[PEN-L:11428] Re: Re: Re: Re: colonialism

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx> 09/21/99 01:43PM >>
"Why did the Chinese fail to develop capitalism?" The very question
is repellant. The question that is politically important to answer is,
"Why did capitalism develop at all?" I would argue that it was *not*
inevitable. That (to use Gould's metaphor for contingency in evolution)
if one played the tape of human history over again, that after 500,000
years (instead of 100, 000 as of now) human culture would still be
paleolithic or feudal or what have you. Because capitalism *did*
develop, we know that it was *possible* for it to develop. We do
*not* know that it was either a necessary or even probable
development.
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Charles: To support Carrol's point, if a comet had hit the earth and exterminated the human race in the year zero, or before capitalism, then capitalism would not have developed. So, the development of capiitalism was contingent upon a comet not hitting the earth.

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The debate, also, and despite the intentions of the debaters is apt
to produce rhetoric with unfortunate implications. I assume that you
are not making moral judgments -- but (as Jim Devine noted) the
rhetoric often suggests that. And the problem with making moral
judgments of imperialism is that it implicitly treats imperialism
as a *policy* rather than as the mode of existence of capitalism.
And treating imperialism as a policy formed the root of Kautsky's
errors. It is also at the root of the errors of those leftists or
would be leftists who support humanitarian bombing. (Rod,
in suggesting that anti-imperialism finds enemies where there
are none, obviously sees imperialism as merely a policy of
a given government that one can tinker with.)

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Charles: I agree with this, but there is a subtlely different role for morality in history. The morality of a given people, culture, group is an OBJECTIVE aspect of its social existence.  A people is , a society is both a social practice and a social theory ( social "morality"). The development of the people is a dialectic of their practice and their morality. Thus, Marx , the arch historical MATERIALIST, discusses the degree of brutality , ruthlessness, willingness to use force and violence and other moral characterisitics of Europeans as material factors ,along with their social productive practices, in the whole bundle of CONTINGENCIES, that resulted in their inventing wage-labor/racist-colonialist capitalism.

Charles Brown