>So in essence, Blaut crticizes Brenner for not being au courant with the >Zeitgeist of revolutionary struggle - i.e. for not being politically >correct as we would say it today - rather than for proposing a theory that >cannot suffciently explain empirical facts that his own can. Am I missing >anything? > >wojtek I am going on record as protesting this sort of "intervention" from Wojtek, which is an open attempt to subvert the scholarly goals of this discussion. I understand that Wojtek is on the faculty of Johns Hopkins University, so I would have expected him to draw upon scholarly resources there in order to make an intelligent contribution to the discussion and not frame it in terms of Rush Limbaugh's radio show. I worked 8 hours yesterday on a migration to a new IBM server at Columbia and when I got home, I sat down and tried to read a few pages of the Brenner NLR piece. At lunch today I went back to the library and tried to find responses to it in NLR, one of which is by Ben Fine in the 1978 volume. Now I also feel obligated to look into the Dobbs-Sweezy debate on Jim's suggestion, since Brenner acknowledged Dobbs as a primary influence. I also plan to continue reading Blackburn (very difficult stuff to digest) and Blaut. This is in the context of having read Abu-Lughod, Amin, Wallerstein, Sweezy, Galeano and other "third worldist" political analysts over the past 30 years. I am interested in having a serious discussion with other people who want to have it. But for pete's sake, if we are going to be distracted by confused and provocative off-topic flame invitations from a Johns Hopkins professor no less, then we might as well shut down this thread right now because it will be a waste of everybody's time. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
