Marxists, You Have it So Wrong

In the News...
Everywhere, the Globe -- Marxists have just got it all wrong. I've begun reading Walter Rodney's sexily-titled work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, and, as expected, I've got some serious issues with the claims in his argument. This isn't shocking. He's a Marxist. I find fault with virtually all Marxist thought for the simple reason that Marxist thought has the unfortunate ability to attempt to boil everything down to class conflict. Class conflict informs everything: how people behave, how communities behave, how nations behave, how ethnic groups behave, how commerce is undertaken, how every goddamn thing is little more than class conflict exerting its force. Well, I call bullshit. Marxism, if it were taken seriously, would mean that every action in history and the present is the result of zombified populations, staggering like the undead masses they are, their brains infected by a compulsive, disease-like need to act out class forces. People and nations have no real choice if everything is dictated by class concerns. Commerce, war, hunger, political instability, and basically any other crisis you can imagine is a secondary cause of constant class struggles being waged daily without anyone realizing it.

Look, I love a snappy, radical theory as much as the next person, don't get me wrong. And I hate to be critical of Mr. Rodney as he's dead by car bomb, and it just feels like a dick move, but come on. As lovely as it would be to boil everything down to class issues and then project that assumption out all over the globe ignoring individual issues of kin-based, religiously-based, and ethnically-based identity to say that people do what they do solely because of their class, it can't be done. At least not seriously. It's a lovely academic exercise, but theory can only go so far in history and Rodney's works illustrate that. He's a radical, black, Marxist who was living in colonial and then post-colonial Africa. It is no wonder that he prefers to analyze Africa's problems and the slave trade as solely creations of a white European, global capitalist class to a more realistic approach that would include the fact that African rulers and merchants alike were just as critical to the slave trade as were the Europeans. Not to mention that slavery was around before European arrival, African industry was not choked in the crib by European trade (actually, it can be argued that it flourished because of it), and identity within Africa at the time was far more complex than "class."

I'll still read the book, don't get me wrong. But it doesn't change the fact that I think Marxists have it all wrong, especially when it comes to history. Theory should be supplemental to an argument, not the foundation of it.