>Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>>And incidentally, I fail to see any remote connection between a
>>proposition on the source of the destructive rationality of
>>capitalism and one's view, one way or the other, of the impact
>>of prevailing winds on history.
>
>It's been a few years since I read the Colonizer's Model, but as I
>remember it, Blaut was so intent to prove that there was nothing
>unique about developments within European society that he reached to
>the winds for an explanation of imperialism.
When the late & lamented Jim Blaut credited the alleged geographical advantage of so-called Europe for the conquest of the so-called New World & then the rise of the so-called West, he ended up falling for a variant of one version of Eurocentrism that he identified & criticized himself: "_Environment_: The natural environment of Europe is superior to all others" (Jim Blaut, _Eight Eurocentric Historians_, p. 1). This is a problem in addition to the conflation of historical "priority" with "superiority" that I mentioned already.
>That slides all too easily into a simple Europe=bad/non-Europe=good
>analysis that isn't fair to any parties concerned.
To paraphrase Frantz Fanon, "The Non-European is not. Any more than the European."
>As for "the destructive rationality of capitalism," that also seems
>fatally one-sided to me. Call me a Manifesto Marxist if you like,
>but it misses the system's positive contributions to world history.
The reason for Marx, Engels, & other classical Marxists' readiness to credit capitalism for progress was not only that they saw capitalism's superiority to feudalism & that they thought that capitalism provided a new global terrain of struggles _only_ through which _universal social emancipation_ is possible. They (often though not always) keenly felt that _history was on their side_ & that, despite what may have at times looked like insurmountable obstacles, it was _inevitable_ that workers of the world would unite & triumph, sooner or later. The prevailing mood of Marxists has changed since then, though it is difficult to pinpoint exactly when it changed. World War I; Stalin's show trials; splits in the Socialist camp (the USSR; Yugoslavia; China, Albania, & Cambodia; Vietnam); Hungary in 1956 & the Prague Spring in 1968; MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction); Dengism; the collapse of Soviet & Eastern European socialism; famines in North Korea; etc. all contributed to the development of a new Marxist structure of feelings: "history is against us, we are swimming against the current."
While the _rational kernel_ of Marx & Engels does _not_ suffer at all from -- in fact shines more incandescently than ever through -- the loss of vulgarly teleological & deterministic streaks in Marxism, some Marxists may have unfortunately lost "optimism of the will" together with them (though it is not "rational" to lose it), thus sharing the structure of feelings with post-modernists, post-colonialists, post-developmentalists, etc.
That said, it is no good either to confuse socialism with the unfettered development of forces of production, as SUV socialist Jim Heartfield does.
Yoshie
P.S. Jim Blaut, however, was _not_ among those who gave up on progress in _any_ form. In fact, despite his profound dislike of Hegel, Jim chided me & Carrol for discounting the "history of Progress" too much. Jim did believe that capitalism constituted progress, & that is why he sought to disprove that "Europeans" invented capitalism. Alas, he believed in the existence of "Europeans" prior to the rise of capitalism, it appears. If he had not, he would have known that there was no need to empirically disprove it, since it is logically impossible for an effect to become its own cause.
P.P.S. BTW, you fall into the same problem of anachronism when you speak of something "unique about developments within European society" being responsible for the origin of capitalism. "European society" is a result of capitalism, not its cause.