Michael Perelman wrote: >Last night, Lou gently rebuked me for neglecting to recognize the >historical element in the debate about the so-called Brenner thesis. I >thought quite a bit about what he said. Michael, a lot of the politics is buried beneath the surface. And I imagine there are personality clashes involved as well. (Recall that the Mensheviks split with Lenin at the "What is to be Done" conference because his proposal to reorganize the Iskra staff would have resulted in the replacement of old-times they were close to politically and personally.) The first time I met Ellen Wood, this was back in the days when I idolized some of these big names like a 16 year old regards the Back Street Boys, I told her that she and Perry Anderson were two of my favorite Marxists. She bristled and said that Anderson hated her. I assumed the feelings were mutual. There is very little controversy to be generated over the role of agriculture in the rise of capitalism, if that's all there was to it. When I read through Hilton's "Brenner Debate", I have to pinch myself occasionally to keep awake for all the minutiae about acreage per peasant, etc. I think it is rather how to regard capitalism within the context of the "modernity" debate. The last chapter in Wood's new book is about modernism, postmodernism and the origins of capitalism. I have a strong suspicion that one of the reasons the batty LM book with its ugly attack on Rachel Carson got picked up by MR is that there is a certain vulnerability around these questions. If you promote a vision of socialism that is tightly linked to building upon capitalist modernization, then you end up in a position where you can adapt to non-Marxist currents. The old-school MR tendency would have not erred in this direction, in my humble position. It's hard for me to figure out who's in charge there nowadays. Louis Proyect (The Marxism mailing list: http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
