From: Rakesh Bhandari (bhandari@BERKELEY.EDU)
Date: Wed Oct 26 2005 - 03:52:03 EDT
I have gone over some of this terrain in a yet unpublished piece. I think Marx's writings are more complicated than Hobson understands, however. I also would not have highlighted the importance of CLR James' work for a rethinking of the Asiatic Mode of Production. But I submit this to this list because my experience is that this is a corrective and challenge to deepy held assumptions of many so called Western marxists. rb John M. Hobson Deconstructing Rosenberg’s ‘Contribution to the Critique of Global Political Economy’ 374 International Politics 2005 42 Revealing the Eurocentrism of classical Marxism Eurocentrism or Orientalism (Said, 1978) had emerged in Europe by the 19th century. It is a discourse that places Europe at the centre of progressive world (dare I say ‘global’?) history-past, present and future. Ultimately, Eurocentric thinkers made two critical intellectual moves. First, they constructed a ‘line of civilizational-apartheid’ that prised apart the East and West into two separate and self-constituting entities that stood in opposition. Second, Europe was privileged as a superior civilization imbued with exceptional, progressive properties that made inevitable its rise to modern capitalism. Inter alia, these included the liberal state (and, for Marx, dialectical class struggle). This fabrication was then extrapolated back in time to Ancient Greece, thereby constructing a new ‘Aryan’ picture of a permanently superior, self-constituting Europe (Bernal, 1991). Conversely, being imbued only with regressive properties — most notably Oriental despotisms — unchanging social structures, stagnation and slavery were (re)presented as the tragic story of the ‘history-less’ East. The upshot was the Eurocentric fabrication of an immanent logic to the rise of Western capitalist civilization, wherein the story could be narrated as an endogenous linear progression or unfolding of events and sequential processes that occurred solely within Europe, beginning with Ancient Greece. Conversely, the East could not progress of its own accord and was thereby stripped of (progressive) history. Hence, it became the duty of the West — charged with an Occidental Messianism and fuelled by the ‘moral obligation’ of the White Man’s Burden – to launch an imperial civilizing mission that would deliver the East from the dark ghetto of poverty and despair to the bright dawn of (Western) history. In this way then, the West is elevated into a Eurocentric fetish that needs to be deconstructed. Unfortunately, to paraphrase Rosenberg, instead of interpreting and deconstructing the Eurocentric spirit of the age, Marx amplified it by endogenizing it within his own theory. How so? Strangely, Marx had less to say about imperialism than our popular imagination would suppose, and it was contained (though not exclusively) in numerous pamphlets and newspaper articles published mainly between 1848 and 1862. In many of these, he insisted that the East has had no (progressive) history. To wit: China was a ‘rotting semicivilizationy. vegetating in the teeth of time’ (in Avineri, 1969, 184, 343). Thus, China’s only hope for progressive emancipation or redemption lay with the Opium Wars and the incursion of British imperial capitalists who would ‘open up backward’ China to the energizing impulse of Western capitalism (in Avineri, 1969, 442–444). The picture of India was similarly disfigured through this Orientalist lens (e.g., Avineri, 1969, 132–133; Marx, 1973, 306–307, 320). The general formula, of course, found its famous expression in The Communist Manifesto, where we are told that the Western bourgeoisie compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the [Western] bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, ie., to become [Western] themselves. In one word, it [the Western bourgeoisie] creates a world after its own image (Marx and Engels, 1985, 84). In this way, the Eurocentric/Orientalist story of imperialism — as a Western civilizing mission — found one of its clearest expressions. But, more significantly, Marx’s dismissal of the East was found at the very heart of his theory of capitalism developed in Capital and elsewhere. The East was monolithically represented by the (residual) category of the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ in which private property and hence class struggle — the developmental motor of historical progress — was notably absent. The key here was the Eurocentric theory of Oriental despotism. Thus, in Asia, ‘the direct producersy [are] under direct subordination to a state which stands over them as their landlordy. [Accordingly] no private ownership