Justin, let me remind you of what you wrote:
there are things Western culture has to offer the world, things that
> are, yes, superior, such as liberal bourgeois rights and Marxist social
> analysis... no less superior in those
> respects to the other offerings on display, such as the caste system and
> fundamentalist Hindu nationalism, to take two rivals from India.
That is, you obnoxiously and invidiously decided to compare the best of the West to the worst of the East. But I guess as a brown man I am supposed to accept such arrogance with a smiley face?
Now I have no problem with claims of the cognitive and practical superiority of Western science (the Lewis Wolperts of the world seem more correct to me than wrong). Why it developed where and when it did--despite prior superiority of, say, Arabic or Chinese technology--remains of course one of the great vexed questions (will probably have to read Needham). Nor do I deny that capitalism constitutes progress in that wonderfully Marxian sense of revealing in the most astonishing way the human powers that had lumbered in humankind's lap. So no argument from me about the objective progressiveness of Western capitalism over all the modes of production that had preceded it. It's certainly no con job in my book.
Now this is of course false:
>The long and short of what R says as to my little paean to Western cultural
>superiority is that I don't know enough about Indian culture to condescend to
>it, which is almost certainly true,
Well, I argued that you don't know enough about Western culture to understand how important its representation of others has been to its own self constitution.
This is closer to the truth:
and that many of the bad things in it,
>such as fundamentalist Hindu nationalism, are really the fault of Western
>colonialism, which is probably true in part.
Did not say wholly responsible. Noted that there is a complex historical process, operating on a world scale, to be understood here.
Certainly R is right to reproach
>me with talking as if cultures were hermetically sealed from one another,
>which is not so, least of all in a world of global capitalism.
Good.
>. And constructed though this may be, several of these cultural traditions
>are broadly "Western" in looking back in large part to Europe for the origin
>of their values, ideals, political institutions,
Too vague for me. Maybe you just don't have the balls to say that capitalism--the most progressive system ever--could have only emerged in the West due to-- i don't know--the judeo christian ethic (Gellner has a quite speculative take on how its inversion made modern science possible), Roman property rights, the Calvinist ethic or racial superiority.
>
>And also, as a not so good Hegelian, I thought I'd mention that western
>culture had some things of value to offer the world, that some of its
>achievements constituted progress, an unfashionable notion, not merely over
>the west's own disreputable past, but with respect to other cultures.
Do you think I denied this? Aijaz Ahmad notes that this was Marx's perspective as well. True enough. Yet we do need to take notice of what Marx possibilities was trying to *recover* through his study of ethnology.
I
>really do take it that no sane person thinks otherwise, that bourgeois
>notions like the rule of law and liberal rights and representative democracy
>really are properly aspired to by almost everyone in the world who has an
>inkling of what they are, even granting the distorted forms in which they
>appear in actual Western societies.
Oh, there seems to be something to Poulantzas' argument that inherent in these very rights or in the individualization that state materializes is the ever present threat of totalitarianism itself. Wasn't this in the individualization chapter in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy?
And likewise, at least in this circle,
>where most us trace our own pedigree in w ole or in part back to a
>classically educated German exile journalist and self-taught political
>economist, that Marxist analysis might be thought to be an advance over past
>and even many present ways of thing available in any society.
No I don't read Marxism as a superior form of social science for all societies but a critique of capitalist social relations in particular. That is, Marxism is bound to disappear with capitalism itself. But here I have been influenced by Korsch.
Yours, Rakesh