Orientalism Revisited

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU
Mon Jan 24 21:43:40 PST 2000


Justin wrote:


>OK, Rakesh, I see we are still on the same page. Sorry if I was
>unintentionally rude. I certainly didn't mean to dis Indian culture.

Don't mind if you dis Indian or any other culture--by the way, I consider myself an American. Just surprised that as even a post marxist you have elided Marx's critique of civilization, Western civilization.

Now what however has led some to embrace the orientalists is, e.g., the consignment by anti orientalists such as by your heroes the Mills of India to the ground level on 'the scale of civilizations'. The Orientalists of course were preoccupied with a pristine and glorious past that they thought colonial rule would restore (well if not today as a third to half the population of Bengal is starved and killed, perhaps tomorrow); for these anti orientalists there was not even such a past.

Marx's position is much more nuanced. It is not that he dismissed the evolutionary doctrine applied to society; rather he looked to other societies in time and space not only to establish the historicity of the bourgeois epoch (he loved through painstakingly careful analysis to mock the bourgeois asses who found the conventionalities re: property, gender, inheritance of 'civilization' everywhere) but also explore the deformations wrought in the capitalist epoch on humankind. Marx anticipates Freud in the theme of the deformation of humankind's character by Western civilization.

So for example the communal base (as Marx imagined it) of the Asiatic mode of production or the gens as studied by Morgan opened up for Marx positive possibilities for the future of humankind by demonstrating the possibilities in egalitarian relations between women and men as well as the collective institutions of property as opposed the pursuit of private and personal wealth.

of course while arguing that in the ancient collectivities there existed the characteristics of society which humankind must reconstitute if it is to overcome the distortions of character in the civilized condition, Marx made it clear, as Morgan did not, that his process of reconstitution will take place on another level than the old. Moreover, Marx rejected any kind of 'evolutionism' for he noted that it would take a human effort, of people for and by themselves, that the antagonisms of civilization are not static or passive, but are comprised of social interests which are ranged for andagainst the outcome of such reconstitution, and this will be determined in a dynamic and active way.

It is a sign of the conservatism of the times, and analytical marxism in particular, that so little interest is shown in this Marxist theme of the deformation of character by the very civilization that you so one sidedly tout here.

Yet this aspect of Marx's work has been known since Krader published the Ethnological Notebooks (I have basically quoted him above). But it has been suppressed no less than the Critique of the Gotha Program was by revisionists, social democrats or (today) analytical marxists.


>I don't agree that liberal rights somehow "contain" totalitarianism. Some
>of Frankfurters used to talk like that too, but I think it's idealism.

The argument by Poulantzas (a former lawyer) is different than the Marcusean one about repressive tolerance. It is not really commented on or developed in the treatments by Bob Jessop in his book on P's theory of the state or Paul Thomas (my great undergrad prof in political theory who introduced me to Marx) in his rather stimulating Alien Politics. I myself have not mastered it. It may not withstand scrutiny.


>
>Whether capitalism required Judaeo-Christianity, who knows. I have always
>been suspicious of the Weber thesis.

Are you less suspicious of the necessity of J-C thesis in other forms?

yours, rakesh



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