of land exists’ (Marx, 1959, 791, 333–334; 1954, 140, 316, 337–339). Thus, stagnation was inscribed or written into this publicly owned land system because rents were extracted from the producers in the form of ‘taxes wrung from them — frequently by means of torture — by a ruthless despotic state’ (Marx, 1959, 726). Thus, it was the absorption of, and hence failure to produce, a surplus for reinvestment in the economy that ‘supplies the key to the secret of the unchangeableness of Asiatic societies’ (Marx, 1954, 338). This scenario was fundamentally contrasted with the European state, which did not stand above society but was firmly embedded within, and acted on behalf of, the dominant economic class. Also, in allowing a space for Western capitalists to accumulate a surplus through the exploitation of labour power, Marx reveals the key to the secret of the unique or exceptional dynamism of Western societies. Finally, Marx’s theory of history faithfully reproduces the Orientalist/ Eurocentric teleological story. For example, in The German Ideology, Marx traces the origins of ‘progressive history’ back to Ancient Greece, and then recounts the story of progress forwards through a linear succession of various European modes of production before culminating at the communist terminus of history (Marx, 1965). At no point does the East actively contribute to the story. All in all, then, Marx makes the mistake of elevating the West into a Eurocentric fetish and, albeit in different ways, much the same is true for most of his many followers — ranging from Brenner and Hobsbawm to Wallerstein and even Braudel. Of course, the Eurocentrism of classical and neo-Marxism does not necessarily render the theory obsolete, for much of it remains useful and often insightful. It is true that, albeit a handful of, Marxists have recognized this problem and have sought to rectify it in various ways — for example, Perry Anderson and, most brilliantly of all, C.L.R. James, Eric Williams and Eric Wolf. Interestingly, James at one time associated with Trotskyism, though he later turned his back on it. Moreover, Alex Callinicos sees in some of James’ work a potential non-Eurocentric cue for Trotsky’s approach (Callinicos, 1990, 62–66). Accordingly, I shall return to this vital issue later. But, for the moment, I simply note that the non-Eurocentric promise of these pioneering neo- Marxist explorations (with the latter three in particular inspiring my own research) cannot detract from the point that Marx’s theory remains trapped within a Eurocentric cul-de-sac. Thus, I see little pay-off in Rosenberg’s passionate call for replacing LGT with classical Marxism, for all it does is substitute one version of Eurocentrism for another. An alternative non-Eurocentric conjunctural method: Eastern/global origins of Western capitalism In seemingly throwing out the global baby with the liberal bathwater, Rosenberg fails — in this article but not necessarily elsewhere (as we shall see later) — to recognize the emergence of Western capitalism as, in large part, a conjunctural phenomenon. I agree with him that modern globalization is an expression of long-term historical transnational capitalism. But, in contrast to Rosenberg and LGT, I see the latter as stemming back to about 500, thereby confounding the conflation of globalization with modern Western hegemony. This reveals ‘Oriental globalization’ and the existence of a global economy that was built and reproduced by numerous pioneering Eastern agents between 500 and 1800 (see Hobson, 2004, Chapters 2–4). Whether this global economy was capitalist in a Marxist sense is beside the point. For its ultimate significance was that it was along its sinews that Eastern ‘resource portfolios’ (ideas, institutions and technologies) diffused through Oriental globalization to fuel the rise of Western civilization. This also demonstrates the considerable ‘impact’ propensity of Oriental globalization, thereby meeting LGT’s essential test of globalization (Held et al., 1999). And it is from this ‘bridge of the world’ that we can deconstruct Marx’s Eurocentric fetish of Western capitalism and LGT’s Eurocentric fetish of globalization to thereby reconstruct an alternative account. Owing to the whip of external spatial compression, I shall undertake a whirlwind tour of some of the major turning points in the rise of the West to illustrate my point (see Hobson, 2004, Chapters 5–9). Most of the vital technologies that promoted European feudalism were transmitted from the East. Almost all of the financial institutions that the Italians unjustly became famous for originated in, and diffused across from, West Asia. There would have been no Italian commercial revolution