Re: [A-List] Re: Substance and rationality -- A-List digest, Vol 1 #311

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 18 May 2002 17:16:27 +0100, James Daly wrote:
>
>Robert is right to say that reason is one and
>indivisible; but the word has been stretched to
>cover everything from logic and mathematics to
>the Anglo-French Enlightenment (light being a
>metaphor for reason).  Hence the problem for
>Sabri, Tariq, Michael  and me.

I wasn't following this thread carefully but the Robert referred to
above is ewc. Perhaps Robert could sign his last name in the future,
so we can keep track better.

In any case, I found the message that has touched off this on-and-off
conversation:

---
You speak of people who seek 'privileged positions'. I guess the
privilege that concerns me most is the way so many of those initially
pushing ideas of 'multi-rationality' did so with the financial
assistance of the Ford Foundation - eg Levi Strauss, Polanyi,
Wallerstein, etc etc. And the interest of such as Aby Warburg (who
lets face it, already had a privileged position!) had in the
undermining of notions of rationality, a few decades earlier.

On this list what interested me specifically is the attention that
has been paid to historical matters to do with currency and bullion
flow, which have been debated here. The matter is directly relevant
to the above - Braudel informs the basis of the later 20th century
bullion flow debate, and was closely associated with Levi Strauss,
Polanyi, and Wallerstein, and got big FF grants. It is my claim that
Braudel basic 'insight' was nonsense, and the basis of that whole
school of thought is phoney. I would much like to debate that with
anyone who has looked into the matter and who disagrees, or even
better, to find someone one agrees and is willing to put their head
over the parapet and admit it in public.

Robert
---

I honestly don't know how to respond to this. My interest in world
systems scholarship is fairly restricted to its use against Robert
Brenner, Colin Leys, the late Ernesto Laclau and a host of other
neo-Kautskyites who are fairly hegemonic in the left academy.

Of course, the Ford Foundation (and the Gulbenkian Foundation)
sponsors Wallerstein et al. By the same token, Robert Brenner
organizes academic conferences at UCLA with the same kind of funding.
All of these academic leftists are careerists. They take money
without worrying where it comes from because they don't have any
connection to the working class.

The biggest problem with the world system gang is that have an almost
Hegelian notion that resistance on the individual state level is
futile. (Or is that more like the Borg in Star Trek?) In the MR from
a couple of months ago, Wallerstein takes a position in defense of
the anti-globalization protests that is ideologically almost
indistinguishable from Hardt-Negri. I say that stuff is hokum.
Meanwhile, their opponents like Leys take an interest in the
individual nation-state on the basis of which fraction of the
national bourgeoisie is spearheading primitive accumulation. In the
case of both Wallerstein and Leys, there is precious little
engagement with the working class. The closest they probably get to
them is when they come to clean up their office on campus.

--
Louis Proyect, lnp3@xxxxxxxxx on 05/18/2002

Marxism list: http://www.marxmail.org