No. They simply had the misfortune of disagreeing with the target of Laclau's
critique, Andre Gunder Frank. Guilt by association is the main trope of this
argument, and since Laclau is now -- but not at the time of the critique -- a
self-avowed post-Marxist, this makes it possible to tar such orthodox
Marxists as Wood and Brenner with the heretical brush.
For what it is worth, the version of Laclau's essay being offered here by
Proyect [the essay was reprinted in Laclau's _Politics and Ideology in
Marxist Theory_] is a caricature. Laclau did not argue that 'third world'
economies, especially in Latin America, which was his primary focus, were
'feudalist'. Rather, arguing against the Frank position that they were
capitalist because there were part of a world market with capitalist
economies at its center in Europe and North America, he contended that third
world economies involve articulations of capitalist and pre-capitalist modes
of production. During the late 1970s and the1980s, some of the most
productive work on the history and political economy of Africa, especially
South Africa, built upon this notion of an articulation of modes of
production.
While this position clearly has implications which are inconsistent with the
simple minded Trotskyism which argues against 'stagist' theories of
revolution [ie, the notion that it might be possible to have democratic
revolutions that are not also socialist], it is clearly not a position that
'third world' economies are, in toto, pre-capitalist. Quite the contrary.
Leo Casey
United Federation of Teachers
260 Park Avenue South
New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand.
It never has, and it never will.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who
want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and
lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters.
-- Frederick Douglass --
