[Marxism] Forwarded from Anthony (reply to Julio Huato)

["Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>]

Julio Huato, who usually has very interesting things to say, wrote:

"Until early in the 20th century, most prominent Marxists assumed that the
disparities between the rich and poor countries in the world were due mainly
to their different degrees of capitalist development."

I think that is basically true, but that idea has lingered on. The
"civilising mission" of imperialism could be justified by the idea that "one
was only helping the savages to reach a higher plane of civilisation", by
establishing a new bourgeois order.

Unquestionably establishing a "new order" did have some benefits, to the
extent that hospitals, schools, etc. were built which provided health and
new skills, some industries benefiting the standard of living of locals were
established, etc. but the real progress that was achieved in the short term
was offset by enormous sufferring, and a pack of problems over the long
term. Because the ideas people had about optimal human development lacked
objectivity, often every shred of objectivity, as you can see with the
Pentagon experiment in Iraq.

The lack of an objective, totalising view of the historical experience of
imperialism is moreover among the causes of the popular confusions about
"multi-culturalism" nowadays. As Marx says, traditions of dead generations
weigh like nightmares on the brains of the living. One theme in
globalisation discourses is, that we should just forget about past
injustices, and that we can now fly around the world into the future on hot
air, and so on, but I don't think that's reality.

The problem with Lenin is not so much that he didn't understand the
significance of the cultural dimension of imperialism, I think he did, it is
more with the specific emancipatory "modernisation" project which he and his
comrades conceived and began to implement upon taking power. The problem, I
think, was with the criteria of human progress he actually operated with.

It's quite clear, that for Marx, one objective yardstick of human progress
in history was the productivity of human labor as the material basis for
human development, and that he tended e.g. to dismiss religion more or less
as a silly superstition existing under conditions where lack of material
progress stultified human development, and that this stultification was then
religiously justified and provided an ideological cover for the exploitation
of people.

But while he was perfectly entitled to do that, this obviously doesn't
really constitute a genuine critique of religion in the classical
philosophical sense of the word, and I think, that what we have to say these
days, is that there are other objective criteria of human progress, and that
is simply because, if the historical experience of capitalism has clarified
anything in stripping away false moralities and superstitions (often leaving
a moral vacuum or "malleable ethics"), it is the real content and limits of
what people can be, and can do, in a lifetime.

Revolutionaries of course seek to extend the limits of the possible, but if
you go over personal limits, you pay a price. Lenin said (towards the end of
the life) that he had this feeling of sitting in a car holding the steering
wheel, but that the wheels would not respond to him turn the wheel this way,
and that way. In a more humble and petty way, I got my wallet stolen today.

What I am saying is that if, in alternative to institutionalised religion,
Marx "moral" was specifically to "work for humanity" by fighting,
challenging and overturning all conditions which made people less than they
could be, then this raises a series of questions which cannot be answered
satisfactorily, if "Marxism" is thought of as an already completed
theoretical system for human emancipation, doctrinally upheld. I think at
least one such objective criterion must be the incidence of infant morality;
there are others to which I have referred to in past mails. The alternative
is a postmodernist rejection of progress in human history, but this must
culminate in nihilism.

Looked at this way, I think you can really get to the heart of the modern
dispute about the benefits, cost and ethics of imperialist adventures such
as in Iraq, and why there remains moral confusion about it. Because the Bush
supporters really think that they are doing Iraq and the world a favour, by
their military intervention ("shit happens" and "we've got to be cruel to be
kind"), and to a certain extent, explicitly or implicitly, today's US
foreign policies are a sort of "Wiedergutmachung" (a retribution with an
ideology of redemption) to the Iraqi people for imperialist misadventure in
the past, which created Saddam Hussein, depicted as a monster, a modern
Hitler who appeared out of a jack-in-the-box one day.

This is not simply a question of economics, but a question about human
culture - we are not now necessarily talking specifically about the
superiority of one culture over another, but rather about a pattern of human
development as such, promulgated as most desirable, and enforced, if need
be, with military power.

Ultimately, every elite justifies its position and the existence of gross
socio-economic inequalities either by some variant of saying "Im anfang war
die Tat" (in the beginning was the deed) or by deferring moral questions in
space and in time. This is perhaps the most abstract dualism of all
dualisms, a dualism which concerns time and physical space itself.

Religion can come in handy there, of course, because it can project a
cosmology of eternity about which we can all speculate, financially and
philosophically. If science shows us real limits, however, we can all still
say, we are trying to do our best within those limits as individuals, and
that could be true, after all. We all have personal limits, and there are
some things we just don't know, isn't that so ?

In that case, the controversy is about how we actually go about obtaining
knowledge, and then we can say that some people are just stupid or do
ill-considered things, which could be true also. I think one way to respond
to that idea (not the only way) is by specifying some indisputable objective
criteria for human development, and to the extent that UN agencies have done
so as a basis for policy, I personally do support those agencies, because
then we are talking sense, instead of pomo bullshit on a horny afternoon.

Jurriaan







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