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[poopathi@aa.net] writes to |
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Arranged marriages and... |
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Com: KM
Sir or Madam, Karl and Mister Engels have decided to answer together to the very important question you raise. Karl provides the economical aspect and Mister Engels the ethnological aspect of the problem. Here, their ideas are amalgamated together. They sat alone, as they often do, in my husband's office, and got out half an hour later with the following text, written together.Please notice that I submitted to them the following corrected version of your intervention: Considering the subhuman treatment that are offered to the women of the third world, (especially indian women), what are you thinking about free love and freedom of women? Respectfully, Jenny Marx, née Baroness von Westphalen Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels Dear friend,
The
bourgeois mode of production tends to destroy everything of the old
ethnological system of pre-existing societies, and to replace it by
trade interactions. That situation continues
in your century, where the world
economy is "now" a solidly installed
planetarian configuration. One could
therefore hope that the western-like
capitalist mode of production would
have drained with it its series of factors
of progress, and among them women
emancipation. As your intervention
shows it, such is not the case, and a
vision of the occidental culture as a
factor of promotion of bourgeois
liberties everywhere on the globe is a
very mechanical and simplistic
conception of historical evolution. The
traditional economical mode of
production of India finished to crumble
under British colonialism and was
replaced by capitalist developments
that were eventually confirmed by the
"independence of the country". The fact
that that destruction of the ancient
Indian society came from outside of its
organisation rather than from within is
a crucial factor in the understanding of
the current ethno-cultural situation of
India, and several so-called "third
world" countries. One has to
understand the fundamental
distinction between the action of a
hinterland bourgeoisie and the action
of a compradore bourgeoisie. The
hinterland bourgeoisie of, say, England
or France, blent naturally with the
whole people, stigmatised certain
ethno-cultural practices and associated
them easily to the hated situation of
feodal oppression. When the lid of the
pot blasted out, several ethno-cultural
features of the old social order were
taken away with it. That opened a
movement of progress that was not
reversible, since supported by the
complete structure of the society,
despite the perpetuation of class
distinctions. That perpetuation of class
distinction even used these factors of
ethno-cultural progress as the best
decoy. That is what you have in the
notion of "fraternity" in the French
Revolution motto. That kind of
movement involved unavoidably steps
of progress toward what you call "free
love". On the other hand, when a
bourgoisie is compradore as in India,
the development of the capitalist mode
of production is imposed from outside
on a society which, despite the objective
inferiority of its mode of production, is
still able to generate formidable
resistances to the order of the invader.
To impose itself then, that one is forced
to make concessions. AND THE
TOTALITY OF THE CONCESSIONS
MADE BY COMPRADORE
BOURGEOISIES TOWARD THAT
TYPE OF NECESSARILY
CONSERVATIVE RESISTANCE IS OF
ETHNO-CULTURAL NATURE, THE
ECONOMICAL CONCESSIONS
BEING ALREADY MADE
IMPOSSIBLE BY A TAKE OVER OF
THE SUPERIOR MODE OF
PRODUCTION AND A CRUMBLE OF
THE INFERIOR ONE THAT EVEN
THE INVADER DOES NOT
CONTROL. Compradore bourgeoisies,
to that effect, present themselves as the
champions of local languages, folklore,
religions, laws, and, as a matter of
course, marital customs. The romantic
admiration of british intellectuals for
the "wisdom" of China and India is just
the intellectual manifestation of that
fatal phenomenon. KIPLING is, to that
effect, the typical example. The grip of
a compradore bourgeoisie turns the
local civilisation to a sort of museum
object, where all the material
motivations of the oppression of man
over woman are objectively unrooted
and at the same time stiffly
perpetuated, in the name of that old
colonial procedure consisting in
denying that the Emperor is, from now
on, naked. Furthermore, these
artificially maintained conservative
tendencies amalgamate "in harmony",
if one may say, with the fundamentally
reifiant tendencies of ultra-modern
capitalism. In this one everything,
including human groups and persons,
is turned to a mere merchandise. Your
century developed that feature to a
level that was simply impossible to
imagine for us, modest 19th century
founders of historical materialism. The
commerces of food, liquors, drugs,
tourism, prostitution, flourish in your
century, and are all manifestations of
the conversion of the planet into a huge
museum, a huge restaurant, a huge
brothel. An immense division of labor
takes place in that configuration. Eiffel
tower and whorehouses, Taj Mahal and
opium, so on so forth. The junction
takes place between the old showy
India, artificially maintained in place
by a long subtly coded tradition of
intensive colonialist and neo-colonialist
compradore capitalism, and the
hyper-reification of millenial trade,
that makes poisonning drugs and
children prostitutes enter in the huge
circuit of profit making merchandises.
In that context the fate of the indian
woman is to toil under the two united
facets of a yoke that sharply
contradicted themselves on the other
side of the planet in 17th and 18th
centuries, but re-enforce each other
here. She used to be the symbol of the
union of two land-owning families, she
is now the merchandise of a trade
between two groups of profit makers,
and the surface of the gestus appears
unalterated to the empiricist eyes.
Terrible union of the Old and the New,
rather than strict remnant of the past.
In these conditions, any notion of "free
love" is a pure lunacy. As old Spinoza
used to say, the idea of freedom is
always the manifestation of the
ignorance of our own determinations.
Capitalism, under the form of a
compradore world order which
folklorizes and reifies in the same
movement, is the gaoler of the indian
woman, in its regressive as in its
progressive tendencies. It is the direct,
fundamental cause of her "sub-human
treatment". But we remain certain that
that yoke of oppression is doomed to
end up broken by its own inner logic of
existence.
In solidarity,
Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels |
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