Why are we discussing this again? didn't we kill this topic? Nonetheless, I
don't see why Blaut's distortions should go unanswered.
Jim Blaut wrote:
>ROBERT BRENNER IN THE TUNNEL OF TIME
>
>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 tradition
>within one of the most egalitarian of all socio-political doctrines yet a
>tradition which, nonetheless, believes in the historical superiority (or
>priority) of one community of humans, Europeans, over another,
>non-Europeans. Eurocentric Marxists are not racist, nor even prejudiced,
>although most of them believe that Europeans have always been the leaders
>in the forward march of history; that Europe is the fountainhead of
>civilization, the main source of innovative social change.
Europeans are also the font of the barbarism of imposing capitalism on the
rest of the world. I don't see why Blaut misses this. If capitalism did
arise outside Europe, say, in Africa, then we should see Africa as the
source of the moral plague that characterizes capitalism. Blaut seems to be
assuming that capitalism is a good thing, god's gift to the world.
If a disease like small pox arose in Western Europe and then spread to the
rest of the world and Brenner showed that this had happened, would he then
be Eurocentric?
If I remember correctly, Blaut also conflates capitalism with commodity
production. Or maybe I'm confusing him with A.G. Frank.
>For these scholars, the origins of capitalism are European.
As Marx wrote, the origins of capitalism are violent and immoral.
>Capitalism's further development consisted of an internally generated
>process of improvement within its classic homeland, the European world.
>The impact of capitalism on the rest of the world has been, on balance,
>progressive.
does Brenner say that the impact of capitalism has been, on balance,
progressive? why? (Marx's argument here was that capitalism was progressive
because it set the stage for socialism, which is hardly a ringing
endorsement.) what is meant by "progressive" anyway?
>Colonialism and (today) neocolonialism are not significant for capitalism,
>are rather a marginal process, a temporary aberration or diversion or
>side- show, not a vital need of the system as a whole, which evolves in
>response to internal laws of motion.
Isn't that a substantive point that can be debated using facts and logic
rather than insults?
>This point of view is basic diffusionism: autonomous development at the
>center, diffusion of development to the periphery. It is also tunnel
>history: a form of tunnel-vision which tries to explain the rise of
>capitalism, and the rise of Europe, by looking only at prior European
>facts, looking, as it were, down the European tunnel of time, ignoring the
>history of the world outside of Europe both as cause of change within
>Europe and as the site of historically efficacious change in its own right
>(Blaut, 1989).
If Brenner ignores the non-European world, he should be criticized. If
Blaut can find the prevalence of production using wage-labor that's been
divorced from direct access to the means of subsistence (i.e., capitalism)
that's begun to spread to take over the rest of the world (rather than
simply staying in a holding pattern) in a large country (not just a city)
somewhere outside of Europe before the European conquest, he should be
praised. He's shown that the Brenner thesis (that capitalism arose in
Europe, due to changes in rural relations of production there) is wrong.
>The Euro-Marxists -- as I will call the socialists of this tradition --
>accept this view, and so they are diffusionists. To this extent, they
>agree with their mainstream colleagues about the rise of Europe, of
>capitalism, of modernization, of industrialization, of democracy:
>basically all of it is European.
Democracy, modernization and democracy are quite different from capitalism.
As far as I know, Brenner doesn't equate capitalism with modernization,
democracy, or industrialization. It seems to me that two of these are
vaguer concepts than capitalism, too. Modernization is something defined by
whoever wins the war (what I achieved is "modern," while what you achieved
is "backward"). Industrialization involves some sort of use of machinery,
but unless one is clear, we can say that industrialization happened
thousands of years ago. (Many equate tools with machines, and we've been
using tools for a million years or so. Democracy, while not vaguely
defined, is something that's been around for millennia. Most tribal and
nomadic communities have big elements of democracy.
>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.
So Brenner is damned if he does and damned if he doesn't. If he doesn't do
good historical scholarship, his results are rejected (and justly so). If
he does, so that even the anti-Marxist scholars cite his results, then
Blaut rejects his results as Eurocentric, applying guilt by association logic.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~JDevine "Segui il
tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.)
-- K. Marx, paraphrasing Dante A.
