It’s been almost a century and a half since Karl Marx’s death, and decades since the collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and elsewhere. In the still nominally…View Post
The author above made one of them. Unilineal cultural evolution is baggage from 19th century anthropology. The idea of society moving through phases on a single track ignores the ways that many anti-colonial movements grounded their resistance not in capitalist class struggle and communism, but in indigenous social forms which they sought to displace capitalism with. The Zapatistas are a great example.
Most modern Marxists do not believe this for the simple reason most Marxists are from Asia where the track as espoused by Marx is completely inapplicable to past Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Laotian society. For example, none of those societies had a slave economy. They just went from a communal society to a feudal society that lasted for millennia with multiple stages of feudalism. Obviously, the communal society->slave society->feudal society->capitalist society track is only relevant in Western Europe when those East Asian societies' track is more like communal society->feudal society->colonized (semi-colonized for China) semi-feudal society->socialist society. It's not like Chinese/Korean/Vietnamese/Laotian Marxists are purposefully shoehorning the slave society stage to their histories just because some 19th century German dude who never set foot in Asia said so. And it goes without saying that the track Marx described doesn't apply to Cuba either.
In general, most people who are critiquing Marxism in good faith (and everyone who is critiquing Marxism in bad faith) have almost no knowledge of actually existing Marxism ie the Marxism that is studied and practiced in current countries with ruling ML parties. Whether China et al is revisionist or not shouldn't be particularly relevant to critiques of Marxism because the question of whether China is revisionist or not is a question between Marxists, not people who think Marxism is flawed. It makes no sense to cast aside Chinese communists as "not real Marxists" in order to find a different band of Marxists as "real Marxist" only to then critique them and use them as a demonstration of Marxism's inadequacies.
The hilarious thing about all this is Marx himself would agree with you
Here he is in 1877 responding to the same critique and being somewhat baffled that it's being applied to him lmao
Now what application to Russia can my critic make of this historical sketch? Only this: If Russia is tending to become a capitalist nation after the example of the Western European countries, and during the last years she has been taking a lot of trouble in this direction – she will not succeed without having first transformed a good part of her peasants into proletarians; and after that, once taken to the bosom of the capitalist regime, she will experience its pitiless laws like other profane peoples. That is all. But that is not enough for my critic. He feels himself obliged to metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into an historico-philosophic theory of the marche generale [general path] imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself, in order that it may ultimately arrive at the form of economy which will ensure, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labour, the most complete development of man. But I beg his pardon. (He is both honouring and shaming me too much.) Let us take an example.
In several parts of Capital I allude to the fate which overtook the plebeians of ancient Rome. They were originally free peasants, each cultivating his own piece of land on his own account. In the course of Roman history they were expropriated. The same movement which divorced them from their means of production and subsistence involved the formation not only of big landed property but also of big money capital. And so one fine morning there were to be found on the one hand free men, stripped of everything except their labour power, and on the other, in order to exploit this labour, those who held all the acquired wealth in possession. What happened? The Roman proletarians became, not wage labourers but a mob of do-nothings more abject than the former “poor whites” in the southern country of the United States, and alongside of them there developed a mode of production which was not capitalist but dependent upon slavery. Thus events strikingly analogous but taking place in different historic surroundings led to totally different results. By studying each of these forms of evolution separately and then comparing them one can easily find the clue to this phenomenon, but one will never arrive there by the universal passport of a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical.
This is why I can't take modern critiques of marxism seriously, 99% of the time they're not applicable or Marx himself would agree with them which begs the question why would it be considered a critique of "Marxism" in the first
The answer is pretty simple, Marxism as defined and elaborated by late-stage Marx is a robust critique and analysis of capitalism that hasn't actually been successfully challenged on its own merits and instead requires a degree of academic slight-of-hand to dismiss, this is enforced on a political basis which is why it's easy for even folks who consider themselves "well-read" on Marx to be completely misled on the subject
I very strongly agree with the points you're making wrt. eurocentrism, and that have been made about progressivist unilineal history but I'd like to add that Korea was absolutely a slave economy. For most of Korea's recorded history 25-40% of the population were slaves.
Most modern Marxists do not believe this for the simple reason most Marxists are from Asia where the track as espoused by Marx is completely inapplicable to past Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Laotian society. For example, none of those societies had a slave economy. They just went from a communal society to a feudal society that lasted for millennia with multiple stages of feudalism. Obviously, the communal society->slave society->feudal society->capitalist society track is only relevant in Western Europe when those East Asian societies' track is more like communal society->feudal society->colonized (semi-colonized for China) semi-feudal society->socialist society. It's not like Chinese/Korean/Vietnamese/Laotian Marxists are purposefully shoehorning the slave society stage to their histories just because some 19th century German dude who never set foot in Asia said so. And it goes without saying that the track Marx described doesn't apply to Cuba either.
In general, most people who are critiquing Marxism in good faith (and everyone who is critiquing Marxism in bad faith) have almost no knowledge of actually existing Marxism ie the Marxism that is studied and practiced in current countries with ruling ML parties. Whether China et al is revisionist or not shouldn't be particularly relevant to critiques of Marxism because the question of whether China is revisionist or not is a question between Marxists, not people who think Marxism is flawed. It makes no sense to cast aside Chinese communists as "not real Marxists" in order to find a different band of Marxists as "real Marxist" only to then critique them and use them as a demonstration of Marxism's inadequacies.
The hilarious thing about all this is Marx himself would agree with you
Here he is in 1877 responding to the same critique and being somewhat baffled that it's being applied to him lmao
This is why I can't take modern critiques of marxism seriously, 99% of the time they're not applicable or Marx himself would agree with them which begs the question why would it be considered a critique of "Marxism" in the first
The answer is pretty simple, Marxism as defined and elaborated by late-stage Marx is a robust critique and analysis of capitalism that hasn't actually been successfully challenged on its own merits and instead requires a degree of academic slight-of-hand to dismiss, this is enforced on a political basis which is why it's easy for even folks who consider themselves "well-read" on Marx to be completely misled on the subject
I very strongly agree with the points you're making wrt. eurocentrism, and that have been made about progressivist unilineal history but I'd like to add that Korea was absolutely a slave economy. For most of Korea's recorded history 25-40% of the population were slaves.
What do you suppose caused it to diverge so greatly from its neighbors?