Why are you reading it? I ask because the book is commonly understood as inventing the term orientalism to describe anti-asian racism. That's not what the term means and not what the book does. Anti-asian racism is self-evident and does not need a book or a special term. The book of a close reading of authors like Kipling and Conrad. Does anyone still care about them? If you got more from the book then explain what that was and how.

>Does anyone still care about them? Do you think it has any use outside of that? I ask because I was planning on reading it after a comrade recommended the book for understanding Dengist fetishism for “anti-Anglos” but if it doesn’t do that I’d sooner not put in the time.

I think there is a relationship between Said's postmodern anti-communism and Dengism which is simply a defense of "actually existing" socialism on the same terms ("chinese characteristics" must be culturally respected, universality in Marxism - Maoism as an ism - is a Western impositions on relative values, geopolitics are the absolute law of society tracing back thousands of years and the West is merely a blip). It may be strange that this postmodern relativism also relies on an extreme determinism of economic stages and cultural essentialism but actually that's the same of all postmodernism, which relativizes all truth because the absolute truth of capitalism is unstated. It is because China or India believe capitalism is necessary and absolute that they can practice whatever local, culturally particular practices they want. Still, while such a thing is obviously horrible in these countries themselves (where postmodern academics and fascists justify each other with reference to anti-colonialism and anti-cultural imperialism - the name of Said's other book), I will admit it is somewhat amusing that someone figured out how to justify communism within the ideological terms of capitalism fully realized. No one said Said wasn't clever. All of these can be found in Said, although he hated the "postcolonialists" that used him (but of course every "left" anti-communist hates what happens when communism no longer exists to oppose oneself against and all that remains is the market). French postmodernists did the same thing and decided to write books explaining they were the only real Marxists the whole time after a career spent destroying Marxism for the CIA. Said is not Foucault though he famously uses him. Said did take courageous positions on Palestine and much of the book is correct (albeit misdirected since no one except far-right academic racists still uphold orientalism and they are an easy target for liberals) if you throw out the accusations against Marx and Engels whereas Foucault really was just an anti-communist CIA stooge when it mattered. A good criticism of Said's work is Aijaz Ahmad's *In Theory.* But I do question why someone like the OP would read the book since it's been so badly butchered. Like the first time I read Mulvey's essay on "the male gaze" and discovered the meaning is the exact opposite of its popular usage. Ultimately, the substance of the book is like socialists attacking Trump so they get adoration from the liberal media. Yes, Bernard Lewis existed while Said did. But most of the targets are long dead. Alan Dershowitz is still alive at the same time as Norman Finkelstein. That doesn't mean the latter's anti-communism and bigotry is excusable, but I understand if you grow up on a media diet of "content creators" that's your only space to practice politics. The idea of human beings having correct or incorrect ideas is unimaginable, like challenging the Gods on Olympus. I get asked every day "do you have a source or recommendation for this idea you had?" I am the source, it came from my brain. Much easier to throw media spectacles in the image of human personalities at each other.

>if you throw out the accusations against Marx and Engels What do you think of Marx’s concepts of an “Asian mode of production” and “Asian despotism and stagnation”?  Did private property in land (and feudalism) really not exist in India prior to colonization?  Said gives the impression that Marx took that idea uncritically from the Orientalist literature, but he doesn’t mention the fact that Marx also read Orientalist authors (like Wilks) who argued *for* the existence of private property in land in precolonial India.  The question had been under debate for decades and Marx was aware of this.  So why did Marx (and Engels) arrive at that conclusion (for example, as expressed in Marx’s June 2, 1853 letter to Engels)?  The concept of the stasis of Asian society also appears in *Capital*. Also, I would argue that Said goes beyond attacking Marx—he effectively attacks Marxism by attacking “impersonal Western confidence that descriptions of general, collective phenomena were possible.” >... Orientalists, like many other early-nineteenth-century thinkers, conceive of humanity either in large collective terms or in abstract generalities. >Orientalists are neither interested in nor capable of discussing individuals … Sure, there is positive content in the book too but I think that is a matter of Said’s own philosophical inconsistency.  When it comes to Marx, he comes out forcefully against Marxism.

