Notes & Commentaries

Sectarianism and the Party

1st June 2009 by Matthijs Krul

If one thing is certain, it is that the only thing Communist parties are more known for than splitting is accusing each other of sectarianism.¹ In the ideological and petty rivalry laden environment of Communist politics, whether in the rich countries or in the poor, accusing each other of sectarianism is about as common a vehicle for settling old scores as accusations of embezzlement are for community groups and accusations of ‘ideology’ for centrist parties. Yet it would be a mistake to conclude from this that sectarianism does not exist, or is not legitimately a problem. The mere fact that a country like the United Kingdom, with a very small and weak left wing both politically and numerically, has easily 10-15 different Communist parties and groups should tell us all we need to know about the reality of sectarian divisions.

The easiest way to approach the issue of what sectarianism is and how Communist parties and groups can avoid it is simply by giving a few descriptions of sectarian practices and approaches. The most important and frequent one of these, which is essentially the general structure of all sectarianism, is making excessive ideological criteria for membership or participation in the Communist party involved. We know for a fact that Marx & Engels themselves never in the First International even required members to be ‘Marxists’, let alone to agree with them on every issue of analysis, but this lesson seems to have sadly been forgotten entirely. Members of the International in those days were not just those later described as Marxists, but also left-wing trade unionists, Lassalleans, Proudhonists, Bakuninists (despite Bakunin himself), and even followers of Auguste Comte! Its explicit purpose was to combat the division of the socialists into the many different sects and groupings, even if this meant that the ‘common denominator’ was a fairly thin one, limited to desiring the overthrow of capitalism. It is worth quoting Marx on this point:

“The International was founded in order to replace the socialist or semi-socialist sects by real organization of the working class for struggle… On the other hand, the International could not have maintained itself if the course of history had not already smashed sectarianism. The development of socialist sectarianism and that of the real labor movement always stand in reverse ratio to each other. So long as the sects are justified (historically), the working class is not yet ripe for an independent historical movement. As soon as it has attained this maturity all sects are essentially reactionary. For all that, what history exhibits everywhere was repeated in the history of the International. What is antiquated tries to reconstitute and assert itself within the newly acquired form.

And the history of the International was a continual struggle of the General Council against the sects and against amateur experiments, which sought to assert themselves within the International against the real movement of the working class.”²

But what do we see in practice today? The exact opposite. Endless numbers of people have been expelled or worked out of Communist parties on the basis of sectarian ideological principles. The only thing a Communist party needs to require of its members is that they support the overthrow of capitalism in whatever way best effects this. All other requirements are necessarily sectarian. It does not matter for Communism, which is after all the “real movement of the working class”, what position a member has on the ‘nature’ of the Soviet Union, on the guilt or innocence of Bukharin, on whether modern art is good or bad, on whether the Asiatic Mode of Production really existed or not, on whether the law of value means this or that, and so forth. All ideological demands of this kind serve only to divide, never to achieve progress. This can be seen by simply asking the question: what if the party leadership, or whoever is pushing the ideological point, were to get its way? If nothing material is changed in the here and now in political terms by even unanimity on a topic, then the topic is a sectarian ideological point. If everyone agreed now that Bukharin was guilty or Bukharin was innocent, this would not change the political state of the world one iota. Therefore, making requirements of this kind is inherently sectarian, and to be rejected.

Also sectarian is an approach which seeks to get people to become socialists of a certain stripe or sect above all else – any approach that attempts to achieve that workers or other socialist-minded people, or people who are desiring a ‘socialist education’, agree with certain programmatic principles or ideological points. Aside from explaining the horror of capitalism, which should be obvious in any case, and from explaining how only socialist revolution can rid us of it, which is a simple point of political logic, the goal in political terms should be to achieve political movement, that is, to get people to act. This can be in terms of activism, voting, organization, military rebellion, resistance, whatever is appropriate and relevant under the circumstances. That is not to say that ideological analysis, essays, and so forth are not useful or important – but their purpose can only ever be to serve as a guide to action, they can never be the goal of the movement. Again, we can quote Karl Marx very fruitfully, when he responded to the Eisenach program of the SPD and its Lassallean influences:

Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes. If, therefore, it was not possible – and the conditions of the item did not permit it – to go beyond the Eisenach programme, one should simply have concluded an agreement for action against the common enemy. But by drawing up a programme of principles (instead of postponing this until it has been prepared for by a considerable period of common activity) one sets up before the whole world landmarks by which it measures the level of the Party movement.³

In other words, the goal is always to achieve political improvement, political progress. Recognition of this does not equal reformism, since there the matter is that the reformists do not understand what political progress is in the final instance, but it does mean that action is better than platforms. Nothing against having platforms, but they may not be an excuse to exclude and reject either political activity or support from outside groups when those are aimed at overthrow of capitalism or creation of socialist relations, in whatever doctrinally flawed form.

