I’m reading through some of our literature (namely Socialism, Utopian and Scientific) and I really get the sense that many of our intellectual forebears think that everything important in philosophy happened in Europe. Granted, European philosophy is necessarily of primary relevance in a critique of early capitalism, but when Engels traces the history of these strains of thought (materialism, dialectics, etc.), they all go back to ancient Greece. I find this suspicious.
Is this a consequence of lopsided education, either of the target audience or of Engels himself? Have non-western Marxists grafted dialectical materialism onto Asian or African philosophy? Are there analogous movements within these cultures that dovetail nicely with Dialectical Materialism? Or do they more or less take Engels at his word here? Maybe I’m misinterpreting something.
No, because Marxism is not only Marx and Engels. Marxism was first developed by them, but was also developed by many other non-European peoples, and just to name a few, Maurice Bishop, Thomas Sankara, Amilcar Cabral, Che Guevara, Raul and Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, Luis Carlos Prestes, Clovis Moura, Ruy Mauro Marini, Vânia Bambirra, Theotônio do Santos, Carlos Marighella, all of them non-European Marxists.
So no, Marxism is not euro-centric.
A good thread about the centrality of the third world to ML thought.
It’s also really funny that anticommunists use the term “eurocentric”, since that term was invented by an Egyptian Marxist economist, Samir Amin.
