At 20/06/01 19:43 -0700, Michael Perelman wrote:
>I suspect that everybody is talking past one another. Mark seemed to be
>closest to the target referring to the combined and uneven nature of
>colonial economies -- They have elements of all sorts of ancient
>formations turned to a capitalist purpose.
>
>I myself work in a feudal institution. You can see that in the robes we
>wear on graduation day, yet it is an important gear in capitalism.
Some of the one sidedness has been removed on each side which happens in
any good debate. Whether this means it is at an end, I don't know. I have
just caught sight of Pat Bond's informed contribution.
When we are looking more at glowing embers, that might be a time for
constructive reflection, which is surely happening. I would be interested
in seeing Yoshie's reponse to Mark's post.
While "combined and uneven development" may reflect the reality of a
mixture of modes of production in one country in the era of imperialism, it
is not clear what the implications of subscribing to this formulation
should be.
It is also not clear that this formula, originally promoted in the context
of Russia at the beginning of the last century, necessarily implies there
was not a unique combination of features that allowed commodity exchange to
develop into capitalism in England. Once emerged, yes, undoubtedly,
capitalism and imperialism affected a lot of other historical developments.
But Louis Proyect's claim that essentially
>CLASS RELATIONS WERE IDENTICAL TO MEXICO, ETC
remains improbable both in theory and empirical fact. This does not
necessarily flow from combined and uneven development. Rather the reverse.
The purpose of Louis Proyect's comparison of South Africa and Latin America
has not perhaps been clarified.
His post of 16th June started with a challenging characterisation of an
article which most of us probably did not have access to:
>As Colin Leys correctly noted in his silly 1978 Socialist Register article
>on the "bourgeois revolution" sweeping Kenya, the availability of 'free'
>labour is key for Brenner.
It ended
>Quibbling over whether the worker is really a worker or not based on the
>peculiarities of a given country's history not only constitutes a form of
>pedantic quibbling, it is a detour from our task as revolutionaries. (16th
>June)
This makes me think that this discussion has been in part to argue that the
particularity of class forces in any country is not important and that
preoccupation with the detail of reforms is a form of quibbling.
By contrast, to the best of my understanding, the South African Communist
Party believes that the national liberation struggle is not completed.
If the S African thread is at an end I would have thought the test is
whether someone could sum up the different positions in a way *to which
none of the protagonists would object*. That would involve some attempts at
courteous characterisation. IMO it is impossible to proceed in the
dialectics of debate without some degree of characterisation, otherwise how
can you check whether you are talking past one another. The emphasis
should be on avoiding *mis*characterisation: which confuses and irritates.
Whatever short term gains, it ultimately rebounds with a loss of
credibility for the perpetrator.
Chris Burford
London
