>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
What Third-World revolutions really needed from proletariat &
intellectuals in rich imperial nations was not so much the latter's
"identification" with the former as socialist revolutions in the
belly of the beast, which didn't happen -- hence the former's
collapse or retreat. You can't eat someone's "identification" with
you, though you may be encouraged by it at times.
Yoshie