without the Eastern trade that flowed into Europe via West Asia and Egypt. Nor would there have been a Renaissance without the assimilation of Chinese, Indian, Jewish, African, but above all, Islamic ideas. All of the critical trans-oceanic nautical and navigational techniques/technologies that made the so-called European Voyages of Discovery possible diffused across from Islamic West Asia and China, in the absence of which the Iberians would surely have remained confined to the Islamic Mediterranean. The European military revolution (1550–1660) was the beneficiary of the Chinese military revolution of 850–1290. Last, but not the least, British industrializa- tion and the European Enlightenment were significantly fuelled by the assimilation of Chinese technologies, methods and ideas that, like all the aforementioned Eastern portfolios, diffused across through Oriental globalization. None of this is to say that Western capitalism was the pure product of Eastern forces, since it was also enabled initially by a Christianized Eurocentric imperialist agency after 1492, and subsequently by the racist agency of European imperialists after 1780 (Hobson, 2004, 162–173, 219–242, 257–277, 305–312). But even then, Eastern resources — land, labour, bullion, raw materials and markets — played a vital role. Finally, I note that it was only during the 19th century that Britain eclipsed China. In sum, then, with the current centre of global-productive gravity seemingly returning to China, contra Marx and LGT, we can now contextualize Western capitalism and ‘Western globalization’ as a late and relatively brief (albeit not insignificant) interlude in the long Afro-Asian global durée that began around 500. The upshot is to recognize that the line of civilizational-apartheid which separates East from West is but a pure Eurocentric intellectual construct that is in urgent need of deconstruction. In the process, this reveals modern globalization and Western capitalism as significant conjunctural expressions of Eastern forces, thereby suggesting that the West is not a pure and self- constituting entity, but an ‘amalgam’ or hybrid formation, reflected in my preferred label — the ‘Oriental West’. Eurocentrism in Trotskyism: non-Eurocentrism in Rosenberg’s approach and its implications for globalization and classical Marxist integrity? In returning to the issue of Eurocentrism in Trotskyism that was signalled earlier, we reach the critical climax. First to Trotsky’s work. While Trotsky followed much of what Marx wrote, he also departed from him in various ways. Notable are his twin claims that historical stages can be skipped (or combined simultaneously), and that Western capitalists do not create a world precisely in their own image because ‘non-Western’ states combine external capitalism with indigenous traditions (e.g., Trotsky, 1965). Both these aspects form the familiar double meaning of ‘combined and uneven development’. Moreover, taking Marx’s occasional comments on Ireland in new directions, Trotsky argued that revolution in a backward Eastern country could promote revolution in the West. But, in Trotsky’s work, this promising non-Eurocentric departure ultimately stalls on the runway because progressive development in the East is made possible in the first instance only by the imperial arrival of Western capitalism, thereby returning us squarely to Marx. Moreover, his occasional statements on Western capitalist development converge with the Eurocentric accounts of Marx and Weber (cf. Trotsky, 1965, Chapter 1; 1973, Chapter 4; Hobson, 2004, 12–19). Concomitantly, whenever Trotsky discussed Asiatic states/ societies, it was always implicitly filtered through the Eurocentric lens of the theory of Oriental despotism. Also, given that Trotsky failed to develop his own historical–sociological analysis of the world prior to the onset of European industrialization, we can only assume, therefore, that he follows the standard classical Marxist historiography upto that temporal moment (cf. Knei-Paz, 1978, 94–96, 328–331). Accordingly, as in Marx’s Eurocentrism, prior to then the East is caught in a ‘pre-historical’ cul-de-sac, while thereafter Eastern history begins, though only — and this entails yet another Eurocentric signifier — by ‘emulating’ the Western powers. But when confronting this issue in Rosenberg’s work, it is necessary to examine a recent unpublished paper in which he advocates a Trotskyist manifesto for the historical sociology of IR (Rosenberg, 2005), for here the Eurocentric charge is far less clear-cut. In this piece, Rosenberg creatively fills in the missing dimension of Trotsky’s work by analysing the pre-1800 world through applying the concept of ‘uneven and