My take on the drunken recantation by Marx was suggested by Engels who said that Marx distanced himself from anarchists. In his preface to the English edition of Capital vol 1, he said that Marx believed that a non violent revolution in a country like Britain if free and fair elections were allowed. If a pro slavery rebellion was not launched by tge confederates, the US could have ended slavery without a civil war.
The hostility to Marxism by bourgeois scholars is partial because few can reject his methodology even if they do not buy his communist vision.
The rejection of Marx by white supremacists is understandable but what worried me was the rejection of Marx by some scholars of African descent despite the fact that he was influenced by the struggles of our ancestors and he openly alligned his politics with our people's interests.
The three major explanations are 1) that we need to originate our own paradigms or we could not lay claim to founding a new discipline of Africa Studies. 2) If we embraced Marxism during the cold war, the new discipline could have been crushed by the counter intelligence program. And 3) the Eurocommunists tend to claim that they alone are the true heirs of Marx, Derrida dismissed such possessveness as belonging to Marx & Sons Inc, and so Marxism is Eurocentric as opposed to Afrocentrucity. I examined these rejectionist reasons and rejected them on the basis of the immense contributions to the development of Marxism by intellectual giants of African descent, cobtributions that we cannot afford to reject by rejecting Marx.
Biko
-- On Thu, May 10, 2018 at 10:35 AM, Emeagwali, Gloria (History)<emeagwali@ccsu.edu> wrote:--'All I know is that I am not a Marxist,' Marx himself
said repeatedly, especially after some French revolutionaries started using violent means
and calling themselves Marxists whereas Marx and Engels stipulated the preferred strategy
of forming a communist party to fight for power social-democratically."
Biko Agozino (2014) The Africana paradigm in Capital: the debts of Karl
Marx to people of African descent, Review of African Political Economy, 41:140, 172-184, DOI:
10.1080/03056244.2013.872613
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03056244.2013.872613
Now the above statement is another take on the context of "I am not a Marxist."Biko, can you clarify so that we can set the record straight or at least improve on it.
I have always felt that one of the reasons why there is a deep hatred for Marxby leading Eurocentric intellectuals - in philosophy, sociology and history etc. - was for his "audacity" to draw attention to the role of the enslaved Africans in capital accumulation and the British industrial revolution itself, and for daring to view the enslaved as victims of oppression and active human beings pursued for their labor power by avaricious proto capitalists. His critique of Judaeo- Christian religion and others as opiate was not appreciated either.
I have to say, though, that the above Africana paradigm article opened up a completely different perspective on Marxist philosophy. It is not what Marxism brought to the analysis of the struggles of Africans but what African struggles brought to Marx and Marxism.This changes everything, so to speak. Everybody should read this article.
Special thanks to the contributions of Tomi Adeaga and Asonzeh Ukah.
GE
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