Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement

A work of intellectual history, Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement explores the relationship between Eurocentrism, alienation, and racism, while tracing the different ideas about imperialism, colonialism, "progress", and non-European peoples as they were grappled with by revolutionaries in both the colonized and colonizing nations. Teasing out racist errors and anti-racist insights within this history, Biel reveals a century-long struggle to assert the centrality of the most exploited within the struggle against capitalism.

The roles of key figures in the Marxist-Leninist canon -- Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao -- within this struggle are explored, as are those of others whose work may be less familiar to some readers, such as Sultan Galiev, Lamine Senghor, Lin Biao, R.P. Dutt, Samir Amin, and others.

Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement was written in the context of the declining British Maoist movement of the late 1980's. As Robert Biel explains in his preface to this new edition,

"The work responded to a strong sense that the important task was to construct a Marxist theory of political economy which could reflect the real relationships in the contemporary world system. That was the constructive task but, before we could attempt it, we also had to conduct a negative task -- one of demolition: to identify and remove the blockage that stood in our way. This blockage was the thing we identified as Eurocentrism, a trend which imprisoned theory in an economistic and mechanical framework, denying the real dynamics of history in which the world outside the major European powers has always played such a major role, and does so still in the form of the liberation movements against all forms of oppression and neocolonialism.

"On the basis of the research conducted in the current book, I felt I was in a position to begin the constructive task, reflected in my book The New Imperialism (2000). In this book, I sought to show that the superficial consolidation of world capitalism (then still in a somewhat triumphalist phase) was premised on an intensification of capitalism’s fundamental contradictions -- on the destruction of human resources and the physical environment—and that the different forms of alienation highlighted by Marx are still fully present, and more specifically, that the global order remains profoundly racist. In my most recent book, The Entropy of Capitalism (2012), I have described a system now beginning to unravel under the force of these contradictions. In this sense, Eurocentrism and the Communist Movement forms the beginning of a trilogy, the more destructive and explicitly polemical part, aiming to clear the terrain."

In pursuit of this "destructive", anti-racist and anti-colonial goal, Biel has made an important contribution to understanding the development of Marxist thought in the 19th and 20th centuries, with strategic implications for our current revolutionary project: "Declining capitalism seems locked in a death-embrace with the symptoms of its own decay.