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Marx afterall, if read ungenorously, urged
> racial war and genocide against the Slavs and argued that imperialism was
a
> progressive force. As you can see, no set of ideas is above reproach. I
> personally can't judge a complex movement comprising millions of people
due
> to one article...btw whose to say that those who self-identify as Dalits
> don't already suffer so much that the only alternative is to struggle and
> reclaim their humanity and dignity?
Well, Marx *did not*, by any stretch of the imagination, urge a "racial war"
against the Slavs. "Generosity" has nothing to do with it. And, of course,
capitalism WAS revolutionary in overthrowing the ancien regime. The
liberation of the Dalits will not come by their imitating the worst features
of their oppressor, while forsaking all others. That to me sounds like the
basis of a pernicious clerical fascism, the likes of which are already to
common in South Asia and elsewhere.
May I be permitted a personal note? I am of Passomqoddy American Indian
heritage. Marx thought that the defeat of the Red Man was "progressive" in
the sense that societies based on obscurantism and superstition and
possessing only rudimentary industrial skills could not provide the material
wherewithal for human emancipation. The suffocating idiocy of
ritual-steeped tribes or castes, once they have outgrown that phase of the
struggle over goods and services of which they were an inevitable product,
cannot survive artificially for long. They must wither and die to make room
for new forms occasioned by changes in production and rates of accumulation.
The attempt to organize society based on ancient, malevolent superstitions
standing above the movement of historical forces is doomed to failure and
this is all I was saying in regards to the Dalits.
Louis G
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