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.
Yes, because during the 19th century, Europe comprising a quarter of the world’s population.
Africa was like what Oceania is right now, lacking in population, even as a settler-colony.
The only other nations of note in size of population were India and China.
There was hardly any knowledge of these nations and those who did lived there.
Knowledge of other nations was scarce and was there, was often faulty and built upon outdated books from 2000 years ago.
People could still get away with easy swindles and mistakes would not get corrected for centuries.
But Marx was the first one to thoroughly give critique to the direction Europe was going into with the first wave of automation replacing a string of previously stable jobs and he’s now to goto person if you want to learn about communism.
And thus his work is what one can further build upon and/or critique.
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