At 05:07 PM 9/25/99 -0400, Louis Proyect wrote: >I just put this out as a webpage at: > >http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/brenner_critique.htm > >Here are the first few paragraphs: > >This article was published in ANTIPODE: A RADICAL JOURNAL OF >GEOGRAPHY,26,4,(1994):351-76. > >ROBERT BRENNER IN THE TUNNEL OF TIME > >J.M. BLAUT University of Illinois at Chicago >Euro-Marxism went into eclipse during the period when liberation movements >were decolonizing most of the world. In this period, the idea that the >colonial or Third World has been, and is, unimportant in social development >was not popular among Marxists. After the end of the Vietnam War, however, >this point of view became again popular, and indeed became the Marxism most >widely professed in European and American universities. Today we witness >the curious phenomenon that Euro-Marxists are quoted with approval by >anti-Marxist scholars, who can use them to show that "real" Marxist >scholarship supports some of the same doctrines, theoretical and practical, >that conservatives do. > >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.1 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
