Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism by Gilbert Achcar

Author:Gilbert Achcar
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Saqi

Critical Marxism and Orientalism

To sum up, the thought of Marx and Engels, assessed from the very same historical materialist perspective for which they laid the foundations, appears as an evolutionary critical endeavour to overcome the epistemological constraints of their time – whether those constraints were philosophical, principally represented by Hegelian philosophy as the intellectual horizon of their epoch and the main influence on their own thinking, or objective, inherent in the limitations of the scholarship available to them. Thus the corpus of Marx and Engels’ work is itself ridden with the birth pangs and contradictions intrinsic to a major intellectual watershed in the history of ideas, premised on a radical epistemological break with the whole tradition of hitherto accumulated thinking. Only the wildest brand of philosophical idealism could construe this break as having been accomplished once and for all in a single moment instead of understanding that it could only unfold as a protracted and progressive process.

The contradictions in Marx and Engels’ thinking processes allowed for different views inspired by different parts or aspects of their legacy. Thus, to be sure, there are positivist and teleological brands of Marxism, some of them unmistakably Orientalist in the pejorative sense, usually wrapping their essentialism in a radical stance towards religion and pre-modern cultures in general.59 Nevertheless, the major breakthrough in the history of ideas that Marx and Engels developed provides the indispensable epistemological tool for a radical critique of all types of essentialism. This includes Orientalism, as Bryan Turner explained in 1978, in what reads now as an anticipatory critique of the limitations of Said’s vigorous repudiation of “Orientalism”:

The criticism of Orientalism in its various forms requires something more than the valid but indecisive notion that at its worst Orientalist scholarship was a rather thin disguise for attitudes of moral or racial superiority ... and thereby a justification for colonialism. ... The end of Orientalism requires a fundamental attack on the theoretical and epistemological roots of Orientalist scholarship ... Modern Marxism is fully equipped to do this work of destruction, but in this very activity Marxism displays its own internal theoretical problems and uncovers those analytical cords which tie it to Hegelianism, to nineteenth-century political economy and to Weberian sociology.60

The great advantage of Marxian thought is that it is armed with a self-correcting methodology. This enables the student of Marxism to discern in the vast corpus of Marxism itself what is inconsistent with the ultimate logic of the materialist dialectical approach of history and society founded by Marx and Engels. As is obvious to anyone who is familiar with Marx’s writings, his intellectual production is based above all on systematic criticism. Living Marxism is predicated upon the permanent exercise of this critical faculty, and the permanent critical and selective assimilation of advances achieved in all fields of human knowledge into the Marxist theory of history and society. Living Marxism is also and inseparably predicated upon the permanent exercise of self-criticism and self-correction in light of those advances.

In this sense, and whatever their

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