Re: Were sugar plantations capitalist?

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Carrol:
>I disagree with him mostly on what I think is his false praise
>of capitalism. The cluster of threads on Pen-L began with a
>really stupid post from an overt enemy of marxism in which
>he asked why China had "failed" to develop capitalism. The
>implication of the question, of course, is that there is something
>wrong with a people who so fail. I deny that the question is
>a legitimate one, and claim that even asking the question is
>racist and eurocentrist.

Carrol, you really haven't understood the debate. It is not whether one
society is "better" than another. It is more about the failure of Marxist
scholarship. If you argue that Great Britain was a pioneer in certain
social and economic forms, but fail to address serious scholarship which
proves otherwise, you are guilty of "tunnel vision". It is not really a
moral problem, it is a problem of how to develop a cutting-edge Marxist
scholarship that operates from an internationalist perspective. In order to
drive this point home, a lot of discussion has revolved around what Brenner
leaves out. That is where the extensive citating from Darrity, Blackburn,
Blaut comes into play. It is fairly dry stuff but essential to the debate.
You fucked the discussion up by writing 5 times a day about preoccupations
that had nothing to do with the substantive issues being discussed. You
were disruptive, a pain in the ass. Paul Phillips, who used the debate as
an opportunity to present a "dependency theory" bird's eye view of Canadian
history, which was in the spirit of Nestor's contributions here on
Argentina. This is the kind of contribution that moves the discussion
forward, but it takes dedication to marxist scholarship. Instead, you
demonstrated a clear disregard for scholarly standards and wrote sniping
attacks on me and Blaut for weeks on end. I ignored you for the most part,
but now I am telling you off. You should be god-damned ashamed of yourself.
A 69 year old retired professor who spent a lifetime in academia and in
Marxist groups who can't get it together to read the texts being discussed
or make substantive contributions. What is your problem?






Louis Proyect

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