Forwarded for comment and/or discussion from the Communist Manifesto-150 list (CM-150). FYI...Louis Proyect maintains this list.
(Andrew: Previous article excerpts by James Petras.....Petras is Professor of sociology at UNY-Binghampton)
-Carolyn-
The latest issue of New Left Review has an article by Immanuel Wallerstein
titled "Eurocentrism and Capitalist Development" that does not mention
Andre Gunder Frank by name, but unmistakably takes aim at the propositions
set forward by Frank in the article I have cross-posted to various lists
and which appeared originally on the Communist Manifesto mailing-list.
Wallerstein's article is divided into two parts. The first takes aim at
Eurocentrism and the second is a polemic against those views which
Wallerstein considers an overreaction to Eurocentrism.
Critics of Eurocentrism, according to Wallerstein, make 3 claims:
1) "...whatever it is that Europe did, other civilizations were in the
process of doing it, up to the moment that Europe used its geopolitical
power to interrupt the process in other parts of the world."
2) "...what Europe did is nothing more than a continuation of what others
had already been doing for a long time, with the Europeans temporarily
coming to the foreground."
3) "...what Europe did has been analyzed incorrectly and subjected to
inappropriate extrapolations, which have had dangerous consequences for
both science and the political world."
Wallerstein views the first two claims as suffering from 'anti-Eurocentric
Eurocentrism'.
The most interesting paragraphs in a most interesting article is
Wallerstein's terse and thought-provoking attempt to explain why capitalism
rooted itself in Europe as a dominant system:
"Let me be clear. I believe that, in all major historical
systems--'civilizations'--there has always been a certain degree of
commodification and hence of commercialization. As a consequence, there
have always been persons who sought profits in the market. But there is a
world of difference between a historical system in which there exist some
entrepreneurs or merchants or 'capitalists', and one in which the
capitalist ethos and practice is dominant. Prior to the modern
world-system, what happened in each of these other historical systems is
that whenever capitalist strata got too wealthy or too successful or too
intrusive on existing institutions, other institutional groups--cultural,
religious, military, political--attacked them, utilizing both their
substantial power and contain the profit-oriented strata. As a result,
these strata were frustrated in their attempts to impose their practices on
the historical system as a priority. They were often crudely stripped of
accumulated capital., and in any case, made to give obeisance to values and
practices that inhibited them. This is what I mean by the anti-toxins that
contained the virus.
"What happened in the Western world is that, for a set of reasons that were
momentary--or conjunctural, or accidental--the anti-toxins were less
available or less efficacious, and the virus spread rapidly, and then
proved itself invulnerable to later to later attempts at reversing its
effects. The European world-economy of the sixteenth century became
irremediably capitalist. And once capitalism consolidated itself in this
historical system, once this system was governed by the priority of the
ceaseless accumulation of capital, it acquired a kind of strength as
against other historical systems that enabled it to expand geographically
until it absorbed physically the entire globe, the first historical system
ever to achieve this kind of total expansion. The fact that capitalism had
this kind of breakthrough in the European arena, and then expanded to cover
the globe, does not mean that it was inevitable, or desirable, or in any
sense progressive. In my view, it was none of these. And an
anti-Eurocentric point of view must start by asserting this."
Now I have to confess that this world-system literature is pretty new to
me. I have read Janet Abu-Lughod's "Before European Hegemony: The World
System A.D. 1250-1350" and it is one of my favorites. Her discussion of the
prowess of the Chinese navy is something that I draw upon time and again. I
picked up all of Andre Gunder Frank's books at the MR office last month and
plan to get a hold of Wallerstein and Amin's works at some point. Frank's
books interest me because he is a Latin American expert and I want to
examine his empirical research into an area that I have had an activist
involvement with over the years. I also have Jim Blaut's "Colonizer's Model
of the World" on my bookshelf. Jim is a Marxism-International mailing-list
regular and I enjoy his posts, even when I disagree with them. Tom Kruse
urged me to look at Eric Wolf's "Europe and the People Without History" in
conjunction with research I am doing on the Incas. I find all this type of
literature very alluring since I hate racism. (I think that Eurocentrism is
an unfortunate euphemism for racism, by the way. Kipling was not a
"Eurocentrist"--he was a racist.)
My problem is that it does not seem to address the underlying issue of
*economic dynamics*. For example, Wallerstein speaks of the "capitalist
ethos and practice" as being in conflict with non-capitalist strata who had
hegemony. This is a peculiar formulation. Generally, I find it more useful
to retain something of the base-superstructure paradigm of Marxism, even
when one runs a risk of vulgarization. My general impression is that
changes in the mode of production account for modifications of "ethos". In
other words, as the city-states of Italy began to set up the prototypes of
the modern factory system, such practices encouraged a new attitude toward
nature, society and trade. The Cartesian revolution seems rooted in the
evolving mercantile transformation of Europe rather than the other way around.
Seen from this perspective, Marx retains a certain freshness, especially in
light of this passage from the Communist Manifesto:
"The feudal system of industry, in which industrial production was
monopolized by closed guilds, now no longer suffices for the growing wants
of the new markets. The manufacturing system took its place. The
guild-masters were pushed aside by the manufacturing middle class; division
of labor between the different corporate guilds vanished in the face of
division of labor in each single workshop.
"Meantime, the markets kept ever growing, the demand ever rising. Even
manufacturers no longer sufficed. Thereupon, steam and machinery
revolutionized industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by
the giant, MODERN INDUSTRY; the place of the industrial middle class by
industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the
modern bourgeois.
"Modern industry has established the world market, for which the discovery
of America paved the way. This market has given an immense development to
commerce, to navigation, to communication by land. This development has, in
turn, reacted on the extension of industry; and in proportion as industry,
commerce, navigation, railways extended, in the same proportion the
bourgeoisie developed, increased its capital, and pushed into the
background every class handed down from the Middle Ages.
"We see, therefore, how the modern bourgeoisie is itself the product of a
long course of development, of a series of revolutions in the modes of
production and of exchange."
Louis Proyect