Philion:
>Although he is not strictly using a Brennerian analysis, probably Maurice
>Zeitlin's work on Chile is close to that, and if I'm not mistaken is a
>book written in response to Andre Gunder Frank's work on Chile.
Of course. The main supporter of Zeitlin I have run into on the Internet is
a professor in Chile who is for all practical purposes a "Marxist"
apologist for Pinochet. Here are some of his contributions to the H-Radhist
mailing list in the course of a fight with Blaut and another American
living in Chile named Chris Brady, who did a BA thesis on Leo Huberman.
These Brenneresque musings by Daitsman are enough to make you puke.
===
Chris Brady is an expert at caricaturing complex arguments into farcical
simplifications. So instead of repeating ad infinitum my points about the
socialist and capitalist revolutions in Chile and their effects on popular
consciousness, which Brady in any event seems incapable of understanding,
Let me go back to the question of early industrialization here.
Now, at this stage in the "debate" (it's actually starting to look more
like a catfight), Brady will not accept anything I write, so bear with me
for a long quote. The source is Maurice Zeitlin, _The Civil Wars in Chile
(or the bourgeois revolutions that never were)_ (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1984).
"THE DEVELOPMENT OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT
"In our own day, Chile is an 'underdeveloped' country, but from the middle
through the end of the last century it was a nation on the move
economically and developing rapidly. Chile strode the Pacific Coast of
South America as a hegemonic power. Its fertile valleys and grain mills fed
foreign flour and cereal markets, and its economy thrived on international
demand for silver and copper; its largest mines and smelters, using the
most advanced technology of the time and owned and developed by Chilean
capitalists, veritably dominated the world copper market for much of this
period. Chileans spanned their country's huge rivers with metal bridges and
crossed its length and breadth with well-paved roads and some of the
world's earliest railways. . .
Brady also claims that my argument is vitiated because I separate the
capitalist state from the bourgeoisie. Let me quote again from Zeitlin, at
length:
====
As to how capitalism arose in Europe, well I haven't read Jim's [Blaut]
book, (and in Talca I doubt I ever will...), but I have been pretty
strongly influenced by the Dobb-Sweezy and Brenner debates, and like Janis
Thiessen I tend to think Wallerstein's world system model is basically a
restatement of Sweezy's long-refuted position.
====
Popular support for Pinochet (which amounts to at least thirty percent of
the total population, and perhaps ten to fifteen percent of the working
class) comes from two sources. First, the depth of the collapse of Popular
Unity in 1973. We really do have to remember that Allende's Chilean road to
socialism failed, and failed spectacularly. US leftists tend to blame that
failure on Kissinger and the CIA, but Chileans much more realistically
attribute it to severe divisions within the Popular Unity coalition and the
nature of the class struggle in Chile. In any event, by mid-1973 the
Chilean economy was a disaster and political society was completely
polarized into two competing and mutually exclusive camps. By September,
most Chileans were worn out from three years of intense political conflict,
and more than anything else simply wanted an end to the fighting -- and to
have food back in the supermarkets. Pinochet gave them both.
====
Capitalism, with all its alienation, atomization, and class divisions
included, is nevertheless delivering to substantial portions of this
population some things they really think they want. Of course there are
voices here that question the new alignments, and in particular the Chilean
Communist Party has been articulating a critique very similar to yours. But
the CP at the moment is living one of the lowest points in its history,
with its presidential candidate garnering less than five percent of the
vote in pre-electoral polls, down from a peak of nearly fifteen percent
during Popular Unity. Of course we could spend all our time moaning about
how evil imperialist capitalism stole that beautiful Chilean experiment
from us, and then spent nearly twenty years brutally oppressing all those
wonderful, long-suffering Chilean peasants and workers. But we wouldn't
even come close to getting what really happens here if we did that.
===
Chile's average life expectancy in 1999 has been calculated at 75 years (72
for men and 78 for women). On the face of it, those are pretty good
numbers, especially considering that in the US the figure is about 77.5
(there are some small, very prosperous countries with life expectancies
over 80 years, but in most core capitalist countries it ranges from around
75 to 80 years). When you add in a little historical perspective, the
numbers are simply astounding. When Allende took office in 1970, for
example, life expectancy was 64 years; when he was overthrown in 1973, it
had risen slightly to 65. Between 1973 and 1989, it rose very little: it
reached 67 years in 1980, and wasn't much higher by the time Pinochet was
forced out of office in 1989. Under seventy years is still pretty much a
third world standard, over seventy is approaching the first world. Chile
took a huge leap in life expectancy in the 1990s, when the Concertacion
government implemented what we might call post-modern (or neo-liberal)
social democracy.
Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
