Re: Parting words on Leo Panitch and company

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 1 Jun 2003, Patrick Bond wrote:
> (I think those York comrades, especially my guru Saul, are all wonderful,
> and I think the same of O'Connor, Brenner, Wood, Harvey and various others
> whom Lou one day glorifies, the next day shits on. But I also think Lou is
> wonderful over a beer at breakfast -- the penultimate time I saw him in
> person, that was... and last time, about six weeks ago at a CU seminar, he
> was brutal with his questions but gave me a nice smile, if you can imagine
> that.)

Patrick, what sort of nonsense is this? If you describe my question at
Columbia as "brutal", no wonder you would think my critique of Panitch
amounted to "slagging". I asked you whether there were stirrings in the
South African CP over Mbeki's rightward shift? What is particularly
"brutal" about that?

We are obviously dealing with cognitive dissonance here. You viewed my
reply to Panitch as disrespectful. Why? Because I said that to talk about
socialism without reference to revolution is like talking about bringing
children into the world without acknowledging the need for sex? The main
problem with the SR crowd is that they obfuscate this all-important
question in the name of classical Marxism.

As far as "shitting" on Ellen Meiksins Wood is concerned, comrades can
decide for themselves if that is what I did:

If you examine Ellen Meiksins Wood's polemic against the late Jim Blaut in
the May-June 2001 Against the Current ("A Critique of Eurocentric
Eurocentrism"), you will notice something very odd. Other than a citation
of A.G. Frank's recently published "Reorient," all of the other six
footnotes refer solely to articles written by Blaut or Brenner.

In contrast, Jim Blaut's chapter on Brenner in "Eight Eurocentric
Historians" (Guilford, 2000) (about the same length as Wood's article)
includes fifty-seven citations often referring to specialized, scholarly
material. (1) For example, since Brenner's argument that capitalism began
in the English countryside relies heavily on Eric Kitteridge's "The
Agricultural Revolution," Blaut offers Titow's "English Rural Society,
1200-1350" as an opposing view. When David Harvey spoke at Jim Blaut's
memorial meeting in NYC recently, he said that while Jim was a dedicated
revolutionary, he was also a conscientious scholar. As he put it, he took
all of the baggage that went along with it quite seriously, including
footnotes.

full:
http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/economics/brenner_thesis_as_iberiantalism.htm

We are dealing with serious political differences here. I intend to
criticize Ellen Wood, Leo Panitch, David Harvey or whoever without fear or
favor as the need arises. As soon as I am finished with John Holloway's
"How to Change the World without taking Power", I will have a word or two
to say about that.

But I haven't said a word about SR or Panitch in probably two years. When
Perelman announced the Foster-Panitch debate, I listened to it carefully
while taking notes just to make sure that I wasn't misrepresenting
Panitch, which he falsely claimed that I did. Comrades can of course
listen to the debate and judge for themselves.