Stephen E Philion wrote:
> Well, if that is Henwood's argument, it's not that far from Frantz Fanon,
> who argued that advanced capitalist countries frequently set conditions
> for investment on newly decolonized countries that keep them from being
> able to experience development *and* if they refused they would be faced
> with the very real threat of withdrawl altogether of financial assistance
> (which Fanon also felt they were owed from the advanced cap. world as
> reparations for years of pilfering of colonial economies...).
Wait a minute, whoa. Fanon gets a lot of (IMHO) entirely undeserved flak because of
his alleged lack of centre-periphery focus. It would be good to have a seminar about
Fanon. People talk about him in thought-bites and only half remember what they read
years ago. Fanon was an entirely consistent fighter against colonialism and is a
giant of our movement. Doug Henwood is not that. He is a pygmy. The problem with
Henwood is not that he argues like/unalike Fanon (or anyone else), it's that he
contradicts himself, does both often at the same time, and is politically
inconsistent. Empirical accuracy used as a camouflage for wild opportunism is an old
trick of Anglo-Saxon scholarship and should not mislead us. You cannot debate
empirical opportunism, because it is a true wilderness of mirrors, a political bog
and a haven for the worst kinds of self-seeking leftwing careerism. And this is
something we ought to have settled accounts with by now, and must do if we are to
develop.
We shall have to take on board all the things which are flowing out of Porto Alegre,
and find the ways to participate more actvely, and decisively, in the movement it
embodies/represents: a movement which is characterised by a tacit alliance between
the compliant petit-bourgeois socialism of acadameics, and the lumpenised
semi-proletariat of the megacities who are now *also* firmly in the *political*
sights of the emergent, post-neoliberal Davos Consensus. These things are connected.
The bitterest and most decisive struggles against petit-bourgeois socialism will be
necessary and while I agree we should be comradely, we should also be extremely
serious and decisive in combating petit-bourgeois socialism.
Mark
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