Europe did the World a Favor
Hello there.
Marxism and communism are at odds in many ways with those who have come to be called social justice warriors. I've always called them the pseudo-left or pseudos for short. But I must say that this new term is very catchy.
But anyway, today I will just focus on one area of difference. And this concerns how you feel about the fact that over five hundred years ago, while emerging from the Middle Ages, Europe developed ocean going sailing ships. This opened up the prospect of plunder and trade on a global scale. This was the original globalization. For most of those who encountered these white monsters it was not a fun experience. Social justice warriors do a lot of hand wringing about this and they are right to point out the wickedness of the whole process.
However, Marx recognized the dual character of western expansion. He was disgusted by European barbarity and hypocrisy, but he also saw their marauding as the means of eliminating the fast frozen backward conditions that prevailed in the rest of the world. It was necessary if the world was to move forward. In particular communism could not have emerged out of these backward conditions.
Let's look at some of the things that Marx had to say on the subject.
In a letter to Engels of October 8 1858 he wrote:
"The proper task of bourgeois society is the creation of the world market, at least in outline, and of the production based on that market. Since the world is round, the colonisation of California and Australia and the opening up of China and Japan would seem to have completed this process."
In 1853, he had a number of articles in the New York Daily News which are of interest and I'll read out four quotes.
Quote number 1
"England, it is true, in causing a social revolution in Hindostan, was actuated only by the vilest interests, and was stupid in her manner of enforcing them. But that is not the question. The question is, can mankind fulfil its destiny without a fundamental revolution in the social state of Asia? If not, whatever may have been the crimes of England she was the unconscious tool of history in bringing about that revolution."
Quote number 2
"England has to fulfil a double mission in India: one destructive, the other regenerating - the annihilation of old Asiatic society, and the laying of the material foundation of Western society in Asia."
Quote number 3
"It is almost needless to observe that, in the same measure in which opium has obtained the sovereignty over the Chinese, the Emperor and his staff of pedantic mandarins have become dispossessed of their own sovereignty. It would seem as though history had first to make this whole people drunk before it could rouse them out of their hereditary stupidity."
And finally, quote number 4
"All these dissolving agencies acting together on the finances, the morals, the industry, and political structure of China, received their full development under the English cannon in 1840, which broke down the authority of the Emperor, and forced the Celestial Empire into contact with the terrestrial world. Complete isolation was the prime condition of the preservation of Old China. That isolation having come to a violent end by the medium of England, dissolution must follow as surely as that of any mummy carefully preserved in a hermetically sealed coffin, whenever it is brought into contact with the open air."
Of course, in the case the Americas, Australia and few other places, the locals were not simply shaken up by the experience; they were brutally exterminated or pushed to the margins with the large-scale arrival of European settlers. For the descendants of these original people, there is of course no going back. Indeed, their descendants will share with others a communist future made possible by modern capitalist society.
For more reading and sources for the quotes I have used go to the article that I have linked to below
See you next time.
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