Re: Auschwitz in Bulgaria

["Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky" <Gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Oh, shit, so that the posting was a posting on Marxmail. So that I
will have to answer this one at length. Ah, would it have been PEN-L
(no offence, Michael P, but I simply cannot cope with so much
mail)...

Let us answer then.

En relación a Re: Auschwitz in Bulgaria,
el 2 Sep 00, a las 22:36, Dennis R Redmond dijo:




> On Sat, 2 Sep 2000, Nestor Miguel Gorojovsky wrote:
>
> > We Marxists cannot set holocausts obtained by economic measures as a
> > class apart from those obtained by overt State enforcement. The
> > unity of the total whole is our methodological cornerstone.
>
> But the whole, as someone said, somewhere (someone who had the
> unforgiveable bad taste of pointing out that the East was becoming
> identical with the West thirty years ago, that late capitalism is a
> world-system, and that the one-party state has not saved us) is the
> false.

First: I have never promoted one-party states. What I will always
promote, only for semicolonial countries, is the construction of
states which are unmistakably linked to the basic principle of
national revolution. In this sense, every state in the "multiparty"
developed West is a one-party state, since save for very small groups
every political party keeps the "national interest" safe. These
states have been the result of national revolutions, and are all
basically "one party" in this essential sense. There is no debate as
to whether the policies pursued by the French state should first and
foremost protect the interest of the French "peuple" (another
bourgeois definition!). This dilemma was solved by a very neat
surgery procedure practiced on M. le Roi and Mme. la Reine, a couple
of centuries ago.

That the East is becoming identical with the West is an assertion the
depth of which, IMHO, can be measured with pin needle.

And the "enormous" idea that late capitalism is a world system does
not take us a single step ahead in the analysis of what follows:

> You have to carefully distinguish between local, regional,
> international and multinational capitalisms, as much as between the
> respective state formations of these.

Because if it is a "world system", the second question, which is
precluded by the way the assertion is made, systems being _either_
coherent _or_ incoherent but in an external way, should be: "what is
the dialectical opposition around which this 'system' revolves and by
which it can advance?". The idea behind the world systems approach,
an idea I reject, is at best and so far as I can understand it (I
reckon I am quite an ignorant, beforehand) that of the internal
coherence of a system which is constituted from enlarged replicas of
identical local instances of capitalism.

> Eastern Europe is simply not
> experiencing the kind of devastation visited on Africa or Southeast
> Asia; the EIB is giving them lots of money, rents from immigrants
> living in the EU are boosting incomes, and cheap consumer goods are
> everywhere, even if many people can't afford them.

Funny to discover that goods that many people can't afford are
"cheap". Behind that definition, dear Dennis, there is a whole class
roaring. But I would rather measure the kind of devastation visited
on Eastern Europe by a simpler rod, that which IMHO reasonably raised
Vere Gordon Childe to decide whether one prehistoric mode of
production was more progressive than another. This measuring rod is
simply that of the average amount of people that, on a given area,
can each system sustain. In Russia, and now elsewhere in Eastern
Europe, it is demography that decries you. I would like to know how
would you call a policy that takes down in 20 years the life
expectancy of males if not as a "devastation"

That's not the same
> thing as death camps and gulags. Late capitalism is a totally
> *mediated* society, not a totally militarized one.

Tell Colombians. The military _also_ are a mediation. The basic
social relation under capitalism is that of things between themselves
by the intermediation of human beings, and this building block is
pervasively present everywhere.

>
> -- Dennis
>
>



Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
gorojovsky@xxxxxxxxxxxx