What then if there are disagreements over seemingly major topics of political import? The obvious answer to this is not to have the party leadership decide, as this simply means that the position of the leadership prevails over the members and supporters without further debate or ado, which fails our criteria against sectarianism outlined above. Many parties for this reason, calling this approach ‘democratic centralism’, have decided that any programmatic question whatever must be put to a vote of the party congress, and once this vote has been held, it is binding on all members to support and voice it. This, too, is irreparably sectarian, and for several reasons. The first is that empirical evidence shows it does not work: the losing side tends to simply leave the party when they can, and start a doctrinally perfect microparty of their own. The result is that instead of one big party capable of action, we now have two small parties, each with virtually identical political goals, but a different ideological platform. This achieves absolutely nothing and only weakens and divides the Communist movement. Nobody who was not privy to the clash of egos involved will understand why there are now two parties and what it matters, and this will disinvite them from participation in either; and those who have taken part in the split either way will be wrapped up in their damaged egos, and tend to focus more on agitating against the other group than on actually achieving anything. Another reason is that it is utterly unnecessary for all members of a party, let alone its sympathizers and activists, to wholly agree with it on every point, or even every major point. The only demands that can be made, again, are those that are strictly necessary for the purpose of helping overthrow capitalism by political action. Agreement on all topics or even all major topics is not one of these demands.

What can be demanded are those things that enable a party or group to come to an understanding of the political situation at a given moment, the meaning of this in political-economic terms if necessary, and the steps to be taken following from the situation. These demands are: first, that there be as much possibility of open debate of principles as well as pragmatics in how they relate to the issue at hand as can be permitted under the circumstances (that is, if there is a situation of repression of Communist activity by the government, it may be necessary to make this debate take place in a limited form, or in secret, or outside the country, while the activists focus on first achieving the necessary liberties – this was the case in Lenin’s days when he wrote What is to be Done?). This implies also that anyone arguing against a party leadership, member, or position is not penalized for doing so, since this serves only to satisfy the egos of the party leaders involved, and harms the party by depriving it of possibly useful advice. Secondly, it can be demanded that a vote takes place on the issue of what concrete political steps are taken on the basis of the discussion, and only on the concrete political steps taken. Again, nobody is served in any way by having majority votes on questions of history, geography, economics, or any doctrine or ideology whatever, including but not limited to eternal wrangling about ‘true Marxism’ or the nature of the Soviet Union. The only thing that matters is what political moves are undertaken. These are of course themselves based on a certain political and ideological analysis, but by voting only on the practical points rather than the analysis itself, one avoids massive waste of time, bruising of intellectual egos, and ideological dogmatism. And this relates in turn to the third demand that can be made: when a decision is made on the political move to be undertaken, it can be demanded that the members and supporters do not sabotage it. Note that this does not mean that it can be demanded they take part: forcing people to assist moves against their political viewpoint and analysis demoralizes them, it causes friction during and after the political move itself, and they will not perform well. Rather, let the principle be one where those in agreement or willing to suspend disagreement will take part, and the others are only asked to not hinder it, which is simply a principle of comradely comity and having the losers of the vote also set their egos aside. These three demands can be made, and these three only. Even after a vote, a losing side is free to continue in whatever way to promote their viewpoint, as long as they do not materially hinder the acting out of the decision; after all, it may turn out that the majority has reason to reconsider.

How then are disagreements on doctrinal questions to be resolved, since they do always seem so important, and they do shape and construct the ideas on political moves to be made? Here again the answer has all too often been to create splinter parties, to make groups under the banner of perfect party platforms, and so forth. This is not the correct way, as explained above. Also not the correct way is that of so-called ‘entryism’, where an existing movement or group is taken over by others in order to move it. This is the exact opposite of what is desirable, since the point is not to create perfect platforms or even as many groups with perfect platforms as possible, but the goal is to achieve political movement against capitalism. Entryist tactics only destroy and divide existing movements without creating even the slightest impulse for new activity, and for this reason are the other side of the coin of splitting, and equally bad.

