Michael channeling Ellen Meiksins Wood:
>debates about it, would survive. I very much doubt that he would
>have
>appreciated attempts by "friends" to stifle discussion of his
>ideas.
Look, Comrade Wood. The problem is not you. The problem is Brenner. He knew
that Blaut was raising hell all over the Internet. Brenner received copies
of many of the germane posts, but never deigned to answer Blaut on any of
these mailing lists, including PEN-L. He must have been afraid of being
shown up. Perhaps you should sub to PEN-L so we can get a chance to review
the errors in your ATC article, particularly with respect to the Irish
question.
Whether or not you descend from Mt. Olympus, I do plan to get back to your
ATC article after I've had a chance to do a little detour on "dependency"
theory, which was attacked in a side-bar in Brenner's NLR article from
disco days. It helps to put things into context to understand these fights
with ECLA, Furtado, Cardoso, Cuevas, Laclau et al. (I should mention that
Mexico, where Cuevas operated from, was never friendly to "dependency"
theory. It appears that the major luminaries on the academic left were
refugees from Franco's Spain. The stagist ideological fountains they drank
from were presumably the same as those from which Christopher Hill and E.J.
Hobsbawm partook.)
The more I look at the whole debate and the better I understand the
participants and where they are coming from, the better equipped I am to
take the "orthodox" Marxism of people like Brenner, Genovese and Laclau apart.
Fundamentally, the debate is about "stages" with the "orthodox" side
attempting a very sophisticated version of Marx's 1850s Herald Tribune
articles. We are dealing with a poorly theorized early version of
historical materialism that gave utterance to such formulations as "The
railways system will therefore become, in India, truly the forerunner of
modern industry." When formulations such as this were generalized in
Kautsky's Marxism and then enshrined in the Comintern,
Marxism--particularly in Latin America--had to struggle to define itself as
a revolutionary current. Castro said that unless the revolution was
socialist, it would fail. Whatever errors A.G. Frank has made over the
years, this was his original belief as well, no matter what risk of
"autarky" (Brenner's infelicitous term) was incurred.
What could have provoked Brenner's attack on the MR dependency theorists,
who took their cue from Sweezy and Baran? Was it how to interpret 15th
century British society or was it a need to supersede the kind of "third
worldist" orientation expressed in this 1963 call by Sweezy and Huberman
after returning from Cuba?
"The only possible revolution in Latin America today is a socialist
revolution.
"The notion that there is a powerful national bourgeoisie in these
countries anxious to break away from US domination . . . is unfortunately a
myth.
"There can be no doubt that Latin America needs and is ripe for socialist
revolution, not at some distant date in the future but right now.
"We did not meet a single serious leftist in Latin America who is not an
ardent supporter of the Cuban Revolution . . . There is just one thing that
worries them, the extent to which Cuba in resisting the US, may have fallen
under the domination of the Soviet Union."
Long live this kind of dependency theory.
Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
