Last night, Lou gently rebuked me for neglecting to recognize the historical element in the debate about the so-called Brenner thesis. I thought quite a bit about what he said. The problem that this debate suffers from might be called over-determination (pardon my Althusserianism). We're talking about history centuries ago, while we are talking about politics today and tomorrow. The fit is less than exact. All history is a model, in the sense that we take a small slice or we take a big slice and neglect the detail. It can never be complete. If I write history of United States, a multitude of local histories will point out innumerable oversights, if not mistakes. Third worldism was similar to the theory of the falling rate of profit. Both implied that some other force was going to carry out the revolution: economic determinism or Ho Ch Min would do our work for us. Sure, this is an oversimplification, but oversimplification is an inevitable consequence of this sort of reasoning. Don't we have to be careful in jumping from one level of analysis to another? -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University [EMAIL PROTECTED] Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901
