--- Original Message --- Louis Proyect <lnp3 at PANIX.COM> Wrote on Mon, 25 Sep 2000 14:31:47 -0400
------------------ Jim Blaut, a Marxism list subscriber and distinguished scholar with solid class instincts and principles, has now come out with the second in a trilogy on Eurocentrism. The first was titled "A Colonizer's Model of the World". The second deals with 8 historians who believe that Europe conquered the world because it had a superior religion, race, environment or culture. He takes on Max Weber, Lynn White Jr., Robert Brenner, Eric L. Jones, Michael Mann, John A. Hall, Jared Diamond and David Landes. I was pleased to no end to discover that I was acknowledged in the preface along with such luminaries as Andre G. Frank and Janet Abu-Lughod for providing "wise counsel". I hope that Jim does not get into too much hot water for this, like a politician appearing on the Howard Stern Show.
In any case, here's the opening paragraphs of the article on Brenner to give you a feel for his approach:
ROBERT BRENNER IN THE TUNNEL OF TIME
Robert Brenner is a Marxist, a follower of one tradition in Marxism that is as diffusionist, as Eurocentric, as most conservative positions. I cannot here offer an explanation for this curious phenomenon: a tradition within one of the most egalitarian of all socio-political doctrines yet a tradition which, nonetheless, believes in the historical superiority (or priority) of one community of humans, Europeans, over another, non-Europeans. Eurocentric Marxists are not racist, nor even prejudiced, although most of them believe that Europeans have always been the leaders in the forward march of history; that Europe is the fountainhead of civilization, the main source of innovative social change. For these scholars, the origins of capitalism are European. Capitalism's further development consisted of an internally generated process of improvement within its classic homeland, the European world. The impact of capitalism on the rest of the world has been, on balance, progressive. Colonialism and (today) neocolonialism are not significant for capitalism, are rather a marginal process, a temporary aberration or diversion or side- show, not a vital need of the system as a whole, which evolves in response to internal laws of motion.
This point of view is basic diffusionism: autonomous development at the center, diffusion of development to the periphery. It is also tunnel history: a form of tunnel-vision which tries to explain the rise of capitalism, and the rise of Europe, by looking only at prior European facts, looking, as it were, down the European tunnel of time, ignoring the history of the world outside of Europe both as cause of change within Europe and as the site of historically efficacious change in its own right (Blaut, 1989). The Euro-Marxists -- as I will call the socialists of this tradition -- accept this view, and so they are diffusionists. To this extent, they agree with their mainstream colleagues about the rise of Europe, of capitalism, of modernization, of industrialization, of democracy: basically all of it is European.
Euro-Marxism went into eclipse during the period when liberation movements were decolonizing most of the world. In this period, the idea that the colonial or Third World has been, and is, unimportant in social development was not popular among Marxists. After the end of the Vietnam War, however, this point of view became again popular, and indeed became the Marxism most widely professed in European and American universities. Today we witness the curious phenomenon that Euro-Marxists are quoted with approval by anti- Marxist scholars, who can use them to show that "real" Marxist scholarship supports some of the same doctrines, theoretical and practical, that conservatives do.
Louis Proyect The Marxism mailing-list: http://www.marxmail.org
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