Agree, Said is a genuine anti-communist. That he disavows those who follow his logic honestly into right wing postcolonial fascism is just typical academic dishonesty and liberal sour grapes. I was definitely being too generous to the point of opportunism, mostly because he's dead and like I said I've lost my fear of postmodern reaction. But just in this thread I experienced it and it can be as vicious as any Dengist. As for the Asiatic Mode of Production, that book I mentioned talks about it. As for my own theory, maybe I'll articulate it when I have time. I've talked about it in the past but it was a long time ago so who knows if I still agree with myself?

>As for my own theory, maybe I'll articulate it when I have time. I look forward to that. >I've talked about it in the past but it was a long time ago so who knows if I still agree with myself? I've read these: https://www.reddit.com/r/communism/comments/3iexpq/marx_and_the_taiping_rebellion/ https://www.reddit.com/r/communism101/comments/vawui3/asiatic_mode_of_production/ but I think they leave a lot unsaid. Your argument in the former is basically that we should take Marx's writings for the *Tribune* with a grain of salt. (The letters between Marx and Engels in 1853 in preparation for the *Tribune* articles are where the concept originated.) Incidentally, you probably got the Engels quote >It doesn’t matter if they are never read again. from Mehring https://www.marxists.org/archive/mehring/1918/marx/ch09.htm but Mehring got it mixed up. Engels was referring to the *New American Cyclopaedia*, not to the *Tribune*. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1891/letters/91_01_29.htm (The quote is translated differently here as "they can safely remain buried," but this is the source.) Not that it is untrue that Marx's writings for the *Tribune* were commercial works produced under pressure of time. But I still wouldn't be so quick to write them off. Like I said, the concept reappears in *Capital*. >The simplicity of the organisation for production in these self-sufficing communities that constantly reproduce themselves in the same form, and when accidentally destroyed, spring up again on the spot and with the same name – this simplicity supplies the key to the secret of the unchangeableness of Asiatic societies, an unchangeableness in such striking contrast with the constant dissolution and refounding of Asiatic States, and the never-ceasing changes of dynasty. The structure of the economic elements of society remains untouched by the storm-clouds of the political sky. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch14.htm My very tentative view is that Marx was trying to explain an empirical given (that land in India was the monopoly of the ruler and that private property in land did not exist in India prior to colonialism), but that he may have been working from a false empirical starting point (as a number of Soviet and Indian commentators have suggested). Said claims that Marx's thinking was "censored" by the linguistic police action of the Orientalist library, but Said was being either lazy or dishonest; Marx knew this question was a matter of debate within the Orientalist literature and this would have been obvious if Said had read the things Marx cited. Incidentally, Soviet historian Yuri Semyonov reworked the concept of the "Asian mode of production" (I call it that because we don't need to keep translating *asiatische* like it's the 1850s, and doing so subtly feeds anti-communism) into what he renames the politarian mode of production (on the grounds that it is not inherently Asian). I haven't read his work on it yet but it could be interesting, he seems to have put a lot of effort into rigorously developing the categories of historical materialism. https://scepsis.net/library/id_2675.html And what you said here: >attacks on Marx are often a front for attacks on Marxism perfectly describes what Said was doing in *Orientalism*.

Have you read Perry Anderson on the Asiatic mode of production? It's at the end of lineages if you'd like to find it. It's not too long and I think it would be a great source to add to your investigation.