Correct is the approach that seeks, as always, to stimulate movement by propounding a particular political point of view or program. This is done not by creating a sectarian party with this as its demand for membership, nor is it done by forcing others to submit their own party to this cause, but this is done by creating a paper, internet website, forum for discussion, journal, newspaper column, or whatever means of communication are appropriate, in which the group that agrees on the platform sets out their views and principles, with the aim of stimulating both existing movements and prior nonactive readers to act on their ideas. In this way of acting, the platform and political views, important as they are, serve the goal of recruiting new socialists and improving the activity of existing ones, rather than serving the goal of creating true believers – in other words, the program serves movement, not the other way round. A good example of this approach done rightly can be seen in Lenin’s journal Iskra, in Marx & Engels’ works in newspapers such as the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, the Northern Star, and in our day for example in the work done by the ‘Maoist-Third Worldist’ internet collective “Monkey Smashes Heaven”⁴, or the attempts at creating an open platform for discussion in the United Kingdom by the Weekly Worker, although few of its contributors can get past sectarian infighting. Those who agree with the platform, or come to agree with its form of socialism after reading it, shall act on it in their own way, and those who disagree will either be able to respond with their own views, or even better, show the correctness of their cause by action. Political action serves as final arbiter of viewpoints, since it shows in practice which views, when acted upon, have which consequences. As mentioned, both within and without official parties it is therefore to be encouraged to hold political discussions through various appropriate fora, without there being any need to penalize disagreement, while all that can be demanded of party leadership and members alike are the three demands mentioned above. If egoism and pettiness, dogmatism and sectarianism are going to be problems, and the risk always exists in any political party (including those of the center and right), then that should be worked on by the members of the party among themselves, not just so an atmosphere of real comradeship may prevail, but also in the interests of the Communist movement itself. Remember: Communism is a movement, not a party. It works towards a political goal, not toward satisfying individual egos. It is the working class and its supporters recognizing their goals and acting towards it, it is not an infallible metaphysical system on all questions historical, philosophical, scientific and aesthetic.

1. This article is partially based on Hal Draper’s excellent article on the same topic. See: Hal Draper, “Toward a New Beginning – On Another Road” (1971). http://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1971/alt/index.htm . ->
2. Karl Marx, Letter to Friedrich Bolte (November 23, 1871). ->
3. Karl Marx, Letter to W. Bracke (May 5, 1875). ->
4. http://monkeysmashesheaven.wordpress.com .->

Barack Obama and Organizer Consciousness

21st May 2009 by Matthijs Krul

By now it is a familiar trope that Lenin is to have stated that the workers do not on their own achieve a Communist class consciousness, but cannot without intellectual input from the outside achieve anything but ‘trade union consciousness’. As he put it in What Is To Be Done?:

The history of all countries testifies that workers left exclusively to their own strength can cultivate only a trade union consciousness– that is the belief in the need to unite into a union, struggle against the bosses, press the government to pass needed labor legislation, etc. The doctrine of Socialism grew out of philosophic, historical, and economic theories which were worked out by the educated representatives of the propertied class, the intelligentsia.¹

If we accept the merits of this thesis, perhaps the same can be said of politicians. After all, in those countries that have the name of being democratic, politicians are generally accepted to represent their constituents, whoever those may be. Often those constituents are a great medley of different classes, sub-classes and interest groups, but that does not diminish the truth of this principle. This means in turn that the level at which their politicians operate depends also on the level of consciousness arrived at by their constituents; for example, in settler nations, white workers at a low level of consciousness vote for right-wing and racist politics, whereas at a high level of consciousness they vote for exclusivist social-democracy and reformism, the so-called ‘social fascism’. However, we may readily assume by analogy of the above thesis, which seems well-enough confirmed by historical experience, that the politicians operate at a higher level of consciousness in theoretical terms than their average constituency does (which is likely true even in tyrannies). After all, they are not only on the whole better educated and so forth, but also tend to be professionals with significant experience molding the stuff of politics – and politics itself is a great tester of theories and whittles many a blunt notion into a sharp understanding.

In countries like the United States, where politics is dominated by two great, if sometimes barely distinguishable, alliances of interest groups, lobbies and clientele, this principle is all the more relevant. With so many different groups being represented by the Mahayana of the Democratic Party, it is inevitable that those politicians which are not directly in the pockets of one or another interest or for parochial reasons (for example due to the district system) have one clear constituency, will have to juggle the different groups’ interests, play them against each other, and strive to obtain a certain ‘average’. In the cowardly American media, always ready to garner valuable attention by making great headlines out of minor political affairs but equally frightened of any challenge to the establishment upon which it is parasitic, the inherent ‘moderation’, ‘centrism’ and ‘stability’ of this function of the American system has been much praised. What has been less noticed however, besides the enormous resulting corruption and stock-jobbing, is the need for high-ranking American politicians and in particular the President to learn a strategy for managing politics beyond the actual interests of his constituents. This is in particular true for the Democratic Party politicians, since their party represents a much greater number of constituent groups and less defined ones at that, since more often than not the party functions as the party of non-reaction, much like the similarly named Democrats did on the continent in the days of 1848. The Republican Party is easily summed up by the interests of the military, industrial capital, the religious bigots, and certain threatened sections of the white petty bourgeoisie and white workers, but the Democratic Party represents ‘everyone else’, which makes great demands on the consciousness of the President and Congress in times when the pendulum swings in favor of the latter party.

