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On 12/10/14 3:41 AM, Ed George via Marxism wrote:
In addition to this, insofar as it does address ‘what capitalism is’,
how it comes into being, how it operates, how it might be superseded,
the debate and the issues it raises are of practical importance now for
Marxists (and for people who might not think of themselves as Marxists)
but who are engaged in the struggle for a better – non/post-capitalist –
world.
I think the most forceful explanation of the political ramifications
came from Brenner himself in a NLR article )even if it is totally
wrongheaded), unfortunately behind a paywall. The final two paragraphs
state:
Most directly, of course, the notion of the ‘development of
underdevelopment’ opens the way to third-worldist ideology. From the
conclusion that development occurred only in the absence of links with
accumulating capitalism in the metropolis, it can be only a short step
to the strategy of semi-autarkic socialist development. Then the utopia
of socialism in one country replaces that of the bourgeois
revolution—one moreover, which is buttressed by the assertion that the
revolution against capitalism can come only from the periphery, since
the proletariat of the core has been largely bought off as a consequence
of the transfer of surplus from the periphery to the core. Such a
perspective must tend to minimize the degree to which any significant
national development of the productive forces depends today upon a close
connection with the international division of labour (although such
economic advance is not, of course, determined by such a connection). It
must, consequently, tend to overlook the pressures to external political
compromise and internal political degeneration bound up with that
involvement in—and dependence upon—the capitalist world market which is
necessary for development. Such pressures are indeed present from the
start, due to the requirement to extract surpluses for development, in
the absence of advanced means of production, through the methods of
increasing absolute surplus labour.
On the other hand, this perspective must also minimize the extent to
which capitalism’s post-war success in developing the productive forces
specific to the metropolis provided the material basis for (though it
did not determine) the decline of radical working-class movements and
consciousness in the post-war period. It must consequently minimize the
potentialities opened up by the current economic impasse of capitalism
for working-class political action in the advanced industrial countries.
Most crucially, perhaps, this perspective must tend to play down the
degree to which the concrete inter-relationships, however tenuous and
partial, recently forged by the rising revolutionary movements of the
working class and oppressed peoples in Portugal and Southern Africa may
be taken to mark a break—to foreshadow the rebirth of international
solidarity. The necessary interdependence between the revolutionary
movements at the ‘weakest link’ and in the metropolitan heartlands of
capitalism was a central postulate in the strategic thinking of Lenin,
Trotsky and the other leading revolutionaries in the last great period
of international socialist revolution. With regard to this basic
proposition, nothing has changed to this day.
---
In other words, Brenner's article was an attack on the Monthly Review
and everything it stood for. The article is filled with arrogant
dismissals of Paul Sweezy and all the people who contributed to a third
worldist orientation over the years, including Andre Gunder Frank who
despite whatever theoretical differences I had with him was a
revolutionary to the marrow of his bones.
Meanwhile, Brenner--despite his fire-breathing radical rhetoric--urged a
vote for Kerry in 2004. (http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/379)
For those who have been on Marxmail for a while and the list that
preceded it, you are probably aware that I became motivated to examine
these issues after running into Jim Blaut, a former subscriber who died
in 2000.
Blaut devoted a chapter to Brenner in 8 Eurocentric Historians, the
second in planned trilogy that was cut short by his death. The last
installment was to be a proposal on how to do history that was not
Eurocentric.
Fortunately, that chapter can be read online here:
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/Blaut/brenner.htm. These are the
opening paragraphs:
Robert Brenner is a Marxist, a follower of one tradition in Marxism
that is as diffusionist, as Eurocentric, as most conservative positions.
I cannot here offer an explanation for this curious phenomenon: a
