Marx After Marx by Harry Harootunian

Author:Harry Harootunian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS054000, History/Social History, POL005000, Political Science/Political Ideologies/Communism & Socialism
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2015-10-12T16:00:00+00:00

4

THEORIZING LATE DEVELOPMENT AND THE “PERSISTENCE OF FEUDAL REMNANTS”

Wang Yanan, Yamada Moritarō, and Uno Kōzō

Although Rosa Luxemburg foresaw the eroding effects of the penetration of capitalism in noncapitalist zones, both the political-economic and cultural consequences of colonial dispossession, the on-site experience was recorded and addressed by others who lived it. The rapid pace of seizure of colonial possessions crested by the time of World War I, and expropriating and extractive powers of imperializing colonial nations settled down in the interwar decades to analyze and assess the baneful effects on subjected societies. Specifically, attention turned to determining the deficits that resulted from forcible dispossession and late entry into the world market. On the part of imperializing powers, there appeared a chorus of regret that began to complain that the colonial project was too expensive, while in the colonies there surfaced incipient nationalist movements demanding independence. In Asia, only Japan managed to successfully to escape the direct consequences of imperial colonization by becoming an aggressive colonizer itself in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Despite evading the direct ill effects of colonial expropriation, Japanese opinion saw the nation precariously balanced on the periphery of industrializing capitalism and embarked on a developmental trajectory since the 1870s that had introduced the coexistence of surviving practices and institutions from a prior feudal order that now were seen as “remnants and vestiges” and that, for many, constituted an immense block to the full realization of a completed capitalist order. For those who perceived in these unwelcome survivals the specter of an unresolved past in their new present as the force that would lead Japan to a retrograde refeudalization and a politically destructive absolutism, the achievement of a mature capitalism was envisioned as a necessity for the transition yet to come from capitalism to socialism. War and destruction in the 1940s and a subsequent military occupation afforded those who believed that the spectral remnants of the past overcame the prewar imaginary the opportunity for a second start. What they achieved was simply the reproduction of the prewar past in a more perfected form in a different temporal register

In China, the rampant colonizing process of diverse European powers prevailed in the coastal areas and selected regions in the interior to produce a political patchwork that was named semifeudalism and semicolonialism. And in India, already colonized for some time, England remained the hegemonic power despite the growing murmur of an anticolonial nationalist sentiment on the horizon that was already pointing to how colonial dispossession had undermined indigenous industries. In all this, it was recognized that these ancient societies had come to capitalism late, and their entry into it was frequently involuntary and often carried out under force or its threat. Such “lateness” inevitably led to classifying these societies as backward and inferior, despite being immanent with a “modern” present, and existing in another temporal register that signified an unbridgeable time gap between advanced modern nations of Euro-America and the rest of the world languishing in the backwaters of modern civilization.

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