Marx had no romantic illusions about pre-capitalist (and post
tribal) societies. On the so-called Indian village
communism: "We must not forget that these little communities
were contaminated by distinctions of caste and by slavery, that
they subjugated man to external circumstances instead of
elevating man to be the sovereign of circumstances, that they
transformed a self-developing social state into never changing
natural density, and thus brought about a brutalizing worship of
nature, exhibiting its degradation in the fact that man, the sovereign
of nature, fell down on his knees in adoration of Hunuman, the
monkey, and Sabbala, the cow."
Acknowledging that in both Hegel and Marx there's an ethnocentric
bias which was quite acceptable in their day (but it is less so
today because we have been socialized in western societies not
to accept it), and that the literature of the time on non-Western cultures
was minimal, one may still argue (which is far from accept) that, as
far as the development of self-understanding is concerned, it was
Europe that carried that torch forward after a certain point in world
history. That is, if we agree that it is possible to write a universal
history in which what counts as a world-historical event consists in
its contribution to the rise of freedom, then we can say that, at
some point in world history, it was Europe that cultivated the kinds
of reflective institutions necessary for the progressive realization of
freedom. Insofar as other societies ceased to cultivate this self-
understanding, they ceased to have history.
