or apply a ready-made schema onto history than draw out the dialectical movement that is immanent in it. Dialectics is a hard taskmaster because it does not involve applying a series of fixed conclusions to new realities; instead, the dialectical movement must be elicited from a comprehensive grasp of the thing itself. Marx himself spoke to this when he said of Ferdinand Lassalle, “He will discover to his cost that it is one thing for a critique to take a science to the point at which it admits of a dialectical presentation, and quite another to apply an abstract, ready-made system of logic to vague presentiments of such a system.”¹² It is not without reason that Hegel himself so strongly warned against “monochromatic” schematicism and formalism in his Phenomenology of Spirit.¹³ Post-Marx Marxists did not ask themselves the critical question of whether Marx himself shared their unilinear evolutionist assumptions – even in the face of a number of indications that he had a different view – because they felt more comfortable with their own standpoint. It would therefore take a long time before the difference between Marx and the “Marxists” on this issue began to come to the fore.

This is no small matter, because the tendency to skip over or neglect Marx’s distinctive understanding of a possible path to socialism in the developing world has had critically important (and tragic) consequences – including on the part of those who rejected for one reason or another the two-stage theory of revolution. This is most evident in the position of such tendencies as Maoism, which thought it possible to make a direct transition to socialism (or even full communism) by downplaying Marx’s insistence that a new society can come into existence only if it emerges from the material conditions developed in the bosom of the old one. Marx never wavered from emphasizing this point, including in the work of his last decade.¹⁴ It is not without good reason that he insisted, in all of his writings on the Russian village commune, that the ability of Russia to achieve communism in lieu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• Introduction: on the New Enlightenment
• Part I Reflections on history
• Part II Decolonizing education
• Part III Inequality and the logic of exclusion
• Part IV Philosophy, culture and politics
• Index