Such a time is now, with the newly elected President Barack Obama having just finished his first 100 days in office, which in American political lore is considered an important milestone. Already he has earned the well-deserved ire of the progressive forces in the United States for his wavering, his reluctance to push through any of the greatly necessary social and economic reforms (from abolishing religious bigotry in the armed forces to uprooting the extortionist healthcare system), and his seeming lack of recognition of his strong historical position vis-à-vis the right. Yet it is too early to support declaring him the black incarnation of Andrew Johnson, since many of his critics do not yet seem to understand what his consciousness is and where it comes from, unlike in the case of the latter.

In Barack Obama’s case, much can be learned about his political consciousness from his background as a professional agitator in Chicago, which in the usual sugary euphemisms of American parlance is called a ‘community organizer’. In this work, Obama has been much influenced by the great paradigmatic figure of community organizing, Saul Alinsky. Alinsky’s approach to political activism has been laid down in his standardwork Rules for Radicals, which he published in 1971, one year before his death.² In this book, we find the prescriptions that Obama is still taking to heart and which infuriate the American left wing, especially its more impatient and skeptical segments. Obama, for example, always prefers using the rhetoric of ‘trusted American values’ rather than the rhetoric of challenge to establishment (other than the political core in Washington, which is a poorly disguised way of rejecting the other party only), as he describes in his political statement and autobiography, The Audacity of Hope.³ In this book, Obama describes how he tired of being on the left-wing, arguing against imperialism, and desired to reconnect to ‘the values of my grandparents’, and so on and so forth. Whereas this does no wonders for anyone’s impression of his political courage and constancy, his ardent desire to drape any real desire for political reform he may have in the colors of the American flag is quite like Alinsky’s commentary on a similar note:

Even the most elementary grasp of the fundamental idea that one communicates with the experience of his audience – and gives full respect to the other’s values – would rule out attacks on the American flag. The responsible organizer would have known that it is the establishment that has betrayed the flag while the flag, itself, remains the glorious symbol of America’s hopes and aspirations.⁴

It is not immediately clear whether we are to believe that Alinsky truly subscribed to this patriotic showmanship or merely had a cynical impression of his fellow citizens, but in any case this well describes the patriotic timidity of the Obama administration. Even when they have all the cards in their hand, as they do now, the Democratic Party is always deadly afraid of the patriotism trump being played against them, because they know that even the workers of an empire such as the American one are bound to see their own strength as being bound up with the strength of its patriotic institutions. Alinsky’s emphasis on “working within the system”, on the sequence of organization-reformation-revolution (which he understands in a very broad sense indeed) fits precisely the mold of the professional organizer of communities, one who is striving to build up power out of weakness and who has little political material to work with.⁵

That is not to say that this organizer’s consciousness is of itself problematic; on the contrary, it is of the greatest use for any political party or movement, especially the Communists, to have people capable of grasping a political situation, to work within that situation to organize power, and to not let themselves be baited either by authorities or by impatience into adventurism and posturing. Obama, however, shows that within the Democratic Party, especially the supposed ‘left wing’ to which he was said to belong (much was made of this during the campaign by his opponents, who thereby revealed their incompetence at measuring from which side the wind was blowing), is not capable of transcending this organizer consciousness. Even when in an exceedingly strong position, they are unable to make any decisive moves or reforms. They are essentially a political equivalent of the trade union consciousness: forever trying to make inroads against a system which by their very attempts at doing so they strengthen, because they play within their bounds and are not capable of challenging the rules of the game itself. Only when those rules themselves are fundamentally challenged does change, Obama’s campaign theme, truly become possible, but the Democratic Party cannot do this without destroying the system of spoil-sharing with the Republican Party. Therefore, if Obama is to become a transformer of American politics, he must first transform his party’s consciousness, and this he cannot do.

