Late Imperial China
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“Peoples without history”! How insulting. He would include the Chinese too! As for the native Americans and Africans …?
… And the Mexicans, and all who don’t know what to do with the land!!!
“Protestant work ethic” springs to mind. Happiness doesn’t figure, nor beauty.
The pamphlet The Socialist Party and War is on the site here.
I added hyperlinks to the Chapter headings to make it easier to navigate through.
That’s a later, revised edition brought out in 1970 but with the cover of the 1950 one. I have dug out my copy of the 1970 one with a view to sending you its front cover to put there instead. I will send you it later today. The text if the 1950 version is not there .
i also wonder ALB just how much of it was related to their disputes with Bakunin.
We also know how irrationally paranoid Marx was about Lord Palmerston describing him as an agent of the Tsar, happy to promote conspiracy theories on behalf a Scottish aristocrat Urquhart.
Nor should we be too overly sympathetic to Mexico who themselves indulged in land-grabs from American natives and also tried to exterminate them. Geronimo gained his warrior reputation from fighting the Mexicans.
You are exaggerating again TM. I don’t know why. Engels was both out of order and proved to be wrong on this matter but he didn’t go as far as you are trying to make out, mirroring professional “anti-communist” websites.
The words “peoples without history” is more usually rendered as “non-historic peoples” which, according to this article, meant peoples that did not have the capacity to constitute an independent nation-state. Which is not at all the same as saying that the peoples he had in mind did not have a history. He was well aware that the Czechs in particular did as he wrote about it elsewhere.
At the time the peoples (language groups) he was talking about were largely subjects of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Independently of Engels, it was not the policy of the Social Democrats there to support the breakaway nationalism of the Czechs and Croats.
After the first world war artificial states such as Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were set up but didn’t last the century.
I think that the violent language Engels still employed after 1848 in private about them would have been due to the fact that it was troops from these peoples that were used to put down the revolutionary wave in the Austro-Hungarian empire in 1848. It seems he never forgave them. He should have of course since you can’t hold people responsible for what their ancestors did.
So he was not talking about China or Mexico as these were already established states and he was certainly not saying that China had no history. As to American Indians, although it could be said that they didn’t have the capacity to become an independent nation-state, that had nothing to do with it. In fact in his The Origin of the Family, Property and the State he was quite sympathetic to them as was Lewis Henry Morgan on whose work he based a large part of his pamphlet. He recognised that they had a history and wrote about it.
As I said, I don’t understand why you want to be put the worst possible interpretation on the mistakes Marx and Engels made, in line with those who seek to use these to malign the whole idea of socialism.
ALB, isn’t it always good to review, and to challenge idol-worship when we come across it?
Marx and Engels are Marcos’ gods, after all.
Neither a follower nor a leader be.
“I also wonder ALB just how much of it was related to their disputes with Bakunin.“
Possibly, as Bakunin had some nasty things to say about Germans and Jews, especially German Jews. But I think it will go back more to the revolutionary wave in Europe in 1848 which Marx and Engels took part in as in effect radical bourgeois democrats and German nationalists (as they mistakenly believed that a bourgeois revolution in Germany would be quickly followed by a proletarian one), Engels even as a fighter. German democrats and radical nationalists regarded Russia as a major threat should they have won.
Our 1950 pamphlet quotes Engels as writing that at the time:
” Our foreign policy was simple: support for every revolutionary people, call for a general war of revolutionary Europe against the great mainstay of European reaction, Russia …”
I think that sticking to this position will have been at the root of their mistakes: Marx’s paranoia about Russia and Engels’s completely unacceptable comments about various Slav peoples.
“Marx and Engels are Marcos’ gods, after all.”
I don’t think they were as he made clear Anyway, you and Robbo have driven him off this forum,
“Marx and Engels are Marcos’ gods, after all.”
I don’t think they were as he made clear Anyway, you and Robbo have driven him off this forum.”
Absolutely deplorable and which could have been easily averted had the moderator made a timely intervention in the manner demonstrated earlier in this thread.
Absolutely deplorable and which could have been easily averted had the moderator made a timely intervention in the manner demonstrated earlier in this thread.
Thanks. Sure thing. I should keep track of every post and drop everything else.
I’ll clone myself.
Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Just for the record I said on October 4 at 1:55 AM
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https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/forum-rules-and-guidelines/I would have needed to be alerted to deal with this. All three protagonists were in breach at some point and would have seen their posting suspended if someone had used the Contact the Forum Moderator button.
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