Steve: Back when that debate was taking place, the late 70s and early 80s, there wasn't much of an inkling that colonial liberation movements, after winning state power, would -- in some cases -- fall back into a new sort of neocolony-cum-bourgeois society. So the attack by Brenner and the other Eurocentric Marxists (like Laclau) was grounded in the idea that these colonial societies were so backward that they didn't even have differentiuated working classes. This varied: some said that capitalism had not penetrated, (articulatrion, etc.), others couldn't find classes at all. All of these arguments were ignorant of reality. So the argument was not that Third World national struggles united the workers with the bourgeoisie, etc., it was, rather, that there were few if any workers. so obviously these societies were no-account as far as socialists were concerned. One very prominent Marxist party in Britain declared as a point of principle, something like: only the workers at the Center can lead the world revolution. No comment. Frank and Wallerstein weren't and aren't Marxists of course. Theirfundamental core-periphery model was basically the same as the models proposed or used by Marxists like rodney, Cabral, and Amin. A lot of the criticism of W and F's views was that they didn't accept the Marxist corpus, and this criticism was justified to an extent. E.g.: Frank emphasized commerce rather than production. But he was attacked by Laclau for saying that wealth from the Third World was not produced by workers! It magically appeared and then went as commerce to Europe. What maNY good people fail to realize is that there is no monolithic "Thirdworldism." A lot of serious Marxists emphasize colonialism, imperiualism, and struggles against both. You'll find these anti-imperialists as ddeeeply inolved in local struggles here as anybody else. Some people, progressive people but not Marxists, take up the struggles of Third World people on two basic grounds: the obvious oppression, and the moral outrage. In the Puerto Rican Socialist Party we were constantly confronted by the condesncion, the paternalism, the veiled sense of superiority of some of these Marxists from the US. Our struggle for independence was just bourgeois nationalism. The fact that some of the leaders of main trasde unions in PR were on our Central Committee was hardly noticed. We should unite with proletariat of the US and together fight for the liberation of everyone. This would require a lot of patience... In closing, I'll state without comment that the workers in the core countries haven't succeeded any better than the workers in the periphery -- thus far. By the way, you seem surprised that the word "Eurocentrism" is even used by bad guys. Shocking. And of course me and others are guilty by assocoation with....Mahathir! Cheers Jim B