1. See: V.I. Ulyanov (Lenin), “What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement”, in: Collected Works (Moscow 1961), Vol. V, p. 347-530.->
2. Saul Alinsky, Rules for Radicals (New York, NY 1971).->
3. Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York, NY 2006).->
4. Alinsky, p. xviii.->
5. Alinsky, p. xxi.->

Twilight of the Ex-Marxists

3rd May 2009 by Matthijs Krul

It seems that it is much better for the readability of one’s work as well as the sense of one’s political judgement to either be a Marxist and stay one, or never to become one in the first place: ex-Marxists tend to combine the worst of both worlds. What defines the ex-Marxist’s clichéd and rigid worldview? His own overwhelming sense of superiority. The ex-Marxist feels that he is the conscience of the intellectual world, because he has joined the Devil and left him again, and therefore best knows his sly tricks. But more than that, his sense of superiority demands that he always assume that when he was a Marxist, everyone should have been a Marxist and it was ‘logical’ to do so, and that when he left Marxism, everyone should have left Marxism, and it is criminal not to have done so. His intellectual trajectory was not just the best one, but also the only intellectually possible one, and everyone who does not follow this pattern must be either evil or deluded, a flaw that is best pointed out by amateur psychoanalysis undertaken on the person involved.

A great example of this can be found in the person of the historian Tony Judt, who has an obvious (and deserved) admiration for the great Communist historian and countryman Eric Hobsbawm, but cannot for the life of him figure out why someone so obviously competent has not, too, become an ex-Marxist; therefore, in an essay on him in the New York Review of Books, Judt spent the better part of it trying to find out what hidden delusion drives Hobsbawm to not acknowledge the Light of ex-Marxism, much like Catholics used to try and figure out what devilry possessed the nonbelievers.¹ Nothing is more comical therefore that when he refers to Hobsbawm’s clear distaste for the pretenses of professional ex-Marxists (“there are certain clubs I do not wish to be a member of”), Judt states that by taking this position, Hobsbawm has “provincialized himself”. Indeed! Nothing of course is as ‘provincial’ as Communism, which has operated and inspired people worldwide for over 150 years and has brought revolutions everywhere from Cuba to China and from Ethiopia to Russia, for better or for worse; whereas we are then left to assume that the arrogant but contentless ex-Marxist liberalism of Tony Judt c.s. is the very height of international prestige. It is no surprise then that Judt himself is left in his essay collection Reappraisals² incomprehendingly wondering why the Americans won’t have a nicer foreign policy and why such valiant anti-Communist warriors like Adam Michnik have suddenly become right-wing warmongerers.

What is more, however, is the enormous capacity for hypocrisy that is granted to the ex-Marxist once he has put himself on his intellectual pedestal. He accuses Marxists of being ideological, because they never seem to doubt, which is after all since Descartes the highest virtue of the intellectual; but when a Marxist does doubt, this indicates the futility and incorrectness of the enterprise to begin with. Moreover, the ex-Marxist himself doubts even less than the average religious individual, having all the zeal of the newly (re)converted, and possessing the infallible judgement that ex-Marxism is somehow assumed to inspire. The best example of this is Sidney Hook, who was proud of his independence of thought, his pragmatism, and his commitment to democratic dialogue and many more of such liberal niceties; but none of this prevented this professional ex-Marxist from calling for the law that would bar any Communist from holding a teaching job anywhere in the United States. This from the author who considered his first ‘rule of democratic discourse’ to be: “Nothing and no one is immune from criticism”!

Indeed, it is not that Marxism has much to fear from ‘apostates’ of this kind – they reveal their own political ineptitude by the great disarray that has appeared in their ranks ever since the war adventure of the Anglo-American coalition in Iraq has collapsed into ignominy. A great number of these respected ex-Marxist intellectuals, constituting the ‘Republic of Letters’ that Judt is so fond of appealing to (although this republic is truly less elected and less constitutional than any Roman aristocrat could have dreamt of) supported this war, since they have abandoned their bad reasons for supporting Marxism for equally bad reasons to support liberalism. Their bluster has for this reason somewhat lessened of late, as it is hard to convince anyone of the reality of your cloak of Moral Authority when hundreds of thousands die across the world in its name, precisely the one thing that these ex-Marxists so strongly hold against the political practice they were once part of – such a cloak becomes thin indeed to wear in the current storms. It is telling that the current generation of ex-Marxists, essentially the second such generation, is possibly more cynical and war-loving than the first one that was bred in the icy atmosphere of the Cold War (at least Richard Rorty, son of one such ex-Marxist, was however honest enough to admit he gladly supported the CIA during the Cold War, unlike most of the current crop of holier-than-thou armchair moralists). One is tempted to say with the Evangelist: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye compass sea and land to make one proselyte, and when he is made, ye make him twofold more the child of hell than yourselves.“³

1.Tony Judt, “Eric Hobsbawm and the Romance of Communism”, in: New York Review of Books (November 20, 2003).->
2.Tony Judt, Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (New York, NY 2009).->
3.Matthew 23:15->

