Edited by Chthonic_Goat_666 ()
baraka's criticism seems to mostly be 'not leninist, erases class'. probably fair.
toyotathon posted:
All of it!
I know about Grover Furr, I have farm to factory, but that's about it. Just most of the history books I know of are either of the Robert Conquest or Trotskyist variety
I am wary of narratives that posit unmitigated evils. Dialectical reflection is needed regarding every historical *wrong turn,* including "traditional" European colonialism. But jumping to the conclusion, as in the above article, that anti-colonialism was and is an essentially unjustified, irrational revolt by gullible masses led by strong men simply inverts the Manichean story that is allegedly dominant. Instead of exploring how power, often despite itself, can serves the interests of reason in history, such an intellectual operation serves to inculcate a lack of responsibility among its intended audience for past and present troubles of the Global South-a lack of responsibility which is weirdly the opposite of the type of intense cosmopolitan involvement with the world that the author is supposedly calling for. Westerners are apparently accountable enough to get a pat on the back for investment in education or infrastructure, but not so much that they should feel any misgivings about the wars of conquest and the mass expropriations that accompanied these accomplishments. We are being asked to reevaluate a particular past, but we are evidently not supposed to wonder about the internal contradictions and crying injustices which made that old order history in the first place
Also the lack of mention of Japanese colonialism is odd, and perhaps a sign of a telling double standard when it comes to the application of the same political-economic methods as Europeons by non-whites.
Edited by RedMaistre ()
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2017/09/a-quick-reminder-of-why-colonialism-was-bad
Well put.
God is pleased;
grovel in the dirt and die,
Race of Cain.
Race of Abel, your sacrifice
flatters the nostrils of Seraphim;
Race of Cain, is your punishment
never to know an end?
Race of Abel, your fields prosper,
your cattle grow fat;
Race of Cain, your belly clamors
like a famished dog.
Race of Abel, warm yourself
at the hearth of your fathers;
shiver in the jackal's den,
Race of Cain.
Race of Abel, increase and multiply,
even your gold will breed;
though your heart burn, Race of Cain,
beware great appetites.
Race of Abel, build your cities
even as the ants;
Race of Cain, your children beg
for bread beside the road.
Race of Abel, your corpse will
fatten the reeking earth;
your labor, Race of Cain,
is not yet done.
Race of Abel, behold your shame;
the sword yields to the butcher-knife!
Rise up, Race of Cain,
and cast God down upon the earth!
RedMaistre posted:"I think even committed opponents of colonialism may sometimes fall into this trap. They may feel as if it is necessary to deny that colonialism ever brought any benefits—which, as Gilley points out, even Chinua Achebe doesn’t think. Instead, it’s important to point out that building power lines and opening a school doesn’t provide one with a license to rob and murder people."
i find this point entirely unconvincing because it's replacing the marxist perspective, oriented to investigating distributive norms within modes of production, with a vague utilitarian calculus of wellbeing. which is entirely unsatisfying when discussing these subjects because it ends up implying that such power lines and schools are merely coincident to robbing and murder. that is, those schools and powerlines are the products of the redistributed surplus of such theft and murder, the idea that they can be analysed as objects separate from the conditions of their existence is an abstraction that i don't think is useful at all
further, it's not entirely self-evident that abstractions of objects of infrastructure from the patterns of their distribution is useful either. in the sense that the infrastructure of colonialism was developed specifically to optimise the conditions of colonial extraction. while the development of modern utilities in urban centres, a distribution of surplus to allow the development of a local petit-bourgeoisie etc. was clearly in the material interest of those who benefited from it, did these not come at the expense of further immiseration of sites and classes whose material investment did not provide such optimisation? how do you compare a road in new delhi to the intensification of sharecropping in kerala?
this of course gets even more ambiguous when dealing with education in particular. this line of thought ends up in a utilitarian calculus where you try and weigh up the benefits of teaching algebra against the blights of engendered anti-blackness or whatever. which i don't think is even possible to meaningfully do, let alone very useful if it was
"Gilley’s method of defending colonialism is through 'cost-benefit analysis,” in which the harms of colonialism are weighed against the “improvements in living conditions” and better governance....We should observe here that this is a terrible way of evaluating colonialism. It is favored by colonialism’s apologists because it means that truly unspeakable harms can simply be “outweighed” and thereby trivialized. We can see quickly how ludicrous this is: “Yes, we may have indiscriminately massacred 500 children, but we also opened a clinic that vaccinated enough children to save 501 lives, therefore ‘the case for colonialism is strong.’” We don’t allow murderers to produce defenses like this, for good reason: you can’t get away with saying “Yes, I killed my wife, but I’m also a fireman.” We must also be careful about using hypothetical counterfactuals: examining whether colonialism is “better than what would have happened in its absence.” I’m reading Great Expectations at the moment, and so I’ll call this the “Pip’s sister defense”: Pip’s sister justifies her cruelty and physical abuse by constantly reminding Pip that if it were not for her, he would be in an even worse situation. It’s an argument frequently deployed by abusive and exploitative individuals in order to justify their acts. And the point is that whether or not it’s true is immaterial to the evaluation of the person’s crimes."
