Putting Steve Philion in context

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Carrol Cox quoting Steve Philion:
>capacity to argue with such mush...It seemed to me that the powerful
>element of Brenner's argument was that it emphasised the particular class
>relations within countries and how they reproduced or presented barriers
>to escaping greater inequality.  Yet the way you would seem to have
>Brenner is as a person who could care less that the world's wealth is
>unequally distributed...

Since Steve is not on this list, it would be useful to put his remarks into
some kind of context. This debate on the "Brenner thesis" has been raging
for over a month on PEN-L. Moderator Michael Perelman can barely contain
the participants from scratching out each others' eyes. I have been on my
best behavior, however. Most of the time, anyhow.

Okay, now Steve has been a diehard Brenner supporter from the beginning.
Since Brenner's 1977 NLR article was an extended polemic against "third
worldism", Steve takes comfort in this because he is doing scholarly
research in China, where nationalist ideology--in his opinion--is used to
shore up class oppression. So Brenner's thesis is seen as some kind of
penicillin to destroy "third worldist" germs. If you accept Brenner's
argument, according to this line of reasoning, that yeoman farmers in late
15th century Great Britain provided the basis for capitalist modernization,
then you can't possibly get confused by Malaysia's Malathir. Or something
like that.

Now I personally would think twice about using Brenner as penicillin. Only
a couple of weeks ago Carrol was trying to divide the Marxism list between
fine upstanding Leninist folks like himself who took a principled stand
against Australian troops in East Timor and those neo-Kautskyite jackals
who were dragging the proletarian banner in the mud. The problem with that
schema is that Brenner supports Australian troops in East Timor. Let me
repeat that to drive the point home: Brenner, as a member of the political
committee of Solidarity, voted for Australian troops in East Timor.

Another troubling question on the penicillin front. Brenner is a big
muckety-muck professor at UCLA. I took a look at their webpages to dig up
some scandal (I know from experience that the higher up you are in
academia, the likelier it is that you have been wallowing with pigs.) I
wasn't disappointed. Brenner is involved in a program funded by the Mellon
foundation (Pittsburgh steel gangsters) to research the transition to
"democracy" and a "market economy". If the Brenner thesis is supposed to be
a prophylactic against anti-Marxist deviations, then he has obviously not
been giving himself regular injections.

====

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Louis Proyect

(The Marxism mailing list: http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)