Leo, first of all, this is your first post in a while with the
bad formatting. I don't know what you did to fix it before, but
please revert to what you were doing.
Second, the style of this post poisons further discussion. I
agree that the previous style have been unproductive. I have
commented on some of the problems. Please try to be more
positive.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> << Leo, you are correct that Lou should not have characterized
> your views.
> Please don't throw fuel on the fire. >>
>
> Michael:
>
> I do not think that the problem here is one of "characterizing"
> views. I
> certainly have described my own position as "post-Marxist" and
> closely
> connected to the analysis of Laclau and Mouffe, so I would
> hardly object to
> someone else calling it "post-Marxist."
>
> What is the problem and what poisons discourse here, as I see
> it, is the
> following:
> 1. A continual and deliberate misrepresentation of what people
> say.
> 2. A willful refusal to make oneself aware of and to engage the
> existing
> literature on the subject.
> 3. A dismissal of substantive argument on the basis of the
> characterization
> of a position.
>
> 1. During the course of this thread on South Africa, the
> positions that Chris
> B, Jim D. and I took have been continually and grossly
> misrepresented. When
> we said, in various ways, that the South African social
> formation was an
> articulated combination of capitalist and pre-capitalist modes
> of production,
> under the hegemony of the capitalist mode, this has been
> deliberately twisted
> into a position that we say that South Africa was
> pre-capitalist. At seems
> that if you can't answer the argument being made, you just make
> up one of
> your own and attribute it to the other side. We have a position
> imputed to us
> without any basis or evidence, that the minimg industries were
> pre-capitalist, which we specifically denied; now we have a
> 'declaration' of
> victory because Patrick B. has confirmed what everyone was
> saying: that it
> was clearly capitalist. It was also articulated to
> pre-capitalist modes of
> production with the use of migrant labor. This method of
> attributing
> positions people clearly do not make is just plain
> intellectually dishonest
> argumentation, and it makes it next to impossible to have civil
> discourse.
>
> 2. There is a voluminous radical literature on South Africa,
> which I refered
> to briefly and which Patrick Bond discussed in much greater
> detail and in
> much more up to date fashion. But we have arguments being made,
> again and
> again, without the slightest reference to it, and in
> contradiction to the
> most basic issues long ago resolved, and which virtually no one
> disputes --
> that apartheid South Africa had, however one wanted to
> formulate it, an
> articulated combination of capitalist and pre-capitalist modes
> of production,
> and that, as part of that reality, race and class were closely
> articulated.
> It is as if the South African example was seized upon because
> it was seen as
> some 'tabula rasa' upon which one could write whatever position
> one wanted to
> take with respect to Woods and Brenner, upon which one could
> simply apply the
> general line without fear of contradiction. "Don't confuse me
> with any
> discussion of the actual historical context in South Africa,"
> is what I see.
>
> 3. Part of political discourse should be the capacity to
> distinguish and
> clarify positions, and this requires characterizations. Some
> distinctions
> need to be made here. The problem is one of pejorative and
> invidious
> characterizations, with the notion that one can dismiss
> arguments simply on
> that basis. If I were to write that Proyect is a case of
> arrested Trotskyist
> development who discovered that the Third World existed 25
> years after
> everyone else and can't get over that fact, so we need not pay
> any attention
> to his argument, then I would have engaged in the kind of
> pejorative and
> invidious argument he has put forward. But I didn't: I made
> every effort to
> respond to the argument that was being put forward. Because if
> a position, be
> it Marxist or post-Marxist, Trotskist or Stalinist, Leninist or
> radical
> democratic, is the source of a poor argument, it will appear in
> the argument
> itself.
>
> Leo Casey
> United Federation of Teachers
> 260 Park Avenue South
> New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
>
> Power concedes nothing without a demand.
> It never has, and it never will.
> If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
> Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation
> are men who
> want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without
> thunder and
> lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its
> waters.
>
> -- Frederick Douglass --
>
>
>
>
--
Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
Chico, CA 95929
Tel. 530-898-5321
E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