Eurocentric history and imperialism

11th January 2009 by Matthijs Krul

One of the most important ways in which a society can ideologically justify itself, or a class within that society, is through the writing of history. Roman aristocrats wrote histories of Roman politics and society to justify both themselves and their rulers, as well as to attack dynastic opponents and ‘populists’ representing the interests of the Roman poor. For Shakespeare, the Tudor dynasty was to be justified by writing historical plays about their predecessors, where opponents of the ruling dynasty, such as Richard III, appeared as evil schemers. But this is not limited to just political history – it is at least as true for the wondrous science of economic history. Famous is the expression ‘Whiggish history’, referring to the 19th Century British school of history-writing, both political and economic, which saw history as an evolutionary succession of stages of development leading to the final pinnacle of human achievement, Victorian bourgeois society. Marx, of course, combated this by critiquing their political economics, but he also in the process had to rewrite this history of successive modes of production himself, since criticism tends to have the greatest effect when an alternative reading is proposed along with it.

Yet for all his attempts at subverting bourgeois categories, Marx’s historiography was not free of bourgeois Eurocentric assumptions, although it has to be said in his defense that much more of this is known now than at the time. Indeed Friedrich Engels was the greater historian of the two perhaps, and not least because he was more inclined to pay close attention to historiographical developments in the study of ancient and ‘primitive’ societies as well as contemporary non-European ones.¹ But he also was limited by the narrow horizons of economic history of that time. A worse example of the same thing is to be found in the explicitly idealist conceptions of Max Weber and to a lesser degree Werner Sombart, together the great exponents and founders of sociology and the German school.

Where Marx had seen non-European societies as essentially inherently stagnant and incapable of development due to the combination of the “idiocy of rural life” in isolated villages with an absolute and bureaucratic power overarching them. This is something to be seen in the context of Marx & Engels’ own experiences with the Prussian bureaucracy they detested. Weber and his group even considered Europe to have developed superior concepts of ‘rationality’ in economics and the idea of cost-benefit analysis free of ideology, which Protestantism had enabled them to do where other religions did not permit it (it is of course no coincidence that the leaders of the German school were all of Protestant background themselves).

It is only in recent times that these views have been succesfully challenged, by both ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ historians. Such people as Goody, Frank, Braudel and Arrighi have systematized our now much more advanced knowledge of economic history in a manner showing beyond question that the West has not always been ahead of the East, nor is the difference to be ascribed to any inherent superiority. In fact, it is only a short period of time that the West can be said to have truly been systematically more advanced: roughly the period from 1750 to 1950. This is a mere 200 years of a history of civilization going back 10.000 years! Yet its impact has been enormous. As Sir Jack Goody writes, “self-congratulation is a zero-sum game”.² It is then no coincidence that the rise of this self-congratulation coincides with the victory of Europe over the other parts of the world in the equally zero-sum game of imperialist fights over control of zones of plunder and exploitation.

In reality, of course, China and India were clearly ahead of Europe both in technology and living standards until certainly halfway the 16th Century. Joseph Needham’s famous studies of Chinese technology show how practically every major invention of the Middle Ages in Europe was preceded by the same invention in China, often centuries earlier.³ Equally, the development of mercantile capital did not lag behind, despite this having been seen often as something peculiar to the continent, which would explain how Europe came to develop further than any other part of the world had. Although some of the critics also make the error of equating increasing volume of trade with development, like André Gunder Frank does, this is based on a fundamentally false understanding of the point of modes of production. Indeed accumulations of capital gained through (unequal) trade can form the basis for expansion of capitalism as such, but it is not sufficient to point to increases in trade as an independent cause. In any case they were not greater in Europe than in other advanced parts of the world: the great trading cities of China and India, like Guangzhou and Ahmadabad, were no less than Venezia or Antwerpen, both in terms of sophisticated large-scale trading companies and volume of trade.⁴

As alluded to already, the basis for the European advancement cannot be sought for in differences in trade scope or depth. Both for empirical and methodological reasons: the latter because of the fact, familiar to all but the vulgar economists, that production analytically precedes exchange: there must first be something to trade before trade can take place. Nor is it acceptable to point to inherent differences. Aside from the implicit racism of dubious analyses of the superior ‘rationality’ etc. of Europeans, it doesn’t withstand even the most superficial critical analysis. If Europeans were indeed more rational, then why hadn’t they always been ahead? When these theories were devised, this was widely understood to indeed have been the case, but we know this now to be untrue. And if they had somehow become more rational (or scientific-minded, or freedom-oriented, or individualist, or whatever idealist ’cause’ one wishes to propose), then how was this change possible? Indeed one can hardly think that the European brain changed significantly in its processing functions from one century to the other, even if just for biological reasons. And there is no evidence that one group of people are less capable of dealing with material reality and understanding how to use it than another – indeed there are differences and always have been in terms of specific cultural practices, as well as levels of scientific knowledge and understanding of natural science, but these are the products of the same kind of reasoning. All societies, without exception, exist in and through “the deployment of social labor, mobilized to engage the world of nature”⁵; something which is only possible because of the capacity for planning and abstraction, something all humans naturally share.

