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It is a sad new to
the Palestine people in particular that the great champion of their cause
against Zinoism has passed away. We in India also share their sorrows. We
communists, however, are not cast in the same mould prepared by feudal or
bourgeois reasoning to be too overwhelmed by the death of a personality
remaining perpetually oblivious to hold the focus on his/her weaknesses or
frailities. World To Win (2004/30) has tried to sweep under the carpet
the significant fact that Said emerged on the intellectual scene and continues
to occupy a niche in that world basically as a writer of Orientalism and
the father of the ‘Colonial Discourse’ – a post-modernist project. In fact WTW
goes to the extent of referring to Said’s book, Orientalism, as an "innovating
book". As a Foucauldian interpretation of imperialism’s creation of the
‘Orient’, despite a brilliant exposition of some aspects of imperialist
domination, Said went too far in bracketing Karl Marx with orientalists for
supposedly justifying British occupation of India. In order to put Marx in the
dock Edward Said inadvertently quoted from Marx’s early journalistic writings
He not only dismissed
Marx in Orientalism as yet another Orientalist, he went to the extent of
rejecting Marxism as an unsavoury child of "historicism" to base himself on the
Foucauldian Discourse Theory. To cite from his Orientalism is a style of
thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between
‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’….. "This
Orientalism can accommodate, Aeschylus, say, and Victor Hugo, Daute and Karl
Marx" [P.3]. Said even commented that Orientalism delivered the
Orient to colonialism, first to interorise the Orient in discourse by Europe and
only then colonization. Said’s denunciation of the whole of Western episteme or
Derrid’s denunciations of the transhistorical Logos and Foucault’s notion of
Power – no class, no gender, not even history, no real resistance, no project
for human liberation, rejection of the Marxist view of attacking mainly the twin
sites of exploitation viz. the state and the unequal economic basis — unite the
three top figures of post-structuralism/ post-modernism against Marxism. For
Said’s project, imperialism appears to be a cultural phenomenon. Though Said
later critically commented that Foucault’s eagerness not to fall into Marxist
economism led him to obliterate the role of classes, the role of economics, the
role of insurgency and rebellion, he could not free himself from the
anti-Marxist project as presented in Orientalism.
It is Marx who
disdainfully dismissed orientalists as ‘lousy orientalists’. Even those who
claim themselves as Marxists like the CPGB leader Rajani Palme Dutt, Soviet
writers like R.A. Ulyanovsky and V.I.Pavlov, the CPI(M)’s erstwhile secretary,
the late E.M.S. Namboodiripad, et al almost solely overemphasized Marx’s
enthusiasm of the stir generated by British capital in the extremely backward
society of India. Those people liked to put blinkers on their eyes not to take
into account a comprehensive view of Marx’s vast wealth of writing abandoning
any possibility of regenerative role of British colonial rule in India. Even in
his acceptance of the terrible and devastating role of British power in causing
socio-economic upheaval in India as an unconscious tool of history, Marx pointed
out in 1853 to the crucial absence of "any symptoms of reconstitution yet
appearing" in India. Marx, in that early writing, only reflected his hope of
imposition of developed capitalist relations through such a process, which might
cause a breakdown of a brutal ‘stagnatory’ and "passive sort of existence".
Such a hope was shattered soon and the vast minefield of Marx’s writings only
accused colonial power and its exploitation. He also identified native
pro-British rulers as ‘English dogs’. It was also Marx who had the courage and
clarity of mind to characterize the Indian revolt of 1857 as a national revolt,
the first freedom struggle of the Indian masses. Marx’s early enthusiasm in the
stir to be created by the penetration of the capitalist economy was only too
short-lived and Marx in his later writings pinned hope on the regeneration of a
colonized India on the basis of internal forces through wresting complete
freedom from the colonial yoke. In 1881 Marx wrote to Danieison that colonialism
"is a bleeding process with a vengeance" [Marx & Engels, "On colonialism:
Articles from the ‘New York Tribune’ and other writings, International
Publishers, New York, 1972, p.339].
While the
above-mentioned writers claiming themselves Marxists had to fall on early Marx’s
hope on the so called dual role of imperialism in order to justify a wrong
methodological approach against revolutionary Marxism; Said was only interested
to project Marx by any means as an unflinching supporter of colonialism in his
book Orientalism. World To Win has only one-sidedly held the focus on
Said’s role, obviously positive, against Zionism in favour of the Palestinians
fighting over years. As a Marxist journal such a complete silence in the
obituary on Said’s overtly anti-Marxist, post-modernist project reads like an
uninspiring eulogy.
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