Notes to Bill Martin’s “Eurocentrically Distorted Communication”

• “Capitalism has been for many decades now a global economy, one that brings
the entire world under a single system of production. To only concentrate on the
supposedly ‘up’ side of the global equation, the welfare net that has existed in the
‘Western democracies’ (and that is now eroding or being dismantled, of course)
since the Second World War, is not to deal with the human cost of the equation
when understood in properly global terms” (Perspectives on Habermas 414)
o “When we shift to that scale, we see that neither is it possible to simply
talk about the ‘extension’ of what the West has achieved to the Third
World, any more than it is possible to talk about the extensions of the
benefits enjoyed by the slavemaster to the slave, nor is it possible to
understand the Third World as ‘simply other’ when it has been forcibly
brought under the rule of the West’s cash nexus” (414)
• “Eurocentric theorists tend to see the self-development of humanity as occurring
at (or from) the ‘center,’ that is, in Europe. Habermas may have cast off the
philosophy of history, but that does not mean that he has abandoned the idea that
Europe is the staging ground for all of the political developments that matter (to
him, at any rate)” (418)
• “in terms of the crucial ethical dimension of any redemptive politics that aims
toward justice on a global scale, there is neither East nor West” (418)
• “Critical theory, insomuch as this term applies to the legacy of the Frankfurt
School or theorists working out of Habermas’s framework, has shown no interest
in the response of Third World peoples to the ‘issues’ posed to them by the West.
But will they recognize the issues themselves, and see that, on the underside of
Europe and its idea, in the margins of European ‘universalism,’ people have been
struggling to frame these issues and to practically and theoretically engage with
them? It seems to me that this struggle can once again be understood in broadly
Hegelian terms, as the reconstruction of ethical and political universalism in the
margins of the dominant culture and polities” (418)
• “If there is some structure that stands in the way of treating persons as ends-in-
themselves, then all rational agents have an obligation to do something about that
structure. If some agents are more responsible for the existence of the structure,
and perhaps even gain some benefit by perpetuating the structure, then those
agents have a special responsibility with regard to the structure” (419)
o “If I say that I want to hear what you are saying, but there is a wall
between you and me, then, if I really do want to hear you, I’d better do
something about that wall” (419)
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