>Jim Devine wrote:
> >Please don't bother me with fictional letters from Marx. Pen-l deserves
> >better than efforts to deflect discussion with lame efforts as humor.
> >Besides, I don't care about "what Marx said" (since no thinker is totally
> >consistent and all can be quoted out of context). Instead, I see Marxian
> >political economy as a living tradition and debate in social science, not a
> >matter of dead texts.
Louis wrote:
>Sorry, I see it differently. Marx never wrote about the 'mita'. That was
>the point of my joke. The problem we are dealing with here is that all
>sorts of attempts are being made to understand such phenomena without
>engaging with Latin American history.
I've read a bit of that history. I'm not one who ignores it. But I agree
with folks like Maurice Dobb and Paul Sweezy (to name two) that having
clear concepts helps thought and understanding.
>That was the role of the scholars just mentioned by Ricardo, to understand
>this reality. It makes no sense to invoke v3 of Capital since Marx had
>virtually no knowledge of Latin American society. The mercantilism he
>discussed was not only--in distinction to his examination of the rise of
>capitalism in England in v.1--highly schematic, it was also prompted by
>the sort of relations that
>existed between Europe and China, or Europe and India, for example. To use
>this as a heuristic for understanding 16th and 17th century Peru and
>Bolivia is a dead-end.
I'd be convinced that it was a dead end if you actually attacked Marx's
theory of merchant capital. This could be done on the basis of facts (e.g.,
that conditions in Peru and Bolivia actually fit "full-blown capitalism" as
Marx defined it) or logic (e.g., that Marx's distinction between incomplete
forms of capital such as merchant capital and full-blown industrial
capitalism is incoherent[*]) or methodology (e.g., Marx's analysis of
full-blown capitalism leaves out major considerations -- for example,
sexism and gender issues -- that are crucial to understanding the issues
at hand).
But you water down and undermine the credibility of your more scholarly
criticisms, by insulting people like Wood and Brenner, exaggerating or
misrepresenting their perspectives, making patently false accusations (that
Brenner stole from Laclau) or making crude jokes (like comparing Wood to
Woody Allen).
Whatever one says about academia -- and much or even most of it is really
f*cked up -- your main kind of attack is not officially accepted as
reasonable argumentation. There are many too many deviations from the
official standards, but I think the standards are worth applying,
especially if the goal is to gain greater understanding -- something that
should help political practice -- rather than to win debating points.
[*] A few years ago on pen-l, Gil Skillman attacked Marx's distinction
between merchant capitalism and industrial capitalism as incoherent. His
emphasis was really on the porous boundary between usury (money-lending
capital) and industrial capital (arguing that even pure money-lenders with
no monopoly or monopsony power can exploit non-proletarian direct producers
simply by lending them money), but if his argument works, then the merchant
capital/industrial capital boundary also collapses.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine
