Re: Angel of History (was Re: Geras vs Laclau)

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

> Lou complains of
>reformism of the SACP, the Mexican CP, FARC, & a host of other
>outfits in the periphery, but in this they are merely following the
>trend that happened much, much earlier in the core.

I must demur. The trend in question was the Comintern of the Popular Front
era which promoted Kautskyism in Africa and Latin America. The CP backed a
populist candidate in Colombia in the 1940s who was the victim of rightwing
terror. To the FARC's credit, it has fought courageously to defend the
peasantry but the theoretical outlook is boilerplate "stagism". You can say
the same thing about the SACP. They supplied the cadre of the Umkhonto we
Sizwe, while intellectuals like Joe Slovo were made of the right stuff.
However, that being said, we are dealing with a serious theoretical
problem, namely "stagism". The relevance of this to the Brenner thesis is
that it reinforced Kautskyism in the third world, no matter the intentions
of Brenner himself. Generally speaking, the reaction against the MR school
was rightward. It expressed itself in various forms, from Bill Warren's
open apologetics for imperialism, to Althusserian 'articulation of modes of
production' which in the pages of scholar John Taylor retrogresses into the
outlook of the Latin American CPs when he complains about "the resistance
put up against imperialist penetration by the non-capitalist mode of
production." (From Modernization to Modes of Production: A Critique of the
Sociologies of Development and Underdevelopment, Macmillan, 1979). I am
reminded of the scandal provoked by TV weatherman Tex Antoine in the 1970s
when he told his audience that if a woman is being raped, she might as well
relax, lie back and enjoy it.

Louis Proyect
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