Is Marxism Eurocentric?

MANY ACTIVISTS today first encounter Marxist ideas in and around college campuses, where certain interpretations of Karl Marx and Marxism have solidified into a sort of conventional wisdom. One of these is the idea that Marxism is "Eurocentric"--and therefore has little to say to the mass of people in the 21st century globalized world.

This reading of Marx is virtually hegemonic in some branches of academia. For example, post-colonial scholars María do Mar Castro Varela and Nikita Dhawan contend that Marx defended a "Eurocentric model of political emancipation that consistently ignores the experiences of colonized subjects in non-Western societies" and "failed to develop his studies of India and Africa into a fully elaborated analysis of imperialism." To them, Marx's analysis neglects "disenfranchised groups such as colonized subjects."

The great Palestinian scholar Edward Said contended that Marx's earliest writings on the British role in India, written in 1853, represent a racist view of the colonized, despite Marx's sympathy for the subjects of the British empire. Said contended that "in article after article, {Marx} returned with increasing conviction to the idea that even in destroying Asia, Britain was making possible there a real social revolution."

Both Said and Shlomo Avineri, another interpreter of Marx read widely in the academy, argued that Marx never deviated from this position, but in fact propounded it even more vociferously later in his career.

Read more: http://socialistworker.org/2015/01/22/is-marxism-eurocentric