Steve wrote:
>I'm afraid I never made the connection between Brenner and Warren. Must be
>something like the connection between Zeitlin and Pinochet.
There is no connection between Zeitlin and Pinochet. I have no idea how you
interpret things this way. All I said is that a professor in Chile named
Andy Daitsman defended Pinochet's "revolution" using healthy swags of
Zeitlin. Whatever Zeitlin thinks about Pinochet is an entirely different
matter. My concern is how certain kinds of "orthodox Marxism" represented
by Brenner, Laclau et al feed conservative trends in the academy. As Jaime
Torras argues in the Fall 1980 Review of the Braudel Center, the Spanish
academy utilized the Brenner thesis to institute a kind of neo-Kautskyism
as official dogma. The reaction against the MR school was part of a
conservatizing trend in academic Marxism. It was a way for academics to
distance themselves from third world revolutions while clutching a cleaned
up version of V. 1 of Capital to their breast. When you want to crawl your
way to the top of the academy, there is a distinct disadvantage in
identifying with third world revolutions. People will not only laugh at
you, they might not give you tenure.
Louis Proyect
Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
