Kevin > Books: critique-imperialism-europe‎ (59)

‘Our [English] father got it right with you. He left you to ferment until you were literate. But he brought me here before I’d formed enough connections, enough memories. What’s more, he was the only person I ever spoke Mandarin with, when my Cantonese was far better to begin with. And that’s lost now. I don’t think in it, and I certainly don’t dream in it.’

‘You know how it feels for your native tongue to slip away. You caught it in time. I didn’t.’

‘But Babel [Western education/academia] gave you everything.’ Letty seemed unable to move past this point. ‘You had everything you wanted, you had such privileges—’

‘Not enough to make us forget where we’re from.’

This confusion, this jumbling of different conceptions of imagination [idealism], runs throughout the history of leftist thought.

One can already see the tension in Marx. There is a strange paradox in his approach to revolution. As I’ve noted, Marx insists that what makes us human is that rather than relying on unconscious instinct like spiders and bees, we first raise structures in our imagination, and then try to bring those visions into being. When a spider weaves her web, she operates on instinct. The architect first draws up a plan, and only then starts building the foundations of his edifice. This is true, Marx insists, in all forms of material production, whether we are building bridges or making boots. Yet when Marx speaks of social creativity, his key example—the only kind of social creativity he ever talks about actually—is always revolution, and when he does that, he suddenly changes gears completely. In fact he reverses himself. The revolutionary should never proceed like the architect; he should never begin by drawing up a plan for an ideal society, then think about how to bring it into being. That would be utopianism. And for utopianism, Marx had nothing but withering contempt [see Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific]. Instead, revolution is the actual immanent practice of the proletariat, which will ultimately bear fruit in ways that we cannot possibly imagine from our current vantage point.

Why the discrepancy? The most generous explanation, I would suggest, is that Marx did understand, at least on some intuitive level, that the imagination worked differently in the domain of material production [i.e. “means of production” via factory wage labour, where most workers are “alienated” as cogs in the machine while imagination’s idealism is reserved for elite workers/capitalists] than it did in social relations [i.e. “social reproduction” via carework, where elites are privileged with violence’s stupidity while those below have to perform imagination’s idealism to reproduce the elite’s fantasies and to empathize with others, i.e. “interpretive labour”]; but also, that he lacked an adequate theory as to why. Perhaps, writing in the mid-nineteenth century, long before the rise of feminism, he simply lacked the intellectual tools. [Graeber’s footnote: “I might add that it is a profound reflection on the effects of structural violence on the imagination that feminist theory itself was so quickly sequestered away into its own subfield where it has had almost no impact on the work of most male theorists.”] Given the considerations already outlined in this essay, I think we can confirm that this is indeed the case. To put it in Marx’s own terms: in both domains one can speak of alienation. But in each, alienation works in profoundly different ways.

The Dutch East India Company was pre-capitalist […] an extractive merchant circuit that the East India Company had created. The East India Company was a combination of a joint-stock company and an imperialist state that had 200,000 soldiers that did all the looting on [their] behalf. I don’t think this is a good example of capitalism […], it’s a good example of how British imperialism and Dutch imperialism and European imperialism started.

[…] you made a point about monopoly capital. East India Company is not a good example of that, but my Westinghouse, Ford and Edison trio [Second Industrial Revolution] are a good example […]

When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint.
When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.
-Dom Helder Camara

Democracy was theoretically a system of political and legal equality. But in concrete and practical terms, it was inadequate. There could be no equality in politics and before the law as long as there were glaring economic inequalities. So long as the ruling class controlled jobs and the press and the schools of the country and all organs of public opinion; so long as it monopolized all trained public functionaries and disposed of unlimited funds to influence elections; so long as laws were made by the ruling class; so long as lawyers, who were private practitioners, sold their expertise to the highest bidder and litigation was exclusive and costly, there would be only nominal equality before the law. So the revolutionaries believed and talked. [Emphasis added]”

Hitler killed five million [sic] Jews. It is the greatest crime of our time. But the Jews should have offered themselves to the butcher’s knife. They should have thrown themselves into the sea from cliffs.....It would have aroused the world and the people of Germany.... As it is they succumbed anyway in their millions.

[The revolutionaries of Bengal] had discarded what they termed ‘anarchism’, or the path of the bomb and the gun. They felt it was possible to fight for socialism through the mobilization of the masses. […]

Das did not, however, agree to teach Bhagat Singh how to make a bomb [to throw in the Assembly Hall courtroom, “away from the seated members”; “Our sole purpose was to make the deaf hear and give the heedless a timely warning”]. His party had abandoned ‘acts of individual terrorism’, as he put it, and he, for one, refused to violate the party discipline. However, Das changed his mind when he was convinced that the killing of top British officials would instil a sense of bravery in the youth and make them participate in revolutionary activities. He noted the panic that had gripped the British after a couple of killings. The old placid situation had undergone a sea-change. […]

Bhagat Singh rejected the idea [for him to escape after throwing the bomb]. He said that it was time that words were spoken. Nothing had ever remained of any revolution but what was rife in the conscience of the masses. Words alone could do that. The rulers must be put in the dock. The court should be used as a forum to propagate revolutionary patriotic ideas and to awaken the people’s fervour for freedom. The public must clearly understand and appreciate the motives of the revolutionaries.

If the motive was not considered, said Bhagat Singh, then, ‘Jesus Christ would appear to be a man responsible for creating disturbances, violating peace and preaching revolt and would be considered a dangerous personality in the language of the law. But we worship him.’ […]

Bhagat Singh believed that oppression should evoke feelings of retaliation, not mere protest [a related perspective: “protest” is restricted to appealing to the current power structure. The alternative is “direct action”, to act as if you were already free and face the consequences; however, violence is still a major debate, from its morality i.e. when is it “self-defence”, to its consequences for the movement]. Violence was a catharsis for the oppressed. It was a cleansing force. It freed the subjugated from their inferiority complex, their despair. It made them fearless and restored their self-respect. It was a phase, an inevitable phase of the revolution. [The biographer sure is channeling Fanon; emphases added].