We must therefore do away with this kind of Whiggish history concerning non-European peoples. This is not merely a question of academic science: one need but point to the important role that this Eurocentric ideology has played in actual colonization and imperialism itself, particularly through the idea that the peoples of colonized areas were not endowed with the same capacities for economic reasoning as Europeans, and therefore did not “improve”, which justified stealing their land. To be able to maintain such reasonings, it became essential for European ideologists, from Locke to the current day vulgar economists, to pretend that for whatever cultural, racial or religious reasons the non-European peoples did not possess the economic rationality that allows increases in productivity ‘for the benefit of all’, so that their mere presence on their own living space became a hindrance to the spread of civilization. Indeed, it was best if one could argue that they weren’t just not “improving” now, but that they never had and never could, because otherwise the risk appeared that they could adapt to European methods and so reclaim their stake to the land. The tragic history of Cherokee attempts to compete with the Europeans in the white man’s civilization and according to the white man’s norms is a good example of the real nature of these purported scientific reasonings: those who argue the incapacity of non-European peoples will never permit those peoples to prove them wrong. They would rather destroy them than allow the ideology of European dominance to be undermined, because it would threaten the entirety of the ‘world system’.

This as regards Whiggish economic history. Of course, this critical essay has not yet answered the question itself that is posed by history: namely, how come the Europeans did win, even if just for a short time. The Industrial Revolution and the development of capitalism to its fullest extent were made possible by these European conquests, and in turn enabled them even further, until even India and China were fully under the dominion of foreign powers and the ancient Chinese empire collapsed because of its incapacity to defeat them. If at the beginning of the late Middle Ages we are still at the period “before European hegemony”, as the title of Janet Abu-Lughod’s book indicates⁶, and yet in 1690 the English had settled in Calcutta and could not be dislodged even by the waning Mughal Empire (heir of the great Timurid realm which had defeated more or less every major empire that had existed at the time)⁷, then what happened in the meantime? Indeed in about 300 years the European powers must have not only caught up with the great Asian powers, but even surpassed them in development to such a degree that they could not be beaten by them (although it would take until the 18th Century before they could truly enforce their will on any Asian power no matter its size).

Jim Blaut in his excellent studies on the same topic has pointed to the European conquest of the Americas as the main cause.⁸ The Americas were extraordinarily rich in gold and particularly silver, allowing (despite inflationary effects) a huge surge in essentially ‘free money’ for the European powers. First Castille and Portugal benefited, then, as they collapsed under the strain of internal conflict over the spoils as well as inflation and the massive debts owed to German and Italian bankers (it is not a coincidence that America is probably named for the Italian investment banker Amerigo Vespucci), the baton was taken over by France, England (later to become Britain), and the Netherlands. It may seem odd to some people that such an enormous difference, with such major impact for world history and the current political situation in the world, could be just because of some gold and silver mines in the Americas. Yet this is for an important part true, although some more detail is needed to explain it, which Blaut provides.

The so-called “Manila galleons” as well as the “silver fleet” of Spain carried such large quantities of precious metals to the European continent that there was a 20% increase in the total flow of gold circulating in the entire Eastern Hemisphere as well as a tripling of the total silver flow during the 16th Century.⁹ The circulation of metal coins increased eight- to ten-fold in the course of the century.¹⁰ This meant of course not only a great increase in wealth for the European powers relative to the rest, because they could now buy in Asian markets at prices that nobody in Asia could compete with, but it also meant that this money would spread quickly through all of Europe itself, through trade, payment of debts as well as robbery.¹¹ But it was not just gold that glittered. An at least as essential role was played by the plantation systems the Americas made possible, for reasons of climate as well as the presence of peoples that the Europeans were willing to work to death and yet whose revolts they did not fear. Disease had wiped out the vast majority of the population of the Americas rather soon after the arrival of European conquerors, but the job was further finished by the slave labor plantation system, in particular for the production of sugar. For several centuries sugar production was probably the most profitable industry in existence: sweeteners had always been popular in food worldwide, but the price of sugar had normally far outstripped other products such as honey, making sugar production a relatively marginal enterprise.¹² All this changed with the possibility of cheaply mass producing cane sugar in the Caribbean, which for this reason quickly became the most important of all colonies in the world for its possessors. (It is because of this that France gave up its North American colonies so relatively easily – they were considered of little import compared to Haiti, Guadeloupe etc.) Brazil was also a major sugar producing area. Since the natives in the Americas had quickly been wiped out through the combination of diseases and overwork (whereby overwork must be noted to have greatly increased their susceptibility to disease, so that at least part of the millions of deaths from disease ought to be ‘credited’ to the European conquerors as well), it became necessary to abduct and buy millions of slaves from Africa, which played a significant role in destroying what development existed on that continent, due to depopulation and the way slave raids are purely predatory on productive labor. The exports of Brazilian sugar alone in 1600 were in value worth twice the combined total of all English exports to the entire world in that year.¹³ Clearly the conquest and plunder of the Americas was profitable to the extreme on a world scale, and in just the ‘right’ period too for the leapfrogging of Europe over Asia! Incidentally, North Africa had been the greatest sugar producer before this, and this production was undermined entirely, sending particularly Egypt into an economic decline along the way.¹⁴ Finally, the slave trade itself was also highly profitable, and entirely parasitical on Africa and therefore at its expense. Well-known is the rise of the great port cities of Europe in the 17th and 18th Century on the basis of slave trading, such as Amsterdam and Liverpool.

It is therefore not any specific intellectual capacity on the part of Europeans that allowed their conquests of the known world that have shaped the state of our world today. Nor was it purely an internal European development in the 15th Century, as Brenner would have it¹⁵, as before 1492 Europe was behind rather than ahead of India and China in terms of economic development, and feudal relations as well as commercial enterprise no different than in England or France. (If anything, the lower taxation of Chinese serfs compared to European ones would give Chinese landlords more room to squeeze them further, giving Chinese peasants in turn more reason to innovate in production methods and to seek to capitalize on production. Or alternatively Chinese peasant income would be higher, which according to Brenner enables them to adopt new technologies better, like English yeoman farmers did. We know however that the opposite happened: Chinese agriculture declined from the late 14th Century on.¹⁶) So if it cannot be sought in Europe itself, the solution to the riddle must be sought outside it. And there, indeed, we have the Americas, then African slavery, which in turn gave the impetus for the industrialization that allowed the final subjugation of India and China. In a neat chronological series, the Europeans systematically conquered and/or plundered each continent that was at the time the weakest link in the chain. The conquest of the Americas necessitated the destruction of Africa through the slave trade, which together gave Europe the advantage allowing it to outpace everyone else in wealth and productivity increases, so that it could finally invade India, which was then used as a stick to beat China with. The development of modern medical science, part of the general superiority in technology on the part of the Europeans, also enabled the final colonization of the African inland. And the rest, as they say, is history.

1. See for example his most famous work of this kind, The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State. But Engels has written much more on history, a lot of which has unjustly been neglected in Marxology.->
2. Sir Jack Goody, The East in the West (Cambridge 1996), p. 238.->
3. Joseph Needham, Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge 1956-2004).->
4. For Indian trade, see e.g. the works by K.N. Chaudhuri.->
5. Eric Wolf, Europe and the People Without History (Berkeley, CA 1982), p. 391.->
6. Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350 (Oxford 1991).->
7. Wolf, p. 244.->
8. Jim Blaut, Eight Eurocentric Historians (New York, NY 2000). This is probably the only study of the kind discussed here that even refers to itself as (by implication) “Third Worldist”: see p. 65. Also of relevance is its prequel, The Colonizer’s Model of the World (New York, NY 1993). Both are essential reading on these matters, the best in post-orthodox Marxist scholarship.->
9. Jaime Vicens Vives, An Economic History of Spain (Princeton, NJ 1969). See also Blaut 1993, p. 189.->
10. Pierre Vilar, A History of Gold and Money, 1450-1920 (London 1976). See also Blaut 1993, p. 189.->
11. Indeed in the Netherlands there are still songs about the conquest of a Spanish silver fleet by the Dutch privateer Piet Hein, indicating the importance attached in later times to these forced sharings of the spoils, even if few now remember the context.->
12. Blaut 1993, p. 191.->
13. Ibid.->
14. The Egyptian state (the Mamluk dynasties) had been quite reliant on income from its sugar monopoly since Baybars instated it in 1423. See Fage & Oliver (eds.), The Cambridge History of Africa, Vol. III: 1050-1600 (Cambridge 1977), p. 57. The Mamluks were the main power in North Africa and the Palestine-Syria area, so their relative weakening greatly enhanced the possibilities for European expansion in the Middle East in later times.->
15. For more on the Brenner thesis and its relevance to this discussion, see Blaut 2000, p. 45-71.->
16. Wolf, p. 54-56. Cf: Blaut 2000, p. 64-65.->