Preliminary (for contrast).
Lou, in your fine open letter to NACLA you write:
I tried to do my own investigation into this incident and uncovered the
following report from The Presbyterian Church of Colombia:
"A new massacre flows with blood in the Department of Cordoba. This time
it was in the village of Saiza, on June 15, where heavily armed men
assassinated eight people and wounded two people of indigenous origin
and
ransacked local commercial establishments. The initial versiones of the
story which passed through the urban zone of Tierra Alta held that the
bloody act was committed by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia
(FARC), but when the injured arrived, this information was "defalsified"
and it was confirmed that the authors of the acts were members of United
Self Defense of Colombia (AUC)."
So when I attended a meeting of the Colombia Media Project on Friday
evening, Sept. 24th at Hunter College chaired by Mario, I asked him to
clear this up. What were the facts? Did or did not the FARC murder and
abduct Indians in the Cordoba region, or was the Presbyterian Church
report accurate?
-------------
Now my point: Here is a question which is of immediate political
importance, and on a subject on which even the real or alleged
experts can claim no special knowledge of the "original sources."
In your letter you provide one source that is probably as close
to a primary source as it is possible to get. Moreover, you state
clearly the political principles which make the factual material
relevant. Most of us on these lists will agree that the treatment
of indigneous peoples by a revolutionary movement is directly
and clearly relevant to the political judgment of that movement.
Most of us will probably agree with your propositions in reference
to "civil society" (or the idea of civil society), and if some do
not the framework you provide will be one within which that
argument can be conducted. And finally you provide rather
good evidence for the unprincipled polemics of the NACLA
author -- the letter you attach to your post. That letter reminds
me of an old legal joke (or serious advice). If the facts against
you, cite the law. If the law is against you, cite the facts. If
both are against you, call the opposing attorney an S.O.B. (Of
course, it is unfortunate that both you and Jim Blaut in the
present thread have resorted to the third alternative.) All in
all the post is the sort of model of political analysis and polemic
that I have come to expect from you at your best.
I wish I could say the same for your performances on the issues
surrounding the origins of capitalism. There your principles have
been either shifting or obscure, your facts have been thrown
about with no attempt to establish their relevance, you have
refused even to try to respond to the actual points others
have raised but have consistently ignored or misinterpreted
their arguments.
Over and over and over again we have insisted, briefly and at
considerable length, that views regarding the origins of capitalism
*are not relevant* to the issue of eurocentrism, which must
be judged in terms of contemporary political practice. Over and
over again you (and Jim Blaut) have ignored that argument and
gone back to piling up mountains of fact and alleged fact on an
issue that we have declared not to be our central concern. In
fact several of us indicated very strongly that we *agreed*
with the political conclusions you drew but insisted that
those conclusions were independent of the historical thesis
you were urging.
The following exchange between Jim Devine and Jim Blaut
gets at the very heart of the dispute:
-----------
Jim Devine writes:
[Jim Blaut writes]:
>What is your opinion of the charges against Catholicism that those Catholic
>dummies were inferior and didn/t/couldm't invent capitalism because they
>didn't possess the Protestant ethic? Wasn't that bigotry, racism,
>prejudice?
this question misses the point, a point that people on pen-l (including
yours truly) have made several times. If one believes in the Weberian
"Protestantism caused capitalism" theory (which I do not), the Catholics
could be _praised_ for NOT having created capitalism. After all,
capitalism
has destroyed the community, the extended family, the reverence of
everyday
life and the Almighty, and the respect for authority that the Catholics
have strived to preserve over the centuries. So the Catholics might be
seen
as _superior_.
I'm not a Catholic, but some of those things (clearly not all of them)
are
valuable. (BTW, I am an excommunicated Unitarian [;-)]and a hard-core
agnostic.)
I don't understand your urge to arbitrarily mix normative and positive
concerns. Though obviously the two can't be separated absolutely (since
one's values inform one's research and vice-versa), your apparent effort
to
defend the non-European world against the charge of being "dummies" for
not
foisting capitalism on the world seems silly.
---------
If I understand Jim B correctly, he maintains the following: If the
Catholics [or the Chinese] did not 'invent' capitalism, *then*
they were dummies.
This proposition makes sense *if and only if* the following proposition
is true:
Any developed tributary society that does not develop capitalism
is in some way defective.
And this statement is nonsense, in fact it is a racist proposition.
Some of us -- including me -- have suggested that in fact a tributary
society that develops ['invents'] capitalism thereby reveals some
defect in its cultural or political arrangements. No sensible society
(if you want to personify socieities, as you apparently do) would
allow the development of a social system so sytematically destructive
of almost everything such social orders (both their ruling and their
subject classes) hold dear. The "failure" of the Chinese, then, to
"develop" capitalism shows, precisely, that the Chinese were *not*
dummies. You and Jim Blaut, on the contrary, hold that the Chinese
were so stupid as to have been "saved" from developing capitalism
only by the fortuitous intervention of the west. To put it another way,
instead of querying China for its "failure to develop capitalism" we
should be praising it for its powers to avoid that plunge into the
abyss.