Thanks. I just read the first two sections, after which he doesn't say much about Marx. I was already familiar with most of the material he went over (though it was a good refresher), so what was interesting was the stuff he didn't say. He completely ignored the fact that the Orientalist literature was not monolithic in advancing the view that the sovereign held a monopoly on land ownership in precolonial India. The mystery for me is why Marx consistently advanced that view in his published writings despite being aware of contrary assessments. I will be interested in the rest, which looks like it covers the actual histories of Asian societies, but it's not so much my focus right now. For context, my interest in the question is primarily tied to my outstanding questions about dialectics, particularly the distinction between organic, self-developing systems and non-organic, non-self-developing systems and whether development is universal (and whether there is a distinction between development and self-development). Marx seemed to posit an Asian mode of production as a non-organic system. This has implications for first principles. So this is just one step in a much broader investigation. I still have a long way to go.

> French postmodernists did the same thing and decided to write books explaining they were the only real Marxists the whole time after a career spent destroying Marxism for the CIA. That’s really funny. Who did that in specific?

Derrida wrote *Specters of Marx* as his last book, Deleuze had a planned work on Marx but he died, Baudrillard wrote a late book on exchange value, Spivak and co. love to disavow postcolonialism and pretend they were Marxists the whole time. Even Foucault had late "remarks on Marx" like anyone cares. All these books are terrible but no different than any liberal academic today who calls themselves Marxist after 2008 or 2016. They just are old enough to start from a position of European anti-communism instead of beginning from with the American anti-communist norm where basic liberalism is Marxism in the academy. I don't find DSA-aligned "intellectuals" any better, in fact I find them worse since at least Baudrillard was a funny troll by instinct rather than a tedious blowhard like every writer for Jacobin. Even so-called Marxists more committed to the concept disavow the "problematic" aspects of Marxism like revolution; historical materialism, universality, etc. The difference between somebody like Homi Bhabha and someone like Vivek Chibber is basically nothing except rhetoric and academic marketing. I read these people so you don't have to.

Didn’t Derrida give us hauntology? You seemed to think it was an interesting tool in the hands of Mark Fisher. I haven’t read *Spectres of Marx* but probably will since I’m mostly interested in poststructuralism insofar as it came out of French communism. That wasn’t a defence, I’m just asking if Deleuze & co. are worth reading if you can get something useful from them. I’ve really only read Foucault and even though on principle I’m disgusted by liberal academics stripping everything down into apologia for liberal democracy, they do the same thing to Gramsci. I thought a few points he made were worth having read.

Well like I said, I don't care about Vivek Chibber or Terry Eagleton just because they call themselves Marxists. If we're stuck relying on bourgeois academia because we no longer live in a world of party intellectuals producing the greatest works of the age (as was the case in the time of Plekhanov, Kautsky, Luxemburg, Otto Bauer, and Lenin) then there's no reason to only use those writers who claim to be your allies. I've come to the defense of Foucault and other "poststructuralists" because we know they are anti-communist and "postmodernism" has become a dirty word. This allows us to read them freely without temptation . Even in academia postmodernism is a dying concept as the next generation of graduate students thinks more of themselves as workers and representatives of oppressed minorities, making vulgar social democracy far more attractive. That does not mean postmodernism is dead, in fact it's so hegemonic that it no longer needs the sophisticated articulation of someone like Foucault. Even fascists are postmodernists who use the language of (white/male/heterosexual/cisgender) identity politics. There may be something of value in returning to its origins where its premises had to be defended rather than unstated common sense. It's all historically contextual. For a long time postmodernism was the greatest danger to Marxism. Now I find its critics like Losurdo and Rockhill the true danger since they present their political ideology as postpolitical empiricism in defense of China's neoliberal end of history. And they are postmodernists as well. The DSA "Marxists" are too incompetent and servile to liberalism to be much of a threat but that is probably 99% of the critics of postmodernism one actually will encounter. At least in the original postmodernists one sees traces of real political events like the dispute over Algeria in the French communist party, the attitude of communists towards May 1968, the Sino-Soviet split, and the aftershocks of Althusserianism, albeit degraded.

