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Decolonial Marxism, Walter Rodney

#decolonial #WalterRodney

People have no difficulty relating to electricity, but they say, ‘Marx and Engels, that’s European!’ Was Edison a racist? But they ask the question, ‘Was Marx a racist?’ They genuinely believe that they are making a fundamental distinction, whereas, in fact, they are obscuring the totality of social development. And the natural sciences are not to be separated from the social sciences. Our interpretation of the social reality can similarly derive a certain, historical law and hence scientific law of society that can be applied irrespective of its origin or its originators.

Marxism comes to the world as an historical fact, and it comes in a cultural nexus. If, for instance, Africans, or let us go back to Asians – whenthe Chinese first picked up the Marxist texts, they were European texts. They came loaded with conceptions of the historical development of Europe itself. So that method and factual data were obviously interwoven, and the conclusions were in fact in a specific historical and cultural setting.

It was the task of the Chinese to deal with that and to adapt it and to scrutinize it and see how it was applicable to their society.First and foremost, to be scientific, it meant having due regard for the specifics of Chinese historical and social development.

One of these limitations is that it is necessary first to misunderstand deliberately, to misread Marx in order to conduct their own polemics. They will say, for instance: Marx does not deal with the kinds of societywhich we have, Marx and Engels were writing about European society which had classes and we don’t have the same classes; we don’t have any proletarian workers. And they may be right.

In some countries of Africa there is hardly any proletariat to speak of. Countries of Latin America and Asia perhaps have larger numbers; but, in any event, they are right in saying that theparticular class configuration or even the absence of classes in a Third World country does not conform to the model of analysis that Marx might have organized for Western Europe, and which, of course, is relevant to North America.

Marx hadn’t claimed that he was organizing a philosophical worldview and that he had created categories for Western Europe which were applicable in and of themselves to the Third World – applicable withoutany new intellectual or analytical effort. Indeed, Marx had to chastise those individuals (some of them calling themselves Marxists) who would like to have applied his understanding of Western Europe in a very uncritical way to the development of Eastern Europe; and he had to warn them that Marxism was not a general historical philosophical understanding of the whole world at all times, in every place.

He made it very clear that that which he and Engels had been dealing with was a systematic and detailed formulation of the development of capitalism within Western Europe; and that they had attempted to describe and understand the specific features of capitalism specific to Western Europe. So that the universality which both he and Engels claimed, was not the universality that applied to Western Europe.

The ‘universality’ is the universality of contradiction; the universality which can be determined by utilizing the historical materialist method with relationship to any given society. So that when those individuals say that Marxism claims that all societies must pass through the same processes, and that the important thing is the presence of the given working class in a particular way, and that therefore we must of necessity bypass this because our society is unlike that which Marx describes – I think those individuals have fundamentally failed to come to grips with what he was saying.

#decolonialmarxism #WalterRodney