As should be obvious by now, much of the material that I have been
forwarding material is connected to major debates within Marxism, such
as underconsumption/overaccumulation, dependency theory/Brenner
critique, etc. This was not my original intention, but I have become
persuaded that this is a good way to approach the material. Keep in mind
that much of Marx and Lenin’s writings specifically arose in the context
of a debate. I would also say that much of my training in Marxism,
except for the occasional classes organized by the theory-bereft SWP,
took place through my exposure to debates in the party.
Although the late Bill Warren is a pretty obscure figure today, he
generated a lot of attention in the early 1970s when he wrote a 66 page
article in the September-October 1973 New Review titled “Imperialism and
Capitalist Industrialization” that argued that imperialism was dying out
in the 3rd world under the impact of local industrial development. In
other words, capitalism was basically playing a progressive role in
places like Brazil, India, Nigeria, etc. The end result of this
development would be something approximating Thomas Friedman’s “The
World is Flat” thesis.
As counter-intuitive as all this seems, there have always been bits and
pieces of the Marxist classics that people like Warren could have
appealed to. For example, Karl Marx wrote “The country that is more
developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of
its own future” in the preface to V. 1 of Capital (1867 German Edition).
Nearly 50 years later Leon Trotsky would write in “Third International
After Lenin”:
"In contrast to the economic systems which preceded it, capitalism
inherently and constantly aims at economic expansion, at the penetration
of new territories, the surmounting of economic differences, the
conversion of self-sufficient provincial and national economies into a
system of financial interrelationships. Thereby it brings about their
rapprochment and equalizes the economic and cultural levels of the most
progressive and the most backward countries. Without this main process,
it would be impossible to conceive of the levelling out, first, of
Europe with Great Britain, and then, of America with Europe; the
industrialization of the colonies, the diminishing gap between India and
Great Britain."
Since Warren’s article is so long, it would not be useful for me to
forward the entire item. However, I will include some key passages from
it as well as some rejoinders that appeared in the New Left Review. For
those of you who have a particular interest in the topic, contact me
offlist and I will be happy to send you the entire article(s).
Before proceeding, I would like to sketch out the political and
historical context in which Warren’s ideas were put forward. To start
with, Warren was a member of British and Irish Communist Organization
(B&ICO, often referred to simply as BICO), a split from the Irish
Communist Group in 1965 that adhered to various aspects of Stalinist and
Maoist orthodoxy with some rather odd innovations, the most
controversial of which was opposition to the Northern Irish Catholic
struggle. They argued from a workerist perspective that was reminiscent
of the CPUSA’s hostility to Malcolm X in the early 1960s.
In my view, it is no accident that both Warren and Robert Brenner were
hostile to dependency theory, the only thing separating them
ideologically was Warren’s going whole hog in favor of capitalism. Both
were convinced that capitalism would be diffused from the more advanced
countries to the less advanced ones, a view that owes much to the
Communist Party’s intellectual traditions. In Warren’s case, you are
dealing with a rather unmediated acceptance of Stalin-era stagism. With
Brenner, you are getting an analysis that is heavily in debt to the
Communist Party Historians Group that included such highly respected
figures as Maurice Dobb, Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm and E. P.
Thompson. No matter how brilliant their scholarship, all of them was
wedded to the idea that history proceeds through stages. Since Dobb was
a primary influence on Robert Brenner, it is easy to understand why he
would have such a strong reaction against a figure like Andre Gunder
Frank who was so deeply influenced by Fidel Castro’s crypto-Trotskyist
call for socialist revolution throughout Latin America even though
conditions might not have ripened (in other words, an industrial
proletariat had not been formed yet.) I say this despite the fact that
Brenner has professed sympathy for Trotsky’s ideas in his NLR article.
Politics is complicated, after all.
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/11/18/bill-warrens-folly/
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