I'm really not up on the Brenner controversy at all, so this is a
genuine question from a naif: what is at stake in this debate? Why is
it important?
Doug
Well, I never would have given it any attention unless I had run into
Jim Blaut on Marxmail. Basically, Jim was the only person besides
Immanuel Wallerstein who had attempted to answer Brenner and company.
I have to add that they come at it from different angles. Wallerstein
is a world systems theoretician, while Jim was much more of a classic Marxist.
Basically, the positions one takes on the debate has little to do
with current-day politics. It is really of much more interest to
academicians who mine the topic like MLA participants mine Jane Austen novels.
When I first read Brenner's 1977 NLR article, I was really put off by
the totally arrogant dismissal of Paul Sweezy as un-Marxist. I find
that pretty typical of the Brenner school. It turns the question of
where you stand on "agrarian capitalism" into something of a litmus
test, holding more or less the same importance that Kronstadt has for
anarchists. I think that the polemical edge of Blaut's writings (and
my own obviously) are a response to that kind of posture.
Beyond all that, the debate became of great interest to me because it
reminded me a lot of the "stagist" conceptions that I had found
off-putting in my research on the American Indian. Generally
speaking, I find the whole idea of defining fixed stages in human
history to be unproductive. It also reflects the influence of social
Darwinism in the 19th century, which tried to come up with the same
kinds of classifications for homo sapiens (barbarism, savagery,
slavery, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, communism) that natural
scientists were striving for.
When you mix that with the British historians school, with its deep
connections to the CP, you end up with the kind of schemas that
Kautsky was famous for. Again, I don't want to imply that Brenner or
Wood were Kautskyists, but Hobsbawm surely was.
--
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