It was not my intention to spark a renewed debate on Brenner, though it would be interesting to have a good discussion on his new book. Of course, it would be wrong to ascribe to Solidarity, especially Labor Notes, all of the views of Brenner - unfortunately. In any case, I would ask that if someone on the list - like Justin - says my views are mistaken that they explain how - instead of just making what amounts to, well, a gratuitous swipe!
He may have just been referring back to his earlier defense of Solidarity/LN where he said that they do indeed care about places like Rwanda. Of course, any one with a soul "cares" about Rwanda, the point is to understand its relationship to global capitalism. That is the virtue and significance of David Smith's argument which I think shifts the paradigm, so to speak, out of the focus on the core industrialized countries so crucial to LN and Brenner but without doing so with typical third worldist, unequal exchange type thinking. I think it is clear that a lean production theory sustains the "militant trade union" core of LN/Solidarity politics and so it is hardly gratuitous to discuss the link between the two. Why? Because it ignores how the law of value operates at a global level - even in (perhaps particularly harshly in) remote regions like the hard scrabble Rwandan coffee fincas. Incorporating the way in which a kind of "primitive accumulation" (defined as absorbing new value into the system at below reproduction costs) operates to sustain they global economy seems particularly important. In doing so, though, one would then have to discuss what impact that has on the sysiphean struggle of trade unionism. The failure to take these two steps is I think a flaw in Moody's thinking that makes its way into the Post review of Negri and Hardt's Empire. As for Bob, I believe that Loren Goldner made some telling comments on the problems in his earlier NLR essay that I am told have been modified in the new ms. but I have not seen it yet (except in an early stage draft that I have not had a chance to look at). In any case, there was little discussion in the early ms., if I recall, of the role of the dollar much less mechanisms like the clash of coffee buyers and producers in central africa leading to the mass murder of hundreds of thousands. If the left cannot develop a critique of political economy that explains such a development in a coherent way then we have no chance of developing a perspective inside the labor movement of the industrialized countries that can respond to the problem and we risk seeing the catastrophic success of new authoritarian movements in the developing countries. Stephen F. Diamond School of Law Santa Clara University [EMAIL PROTECTED]
