Left-Wing Melancholia by Traverso Enzo;

Author:Traverso, Enzo; [Traverso, Enzo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: trav17942, PHI040000, PHILOSOPHY / Movements / Critical Theory, POL005000, POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Ideologies / Communism & Socialism
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016-05-16T04:00:00+00:00

5

Marxism and the West

Zeitgeist

Like all classics, Marx both “transcends” his own time and remains a thinker of the nineteenth century. With an incredibly imaginative strength, he was able to grasp tendencies that, still embryonic in his epoch, developed spectacularly during the following century. This astonishing modernity has led many scholars to interpret his works in naïvely anachronistic terms, as if they had been written in our age. Marx contributed to the forging of our lexicon, but many concepts through which we today apprehend the nineteenth century—for instance, imperialism—simply did not exist during his lifetime, or did not have the same meaning we give them nowadays. This concerns particularly the concept of the “West,” which in his era meant essentially Europe, with the exception of the Russian Empire; West and East were not yet geopolitical categories, as they would become in the years after 1945.1

Europe dominated the world, viewing itself as its economic and cultural core. In his lifetime, Marx observed the rise of the great European empires, which were conquering Asia and Africa, and passed away long before the advent of the American world hegemony, which took place only at the end of the First World War. The rule of Europe was historically transitional, but its economic, political, and military elites were not aware of that, nor were its intellectuals. To blame Marx for his “Eurocentric” views means, in some way, to blame him for having lived in the nineteenth century and for having inscribed his thought in the intellectual and epistemic horizon of his time. There are two symmetrical misunderstandings that consist either in denying the Eurocentric dimension of his work, as many devotees obstinately do, or in stigmatizing it with a retrospective, completely anachronistic wisdom.

Belonging to the zeitgeist of the nineteenth century, Marx’s Eurocentrism shapes his theoretical works as well as his articles devoted to contemporary events. In a well-known passage of The Communist Manifesto (1848), Marx and Engels depicted capitalism as both a system of exploitation of man by man and a historical progress driving civilization forward through an extraordinary growth of the forces of production. Thanks to its development, capitalism destroyed feudal societies, created a world market, and unified the planet, submitting it to the law of profit. Highly cosmopolitan, it generated a world after its own image and crushed prejudices, narrow cultures, and different forms of obscurantism inherited from the past. The world market resulted in the “universal inter-dependence of nations” and created a “world literature.” But capitalism also engendered its own gravediggers because its economic cosmopolitanism was the material basis of proletarian internationalism, the project of an emancipated society, made of free and equal human beings on a global scale. In other words, socialism carried on the “revolutionary” role played by the bourgeoisie when it appeared on the stage of history. Capitalism, Marx wrote, “draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization,” compelling them to “introduce what it calls civilization.” A crucial passage of The Communist Manifesto presented the bourgeoisie as a vector

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