On 10/29/06, Carrol Cox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>
> The world today can't be understood by reading "State and Revolution"
> or "The Civil War in France." You read those texts mainly to
> understand early 20th-century Russia or late 19th-century France.
I'm too tired tonight after a day's travel to develop this, but perhaps
I can make a rough start.
At the RM conference I listened to a fascinating paper by Moishe
Postone, with the title, "Theorizing the Present: David Harvcy, Giovanni
Arrighi, and Robert Brenner. (My memory is sketchy: age hasn't dulled my
capacity to follow an argument but it has considerably damaged my
capacity to retain an accurate memory of the argument.) My concern here
is his comment on the part of Arrighi's book which covered the last 20
years or so. Arrighi, he says, offers a description rather than an
analysis, and thus does not contribute to our understanding of all that
points beyond that present. Similarly, he found Brenner's use of the
tendency of the rate of profit to fall as being descriptive (as in Smith
and Ricardo) rather than historical as in Marx. I won't try to explain
his argument there as my memory of its details is spotty.
It is that kind of historical understanding of the present (crudely, the
present viewed from the perspective of the future, or the present as
history as Sweezy used to call it) that we need, and that understanding
cannot come from endless entrapment in a mass of empirical detail.
Perhaps State and Revolution or even The Civil War in France is not the
specific text we need, but perhaps better we should reread Grundrisse to
learn or relearn how to think historically. (And really, we do not read
Lenin or Marx to understand France or Russia; we read them to learn _how
to_ go about understanding any period.)
I might suggest that if I were talking to people who aren't familiar
with Marx and Lenin. Here, the problem, imho, isnt' lack of theory.
I'd say it's the vision thing that most Western leftists today don't
have. :->
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