blinkandwheeze posted:it's not that they can't, it's that doing so is an abstraction that doesn't provide any value. tabulating numbers of electric pylons tells us almost nothing about anything when divorced from an understanding of the conditions of their production. i think it inevitably leads to vulgar utilitarian calculus because that's really the only available place for such information
If they can't be usefully separated, in your view, then there is no intrinsic reason why the concrete fusion of the good and the bad can't be evaluated positively rather than negatively, if cheering or booing is supposed to be our only options when faced with history.
blinkandwheeze posted:it's not that they can't, it's that doing so is an abstraction that doesn't provide any value. tabulating numbers of electric pylons tells us almost nothing about anything when divorced from an understanding of the conditions of their production. i think it inevitably leads to vulgar utilitarian calculus because that's really the only available place for such information
i think you will find that most colonized peoples are actually able to articulate a fairly nuanced view of their own colonization perfectly fine without falling into such traps
Edited by blinkandwheeze ()
RedMaistre posted:If they can't be usefully separated, in your view, then there is no intrinsic reason why the concrete fusion of the good and the bad can't be evaluated positively rather than negatively, if cheering or booing is supposed to be our only options when faced with history.
of course i don't think there's an intrinsic reason why anything should be evaluated positively or negatively, those evaluations should be dependent on the particular contexts and historical/theoretical positions of national liberation movements. in the majority of cases i think the articulation of colonialism in regards to the perspective of national liberation leads to the negative
Edited by RedMaistre ()
Edited by RedMaistre ()
RedMaistre posted:I was not describing the anticolonial discourse represented by people like Mao has Manichean.
i didn't think you were. but my point is that i don't know how you can distinguish them from the other tendencies you do identify as such. mao unambiguously presents a necessarily either/or presentation of politics, as do many significant anticolonial thinkers
i of course agree with all your criticisms of gilley but you're clearly not just arguing against the straw man he invokes, or you wouldn't consider it a broader phenomenon worth addressing and invoke the currentaffairs article that states that this is a lapse even the most committed anticolonial figures can be close to
There is a difference between acknowledging the insights that can arise from praxis and uncritically believing in rhetoric.
RedMaistre posted:There is a difference between acknowledging the insights that can arise from praxis and uncritically believing in rhetoric.
Imo the general tendency of identifying the theoretical output of such movements as being governed simply by rhetorical expediency is just chauvinism, an excuse to not take these thinkers as seriously as more academically situated counterparts. this is especially the case regarding figures like a mao or a cabral who insisted on the necessity of political rhetoric directly reflecting advanced theoretical understanding. there is no heuristic in the works of these thinkers themselves to distinguish rhetoric based on expedience against that which is a genuine reflection of higher level analysis (if this distinction even exists) so these arguments require deferring to some external authority
and this isn't necessarily the case with you but this almost always seems to lead to a deferral to proximity to western academic orthodoxy on these questions. i see the fact that i am not in the partisan position of a mao or a castro is an argument for taking their works as seriously as possible, not the opposite
The distinction between scholarship and politics, between theory and praxis, should not be collapsed if we want knowledge that reflects about power as opposed to being merely its auxiliary. Just because a specific politician does their best to bridge the divide between these different modes does not mean that everyone else has to take their attempt as definitive now and for all time.
Edited by RedMaistre ()
Edited by RedMaistre ()
RedMaistre posted:I am not saying that the productions of Cabral et al are simply expressions of expediency. Rather, I'm pointing out that partisan interest and rhetoric are at work in all political discourse.
i don't understand the distinction you're making, sorry. what is the compromise of higher theoretical principles out of partisan interest but an expression of expediency?
i don't really see your argument that the words of statesmen should be necessarily definitive now and for all time as an argument, it's just a truism. i'm arguing that it's the best we have, not inscribing infallibility. identifying the possibility of insufficiency doesn't really say anything convincing to me. of course it's possible, but what heuristic are you deferring to that illuminates such shortcomings and what justifies that deferral? where does it succeed where others fail? how does it help us to distinguish what is mere rhetoric and what is consistent with higher theoretic principles?
