Huh, Zeitlin supported Pinochet? I'm sure Petras would be
surprised to hear that. A good friend of his for several
decades was a Pinochet supporter...Unfortunately, that's not a response,
or not a serious one. I could
likewise note that Petras thinks very highly of Zeitlin, which is probably
much more relevant in any event.
Your characterizations of Zeitlin without having read Zeitlin is
revealing. You do this rather often and at times it's revealing. You once
claimed to me that Raymond Lau's writing on Chinese political economy
during restructuring is just a bunch of Trotskyist jargon designed to
parrot Trotyskist formulations, although you had never read
anything he wrote...when anyone who reads his articles would
note that the guy hardly uses any Trotskyite jargon and sticks to class
analysis and Marxist political economy. You just imagined it, since the
guy's arguments would make you uncomfortable or other reasons I can't
figure...
Steve
On Wed, 23 May 2001, Louis Proyect wrote:
> 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/
>
>