combined development’. Inter alia, he produces a powerful historical account of Russian development — significantly borrowing much from Eric Wolf — in which he reveals it as considerably propelled by ‘external’ forces, many of which are ‘Eastern’. Thus, it would appear that my own analysis of Western Europe (sketched out in the last section) finds echoes in Rosenberg’s account of East European Russia. Accordingly, the central twin questions now become: would Rosenberg be prepared to do for Western Europe that which he has done so powerfully for Russia? If so, he would enter the gateway into a non-Eurocentric universe. This begs the second question: if so, what are its implications for his rejection of globalization and the maintenance of classical Marxist integrity? With respect to the first question, logically there would be a compelling reason to do so. Indeed, having discussed Russia, he rhetorically asks the question posed above: ‘what would the consequence be for social theory if — as is indeed surely the case — [the theory of uneven and combined development could be] applied not only to Russia, but to every known society?’ And his answer confirms that ‘[a]ny enduring society — if we ‘fast-forward’ the replay of its historical life in the way done for Russia above — reveals an equivalent interactive texture to its historical constitution’ (Rosenberg, 2005, 28). So there we have it. For while he does not provide such an analysis of Western Europe in this particular paper, it is surely immanent. But it is in answering the second question posed above wherein two critical paradoxes or conundrums emerge in the context of the immediate article under review. First, it requires him to accept, as do I, not only the presence and autonomy of global forces/globalization today but, contra LGT, to recognize their existence throughout the long period of the rise of the West dating back at least 1500 years. Paradoxically, this would entail a more temporally extensive and ‘thicker’ analysis of globalization than that provided by LGT. Second, in applying Trotsky’s concept to ‘global history’, which would necessarily include Western Europe, he is, at the very least, in danger of undermining the central pillars of Marx’s theory of history and the rise of capitalism. And so we arrive at the final conundrum. Would Rosenberg be prepared to accept the logical inference of his Trotskyist historical sociology by moving beyond not simply the spatial limitations of Marx’s own analysis, but also the very foundational pillars of Marx’s theory of (Western) capitalism, thereby accepting the significance and autonomy of (Eastern) global forces and globalization? But ultimately, whichever avenue or ‘combination’ of avenues Rosenberg chooses to take in response should not detract from the point that his approach is one that I find attractive. And, more importantly, it is one that surely deserves to take its place at the centre of the historical sociology of IR, if not of world history/sociology. Notes 1 I thank George Lawson for his pertinent advice, though this is not to implicate him in any errors made. 2 I note, but leave aside Rosenberg’s reversal of Trotsky’s ‘combined and uneven development’. References Avineri, S. (1969) Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization, New York: Anchor. Bernal, M. (1991) Black Athena, I, London: Vintage. Callinicos, A. (1990) Trotskyism, Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Held, D., McGrew, A., Goldblatt, D. and Perraton, J. (1999) Global Transformations, Cambridge: Polity. Hobson, J.M. (2004) The Eastern Origins of Western Civilisation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Knei-Paz, B. (1978) The Social and Political Thought of Leon Trotsky, Oxford: Clarendon. Marx, K. (1954) Capital, I, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K. (1959) Capital, III, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K. (1965) The German Ideology, London: Lawrence & Wishart. Marx, K. (1973) Surveys from Exile, London: Pelican. Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1985) The Communist Manifesto, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Rosenberg, J. (2005) ‘The Concept of Uneven and Combined Development’, Paper Presented at the ISA Conference, Hawaii. Said, E.W. (1978) Orientalism, London: Penguin. Trotsky, L. (1965) The History of the Russian Revolution, I, London: Sphere. Trotsky, L. (1969) Results and Prospects, New York: Merit. Trotsky, L. (1973) 1905, London: Pelican. John M. Hobson Deconstructing Rosenberg’s ‘Contribution to the Critique of Global Political Economy’ 380 International Politics 2005 42
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Oct 27 2005 - 00:00:03 EDT