RedMaistre posted:Taking Robespierre's speeches as the last word on understanding the French Revolution would be a horrible way to write a history of that epoch.
but this argument confuses historical accountancy for theoretical modes of analysis. it would be reasonable that mao's theoretical output is the necessary lens for examining this epoch but insufficient for providing a rigorous historical account, because mao wasn't a historian. i also think this ignores that marxism is in a unique position of developing the theoretical product of practical effort - these figures are not simply one among many next to the likes of robespierre
Obviously it needs to be updated with the knowledge that the 70s movements both in the first and third world were in important ways successful. As Eve Chiapello and Luc Boltanski in The New Spirit of Capitalism point out, neoliberalism and post-fordist silicon valley ideology came out of May 68 and the 60s leftist critique of capitalist alienation, not in opposition to it. This has a material basis in the other victory of the third world to develop the productive forces. Unlike the imperialism of the 70s in which cheap raw materials are exported for assembly by the "working class" of the first world (leading to the labor aristocracy thesis through bribery the Blekingegade espoused), now production is done entirely in the third world for low wages while only planning and consumption is done in the first by a vast population of "ideas men" and those who provide them services. Unfortunately that development only meant that value transfer happens in production rather than export, but this is a great victory as the conditions for socialism already exist in these nations and the most advanced production goes from third to first. No more confusion about the character of the first world working class, it doesn't even exist except as managers of capitalist competition in the third world and the greatest attempt at import substitution industrialization in world history in China.
Everyone here knows this, the point is that the former revolutionaries see themselves as mistaken and too committed to orthodox Leninism (spurred on by Kuhn), but the opposite is true. Just like Marx saw the development of world capitalism when it was a tiny speck on the globe and Lenin saw monopoly capitalist imperialism when it only consisted of a few corporations that Apple and Nike laugh at, they saw the beginning of what is now undeniable: the division of the world into a global proletariat in the oppressed nations ruled by an aristocratic first world population of relatively decreasing size. They point out that opening a coffee shop to raise funds was "too early" but that really describes all the great communist movements including theirs, only now is the world ready for a mass confrontation of the third world against the first. Maybe that's too optimistic but they go into the isolation they faced and how they didn't really have politics at all compared to the other urban guerrilla movements and new left parties, now I think anti-imperialism rather than organizing the "working class" is the norm rather than the exception on the left (in deed rather than word perhaps, no one actually sends party cadre into West Virginia coal mines anymore while everyone is trying to hitch a ride on black lives matter). Just a shame Eastern Europe and the USSR ended up as casualties and were reabsorbed into the third world.
Edited by babyhueypnewton ()
The word "compromise" implies that I think Mao and co were "intentionally" muddying principals for practical gain, an accusation which is not necessary for my case. Further, I don't think expediency is such a dirty thing that it is incompatible with having theoretical insights. I am not arguing that we in the present have nothing to learn from Mao.
I think politicians should be understood to be like lawyers in so far as it should always be acknowledged that they are working on behalf of clients. They can still articulate certain truths, but they always have an interest which goes above and beyond a theoretical interest in accuracy.
i don't really see your argument that the words of statesmen should be necessarily definitive now and for all time as an argument, it's just a truism.i'm arguing that its the best we have, not inscribing infallibility.
Fortunately for the work of writing history, we often have access to more information than is present in words of politicians. Even when we don't, we can compare the variety of different views expressed by those involved with politics and interrogate the silences of individuals in order to arrive at a more complete picture. It's never the case that we have to stop at anyone's self presentation.
but what heuristic are you deferring to that illuminates such shortcomings and what justifies that deferral?
Any sufficiently dialectical approach to the past will treat all voices, including that of the Maos of this world, as individually being merely partial perspectives on the truth that is only accessible through ever more thorough approximations of totality. Doing otherwise would be like interpreting King Lear or Hamlet by only reading one character's lines and ignoring everyone else's.
but this argument confuses historical accountancy for theoretical modes of analysis.
I refuse to cede that history is merely a matter of accountancy. It would be abdication of responsibility on the part of scholars to pretend they have nothing to say regarding theory.
mao wasn't a historian.
That's the substance of my argument. His discourse should neither be judged by the standards of a historical analysis or be treated as a final criteria by which the work of historians must be held accountable to.
Thankfully, it should be pointed out, we both agree to the possibility of the insufficiency of Mao's words, though evidently we draw different conclusions from this fact.