I think we make a fundamental mistake if we try to attribute to Marx (and Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, et al.) motives that are really our own.
To put it simply: Marx was not concerned with a passive, contemplative judgment of politics or of historical development but he was about changing the world. Hence, his (their) judgments were about not about phenomena in and of themselves, but rather what potentially advanced or blocked the changes he (they) wanted to politically pursue. For instance, this usually hinges on a false historical estimation of when capitalism/national wars/imperialism were "progressive" vs. when they became "reactionary." But what this leaves out is the force of the Left to potentially change the world in an emancipatory direction, which was the crucial factor in the estimations of Marx (and his best followers), e.g., what made the U.S./union side in the American Civil War "progressive" was in large part a function of Marx's estimation of the European workers' willingness to support it, over and above their immediate "material" (socio-economic, within their national labor
markets) interests. It was a political judgment, not an analytic one.
In this way Marx (and his best followers) were responsible in a way that today's pseudo-"Left" is not. Marx appears to be ambivalent on e.g. the British Empire only to those who think that Marx thought the British Empire would do his job for him. He didn't think so, and so he wasn't ambivalent. He wanted to overthrow the British Empire, but what the British Empire did and didn't succeed in doing, and what its opponents did or didn't succeed in doing needed to be judged on a case-by-case basis, in terms of what potentially promoted or retarded the revolution. Such judgment is open to debate, the very essence of politics. Platypus exists because we find that in place of judgment and politics, schematic (and black-and-white, either-or) thinking prevails, in the absence of true politics. The fake "politics" on the pseudo-"Left" to us is almost entirely about spurious agreements and disagreements, hence it is necessarily dogmatic and sectarian. This is
because no one is really trying to change the world, just justify (rationalize) to themselves how they feel about it. We in Platypus favor instead a stone-cold sobriety about the rather dim realities we face.
Whatever else may be fallacious about their thinking, one thing that speaks to the rationality of the positions taken by such types as Hitchens, Makiya, Glavin, et al. is their recognition that their is no effective Left politics, i.e., that there is no real potential progressive "anti-imperialist" politics that provides an actual emancipatory alternative to U.S. policy (not that I agree with the conclusions they draw from this observation, but this factor still needs to be faced and processed).
To get back to Marx: Marx did not change his mind on India; he was ambivalent about an ambivalent phenomenon, the destruction of traditional society by capital effected through the British. But Marx didn't think the Sepoy rebellion was anti-capitalist or even had any realy hope of success, rather, it signified that there would be other forces of potential historical (ambivalent) "progress" in India besides the British, and that India (like Ireland) could come to figure more prominently in British politics in ways that could hasten the downfall of British capitalism/imperialism. (Again, I think Marx's judgment on this could be disputed, but we need to understand its basis, which included first and foremost estimations of the strength of the potential anti-capitalist politics of the British and broader European workers' movement, which Marx was active in shaping.) Does anyone really think this is true of the Taliban, et al. today?
-- Chris
Date: Thu, 8 Apr 2010 12:52:44 +0100 From: "James Heartfield" <Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk> Subject: [lbo-talk] Platypus: what we are, what we do, and why To: <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org> Message-ID: <C99FA0C689F44883A732CDB02B0D05AE at JamesPC> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
Joseph Catron wrote (unless I have misread the text-clipping)
>Like the assumptions packaged in posts about the Civil War sent to this very
>list within the last few hours? (For some reason, many on the left resort
>to crude moralistic appeals in this one unique instance - slavery in the
>American South - while disregarding their modern equivalents, like the
>subjugation of women in Afghanistan. For the record, I find both instances
>of imperialist propaganda equally and identically troublesome.)
Help me out, Joe. Are you saying that the cause of anti-slavery was mere propaganda in the case of the U.S. civil war? In which case, I disagree. Or have I misunderstood.
Crushing the confederacy, and slavery with it, seems like a good thing, to me.