Palgrave-McMillan, an academic publisher, has just come out with
Rethinking Capitalism: a Study of Capitalist Rule for only $95. As
a long-time observer of the ironies of anti-capitalist manifestos
with such capitalistic price tags, I have to give credit to the
authors—John Milios and Dimitris P. Sotiropolous—for putting it on
the internet as well.
Since the book was cited in a debate over imperialism on the
Marxism list recently, I felt obligated to read it from cover to
cover, especially since it was billed as a frontal assault on
Lenin’s Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism and the
Monthly Review or dependency school of Marxism that included Andre
Gunder Frank, Samir Amin et al. I tend to identify with MR even if
I find the “anti-imperialist” posturing of MRZine an
embarrassment. Suffice it to say that nothing has ever appeared in
the print edition that remotely resembles the apologetics for
Ahmadinejad on MRZine.
To begin with, there is something a bit odd about such a book
coming out at this point, so late in the game, since for all
practical purposes the dependency school is dead as a doornail.
The simple truth is that the academic left decided long ago that
Frank, Amin and company were fuddy-duddies who did not understand
Marxism. The younger and hipper academics were determined to get
rid of notions about “core” and “periphery” and put the emphasis
back on class. Key to this was Robert Brenner’s article in the
July-August 1977 New Left Review that concluded:
From this perspective, it is impossible to accept Frank’s view,
adopted by Wallerstein, that the capitalist ‘development of
underdevelopment’ in the regions colonized by Europeans from the
sixteenth century—especially the Caribbean, South America and
Africa, as well as the southern part of North America—is
comprehensible as a direct result of the incorporation of these
regions within the world market, their ‘subordination’ to the
system of capital accumulation on a world scale. Frank originally
explained this rise of underdevelopment largely in terms of the
transfer of surplus from periphery to core, and the
export-dependent role assigned to the periphery in the world
division of labour. These mechanisms clearly capture important
aspects of the functioning reality of underdevelopment. But they
explain little, for, as the more searching critics of Frank’s
earlier formulations pointed out, they themselves need to be
explained. In particular, it was stated, they needed to be rooted
in the class and productive structures of the periphery.
In journals such as Latin American Perspectives, the assault on
dependency theory continued. Scholar after scholar, invoking
Robert Brenner, called for a return to Marxism and an end to such
fuzzy notions as “core” and “periphery”.
The late Jim Blaut, my old friend Jim Blaut who wrote The
Eurocentric Model of the World, had a political explanation for
the turn against Frank and company:
Robert Brenner is one of the most widely known of Euro-Marxist
historians. His influence stems from the fact that he supplied a
crucial piece of doctrine at a crucial time. Just after the end of
the Vietnam War, radical thought was strongly oriented toward the
Third World and its struggles, strongly influenced by Third-World
theorists like Cabral, Fanon, Guevara, James, Mao, and Nkrumah,
and thus very much attracted to theories of social development
which tend to displace Europe from its pivotal position as the
center of social causation and social progress, past and present.
Euro-Marxism of course disputed this, and Euro-Marxists, while
strong in their support of present-day liberation struggles,
nonetheless insisted as they always had done that the struggles
and changes taking place in the center of the system, the European
world, are the true determinants of world historical changes;
socialism will rise in the heartlands of advanced European
capitalism, or perhaps everywhere all at once; but socialism will
certainly not arrive first in the backward, laggard, late-maturing
Third World.
Milios and Sotiropolous (referred to hereafter as M&S) are more
ambitious than Brenner and his acolytes. By singling out Lenin as
the source of all this theoretical confusion, they follow
Commander James T. Kirk and go “Where No Man Has Gone Before”.
Well, bully for them to have the audacity to challenge Lenin. If
anything, Marxism needs more iconoclasm than ever, given the
doctrinaire cult formations that speak in its name.
Of course, it is not sufficient to be an iconoclast. You also have
to be right.
full article:
http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2010/06/09/critiquing-a-critique-of-lenin/
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