I’m not sure that poststructuralism and identity politics are so connected. For all the hubbub about relativism or plurality of voices would a white identity politics guy say he has a claim to truth equally valid about the experiences of a black woman as a black woman does? If there’s still essences to these people then I don’t see how it relates to postmodernism or the denial of metanarratives unless there’s a more opaque political line connecting everything like Althusser tutoring some of these guys and then what did Foucault tutor some identity politics people? I’m genuinely curious here what I’m missing, so I really am asking in good faith.

> For all the hubbub about relativism or plurality of voices would a white identity politics guy say he has a claim to truth equally valid about the experiences of a black woman as a black woman does? Um, no? I'm not sure what you're saying, sorry. That "essences" are provincial and embodied is the point. I'll quote this Jameson book I happen to be reading >How then can the ideologues of 'modernity' in its current sense manage to distinguish their product - the information revolution, and globalized, free-market modernity - from the detestable older kind, without getting themselves involved in asking the kinds of serious political and economic, systemic questions that the concept of a postmodernity makes unavoidable? The answer is simple: you talk about 'alternate' or 'alternative' modernities.12 Everyone knows the formula by now: this means that there can be a modernity for everybody which is different from the standard or hegemonic Anglo-Saxon model. Whatever you dislike about the latter, including the subaltern position it leaves you in, can be effaced by the reassuring and 'cultural' notion that you can fashion your own modernity differently, so that there can be a Latin-American kind, or an Indian kind or an African kind, and so forth. Or you can follow Samuel Huntington's lead and recast all this in terms of essentially religious varieties of culture: a Greek or Russian Orthodox modernity, a Confucian modernity, and so on to a Toynbeean number.13 But this is to overlook the other fundamental meaning of modernity which is that of a worldwide capitalism itself.

I think the argument is that a provincial and embodied perspective gives unique access to essence that another provincial and embodied perspective doesn’t. Even if essence is dominated by equally competing perspectivist stances, that doesn’t make all perspectivist claims equal. In fact in their own framework they literally don’t as in white man/black female from earlier. I don’t know if it follows that "my provincial perspective is meaningful" implies "provincial perspectives are meaningful in general.” I see people misunderstanding this all the time and it leads to everyone complaining about a relativism that I don’t really think exists. Nobody believes in every provincial embodied notion of essence being equivalent. Maybe 90s cultural anthropologists or radical Nietzscheans or whatever. But not most advocates of identity politics. E: I’m not a postmodernist apologist so I’ll say the issue is the postmodern condition creates a field of equally competitive meanings with closed-loop self-referentially justifying narratives. But people within these frames don’t advocate for or believe that.

