While Albert Bergesen has a point re I Wallerstein's post wrt Arab,
Chinese, Indian civilizations being immune to the toxin of capitalism, it
seems to me that he misses the main thrust of the post -- Eurocentric
anti-Eurocentrism -- as well as the question-begging, if not worse, that
such anti-Eurocentrism entails.
True, I Wallerstein's suggestion of some kind of immunity puts us
(non-Europeans) in a position of absolute difference (and hence might be
considered "orientalist" in some sense), the other view would deny any
difference (hence, equally "orientalist"). Wallerstein's suggestion of an
immunity would, in the light of Europe's onslaught, only serve to show up
the tremendous weakness of that immunity, if it existed -- the ease and
speed with which the core values of capitalism (in literary form,
Shakespeare's portrayal of money in the Merchant of Venice, I believe)
undermines other value systems and social relations is nothing short of
shocking.
Marx's great insight was to acknowledge the difference of the non-European
orders (if sometimes in highly distasteful fashion), yet recognize: (i) the
greatly different order that Europe had arrived at in the course of the
16-18 C, (ii) its great power to re-shape all others, and (iii) its
positive and negative features, which could not be teased apart, but were
fatally imbricated (much like Goethe's recognition of modernity as a pact
with the devil).
In this, pace I Wallerstein's reference to Prime Minister Mahathir of
Malaysia, Marx at least recognized that it is not so easy, if not
impossible, to disentangle the technological and other achievements of
modernization from the value system in which it is embedded. Marx's belief
in the possibility of a revolution as a means by which such a re-embedding
could be forged is, in the light of the experience of the last 70 years,
somewhat in doubt.
Re Wallerstein's proposal that the starting point is a negative valuation
of capitalism/modernity -- if that serves to put a stop to work of the "we
could have done it too, if only you hadn't come and buggered us up", then
it would have served a useful function. We (speaking, presumptiously, for
the non-European) had much to be proud, and equally, to be ashamed of and
we have to come to terms with our own history not in terms of whether we
can achieve what Europe has (as symbolized by Prime Minister Mahathir's
pride in the Malaysian attempt to scale Mt Everest - the symbol of man's
conquest and triumph over nature, or demonstrations by some Muslim
intellectuals that European medicine and science drew much, if not all,
from the medical and scientific knowledge of Muslim societies) -- that
still situates Europe as the yardstick. But I'm not sure we know any more
what other terms of assessment there could be, having been imbued by the
notions of modernity from which, I think, there can be no turning back.
Pace A Bergessen, and at the risk of being pedantic, it is surely
inaccurate to suggest that "the moral evaluation of the euro difference
also remains as it was with Marx -- negative, capitalism having done less
rather than more good". I think any balanced reading of Marx would come to
something like the opposite conclusion, i.e. that in the beginning
capitalism did bring more rather than less good, but that subsequently it
becomes an obstacle to the attainment of even greater good, then becoming a
negative force.
Pace the discussion, Bergessen is, I think, partially mistaken in believing
that what is needed is "some sort of theoretic reformulation or
breakthrough." The problem, it seems to me, is insufficient attention to
detail. The fact of porcelain production for export, of land for sale and
rent, of accumulation of wealth, without equal attention to the value
systems and orders in which such activities were embedded, can and will
always lead to overly facile conclusions deriving from some paradigmatic
assumptions about the nature of the world, European and non-European. Work
on grand histories, admirable and awe-some as such work often is, does not
allow the attention to detail of close-up micro-studies. And such
micro-studies are often lacking for whole segments of the non-European
world, partly because of the manner in which non-European source materials
are often treated, e.g. when such source materials tell of wondrous tales
and the existence of creatures and events that the modern European cannot
believe in, the European looks to interpret those texts in some other way
when perhaps those tales and creatures and events are real to the
non-European orders from which they derive and tell us plenty about the
situating of other, dare one say, more purely economic activities.
Finally, with no desire/felt need to defend Marx or Weber, surely their
views, on matters empirical, were somewhat more complex than the
dichotomous schemes that Bergessen suggests. Specifically, Weber's
dichotomies were surely conceptual constructs which never applied in toto
in specific empirical contexts except in some kind of more or less, rather
than absolute, fashion. Thus, all social orders surely had to have some
degree of instrumental logic -- the necessity to survive would see to it --
but not all would carry that to its ultimate (as European societies would
pride themselves on doing, although even they don't quite achieve that in
absolute fashion -- friendship being an instance, unless one is cynical
enough to deny the existence of genuine friendship). So also, it is
somewhat misleading to pose the asiatic mode vs capitalism as proof of
Marx's dichotomous thinking rather than to see in it an attempt to deal
with what must have been for him somewhat puzzling differences between
European feudalism or slavery and the social orders existing in India or
China. He may have been wrong -- should that be surprising -- but the
recognition is/was of value. Latter day marxists were indeed guilty of a
eurocentrism in attempting to assimilate all social orders to that
described for Europe.
Khay Jin