Now this argument may be wrong. Perhaps the stage theory of human
history is correct. All the basic social formations have been implicit
in the very nature of humans and their physical environment. Each
mode of production, as it appeared, was a direct progress (i.e.,
immediate improvement) over the preceding stage, and any people
who did not go through these stages on their own were either
deficient ("dummies") in some way or suffered under peculiar
climactic or other geographical handicaps. Please note that in
order to remain faithful to the implicit darwinian metaphor, the
improvement (progress) must be an *immediate* one. Perhaps
the development of capitalism made possible the discovery centuries
later of penicillin -- but in the meantime it had caused more disease
and killed far more people than earlier modes of production.
What I have described, and what you and Jim Blaut seem committed
to repeating, is the 19th C. Whig view of human history. As I say,
it is a defensible (though I think terribly wrong and racist) view of
history and the way in which history operates. But you should
recognize your implicit principles. (That is what I mean by arguing
that empiricism is wrong: the facts don't speak for themselves, and
when they seem to they are merely speaking in the voice of the
ruling class ideology.)
Does a failure to develop (invent, evolve) capitalism show a culture
to be deficient? I say No. Until you prove this proposition is in
fact correct, your arguments over the 15th -18th centuries are
not of much political significance. (Truth about history is always
interesting, whether or not of political significance. We just need
to keep the difference clear.)
Louis Proyect wrote:
> These are some initial reactions to Brenner's NLR piece that I will amplify
> on after finalizing my research.
Lou, you've flipped. Neither of us is an economic historian or
medievalist.
So when either of us sits down to attempt to arrive at a conclusion
regarding
England in the 16th century we are going to be using secondary or
tertiary sources, the factual accuracy of which we are incompetent to
judge. (Since I have not pretended such competence, it is best to
emphasize here that *you* are incompetent to judge the factual
accuracy of your sources.) Hence you are not in any serious sense
engaged in "research"; rather, you are engaged in the personal
study of the research of others, and you are doing so, as far as
I can tell, without even a preliminary survey of the scope and limits
of that research. That is, you have no way of knowing what proportion
of the relevant secondary sources are even in your bibliography. This
leads to some very odd assertions very early in your "provisional
reactions."
> In Brenner's very, very lengthy article, there is nearly ZERO discussion of
> Latin America, Asia and Africa. Since he is polemicizing against
> "core-periphery" theorists, you'd think he'd take the trouble to
> investigate their empirical research
Before you can make this bald assertion you first have to convince
me that you have read Brenner's mind. Whenever anyone, scholar
or amateur, reports on their studies (or research) in any work less
lengthy than the OED, they mention only a small proportion of
the material they have reviewed. Perhaps Brenner has read all
the material available on Latin America, perhaps not. Perhaps
some of that material is relevant, perhaps not.
Now the main participants in this debate, including Jim Blaut,
have done direct research, and we can provisionally trust their
information. And we can, granting them their information, make
independent judgments of their *use* of that information. We
can also judge the principles in terms of which they organize
their use of their material. Most particularly, since all of us engaged
in this debate have long histories of political activism and political
study, we are all in a position to make independent judgments
of the political significance of the results.
And it is in this last realm, of political significance, and *only* in
this realm, that your independent judgments are of any particular
interest. Any judgments you make of what happened in England
from 1450 to 1600 have the interest of an undergraduate
term paper by a bright student -- but that is all.
You and I can both claim some status in reference to contemporary
political issues and to marxist theory. We are not 16th century
historians (just as we are not biologists) -- and an attempt by either
of us to pretend to be 16th c. historians would put us in the
position of the people who for a month have been writing letters
to the local paper attacking evolution. Ignoramuses pretending to
know something. (I know quite a bit of history -- for a non-
historian. You know quite a bit, more than me I suspect -- for
a non-historian. We are both still amateurs. In particular, neither
of us knows the languages requisite for studying medieval or
early renaissance history.)
Historians can tell us something about the 16th century. They cannot,
*as historians*, tell us anything about the relevance of that to the
20th century. When you are arguing the latter I will read you with
interest, whether or not I agree with you. When you set yourself
up as a medieval historian, however, I'm not going to waste my
time with you.
Incidentally, I am glad you have finally made the stupendous discovery
that a number of us have been trying to tell you all along -- that
Brenner is an antagonist of Cohen. That it took you so
long to make this discovery for yourself hardly inspires confidence
in your scholarship. Nor does your grasping at the straw that
"Alan Carling argues in a NLR article that on a higher
level, the Brenner thesis and Cohen's ideas on the origins of capitalism
are related dialectically and can even be synthesized. I will have a
look
at this article and try to address it in my posting on Brenner." Is Alan
Carling himself a stagist and technological determinist like Cohen?. If
so his arguments are a bit suspect.
In any case, the arguments you need to look at are arguments over the
question of whether capitalism was inevitable or not. If it was, then
the
core of Marx's thought was wrong. (And your critiques of "stagism" are
also wrong.) If it was not, then whether it did or did not develop here,
there, or elsewhere is not of political importance.
Carrol
Incidentally, as I understand Jim B's and your arguments, Jim Craven
is calling indigenous peoples dummies for resisting capitalism.