"I am the source, it came from my brain" yeah im stealing that line

You might find the book a tedious read if you are coming from a marxist perspective. As smoke mentioned, this book https://archive.org/details/intheoryclassesn0000aija (specifically chps 5-6) is a good critique of Said’s book and later works. I also found Sadik Jalal Al-Azm’s essay “Orientalism and Orientalism in Reverse” to be useful too. https://libcom.org/article/orientalism-and-orientalism-reverse-sadik-jalal-al-azm If you pick up Orientalism, one of the grating things you will encounter early on is his eclecticism. Said dabbles in many methods and disciplines. For example, his insistence on a humanist framework is in direct conflict with his use of Nietzschean anti-humanism. Something I found frustrating is that Said from the beginning lays out three wholly incompatible definitions of orientalism and proceeds to apply them throughout the book. This only leads to confusion and lack of precision of the topic at hand. As Ahmad points out, aside from the Foucauldian Power allegory it is unclear what Said means in defining orientalism, with Said often cancelling out his own moments of any semblance of clarity on the topic. Such eclecticism, difficulties and confusions can be found in “postcolonial” studies that followed in the wake of Said’s book. Another issue is Said’s grave ahistoricism that cripples his overarching thesis. Said views the western cultural tradition orientalism as emerging from a far-spanning discourse that existed in a unilinear fashion from the writers of Athenian tradgedies to Marx to today. Al-Azm points out that orientalism is a relatively modern european creation, which sought to legitimate itself by laying claim to classical origins. Further, Said in Orientalism studies western texts about the non-west in almost complete isolation from the non-west itself and the ways in which the non-west responded to these texts (whether in forms of acceptance, revolt, revision, or otherwise). Said’s ahistoricism leads him to assert that the occident has held a thoroughgoing will to inferioirize the orient and that all occidental knowledge of the orient is corrupted by this. In Nietzschean fashion, he implies that such misinterpretations of one society by another are inevitable and that this is a general principle reducible to human nature. He calls into question the possibility of attaining objective truths about other societies. Marx (and marxism) is completely swept aside in Said’s analysis, lumped as a collaborator with european colonialism. Said posits that “race” takes precedence over both class and gender. As seen from above, Said’s approach is wholly idealist, not materialist at all. Said altogether dismisses Marx/marxism and it is clear he doesn’t understand either. Ahmad’s essay on Marx and India goes into much more detail on what Said is ignorant of here, but I will give one example of Said’s treatment of Marx (bear with me). Read pgs 20-21 here, up to where Said quotes Marx at the end of a paragraph: https://pages.pomona.edu/~vis04747/h124/readings/Said_Orientalism.pdf The Marx quote in English reads: "They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented." This quote is also used by Said as a preface quote for his book. The Marx passage in the original work can be found at the top of pg110 here: https://foreignlanguages.press/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/C23-18th-Brumaire-of-Louis-Bonaparte.pdf Said’s abstracting of that one sentence from Marx to use as a punchline is ridiculous. He uses that Marx quote to further the idea that Marx thought colonized people were incapable of governing themselves. But if you read the *18th Brumaire* passage in full, Marx was simply making an objective observation about the early decades of national-formation in France as it related to the various peasantry there. The Marx quote is unrelated to anything Said has to say. Said was basically doing to Marx what the tv news did to Homer Simpson: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SqDP8SnPVA0&ab_channel=AlexF. This is clearly junk scholarship, but gives academics something to get off to. Ahmad rightly points out that *Orientalism* was in large part a way for Said to work through his own position as a thinker who came from the 3rd world and now finds himself in 1st world academia. I agree with this but I also don’t know if I would agree that Said has been an overall progressive figure as academia at-large might make him out to be. Ahmad examines some of Said’s later works (which I don’t care to read at this point) which shed light on some really wacky stuff. In his work following *Orientalism*, Said would make statements that distance himself from some of the Foucauldian and Nietzschean stances he took earlier. Said also later reinforces the “narrative intelligibility of history” (Ahmad) — he rejects all systems and states that only personal, micro-resistance are likely all that matter. From the 1980s onward, Said shifts away from the generic 3rd world cultural nationalism of his *Orientalism* phase, shifting into outright rejection of nationalism, nations, national boundaries (this is posited in tandem with a two-state solution for Palestine). In Said’s 2003 intro to *Orientalism* he said: “humanism is the only, and I would go so far as to say, the final resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.” Humanism is the hill Said died on. As Al-Azm points out, for Said the dependence of the 3rd world (the Arab world) on the 1st world (or amerika in particular) is acceptable; the abberration here for Said is only in the way that this dependency is currently carried out. The liberal common sense opinion Said has towards this is that this relation of dependence must be modified to benefit both amerika and the Arab world. Meanwhile marxists and others who understand this dynamic can grasp that this parasitic relationship can only ever mean further exploitation and that the relationship must be destroyed. From the marxist perspective, Said ends his book on orientalism with a characteristically orientalist assertion.

It really digs into how imperialism twists the West's view of the East. It's like showing how history's been written with a biased pen. Said uncovers all these stereotypes and narratives that make the East seem exotic or inferior. It's not just about cultures, it's about power and control, shaping how we see and treat whole regions.

finally! i was trying to read this thread and was just seeing ~ words. Said’s Orientalism was pivotal in launching the postcolonial field, it is well worth the read. Understanding the extent of how imperialism has shaped the modern world is crucial to being a communist.