nationalism & imperialism (jim o'connor)

[Nasreen Karim]

Point well taken.  Actually, my point was not to criticize Marxism or its
Eurocentrism in a totalizing fashion, but to identify certain trends within
Marxism. Even in Marx's own work, one can find a tension between its
European embeddedness on the one hand and a post-capitalist universality on
the other.  It is probably legitimate to read , as some people have already
done, a dialectic trajectory in Marx's text from a Eurocentrism (roughly the
period of Communist Manifesto) to a later multicultural discursivity
(roughly the period of "Ethnology Notebook).  And of course, throughout the
third world, both in colonial and postcolonial phases, Marxism provided a
radical hope for social transformation.  Many of us had our political
schooling in the street politics of Third World militant Marxism.  Although
some of us have reassessed some of our earlier political premises and took a
somewhat postmarxist turn, Marx still remains an important point of
departure for us.

Manjur Karim
----- Original Message -----
From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
Sent: Saturday, January 22, 2000 9:36 AM
Subject: Re: nationalism & imperialism (jim o'connor)


>
>
> Nasreen Karim wrote:
>
> > The fact is, historically speaking,  a big part of Marxist
> > thinking was not able to break away from an Eurocentric (hence, I dare
say,
> > imperialistic)  thought pattern.  Even Gramsci, who is otherwise so
> > illuminating, showed clear signs of Eurocentric prejudices in his
writings.
>
> Could this help explain why the only marxists after Lenin who stand out
> as indisputable giants are non-europeans -- Cabral, Mao, James, Ho.
> Perhaps, though he was not a marxist, one should nevertheless add
> Malcolm. There have been innumerable fine marxist scholars and
> activists (and activist scholars), European and non-European, but none
> stand out as these men do.
>
> Carrol
>
>