Combined & Uneven Development 2 (was Re: Calling an end to S. Africa thread?)

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

>  >What about fundamental change on this side of the border?
>
> What about it.
>
> > It's not
> > as though Mexicans, South Africans, etc. have a duty to get an
> > international chain of revolutions going but we don't, is it?
>
> No. I mean yes. No, let me take that back. No. Sorry, can't make up my mind.
>
> > Or
>  >does our duty end with supporting revolutionaries elsewhere, while we
> > engage in reforms?
> >
> > Yoshie
>
> I am for reforms. What is wrong with reforms? Sorry, I apologize. Didn't
> mean to ask a rhetorical question. Not really my style.
>
> Louis Proyect

Theory of permanent revolution based on analysis of combined & uneven
development in the periphery doesn't say much about how we go about
socialist revolution in nations where bourgeois revolutions
(including what Gramsci called "passive revolutions") happened a long
time ago.  Neither does dependency theory.  Why are we big on
theories of revolution in the periphery but have little to say about
what is to be done here?  That's probably in large part because in
practice socialist revolutions have happened only in the periphery &
theory could only follow practice, but that's all the more reason to
remedy what's been missing politically & theoretically here (which
has reversed the gains in the periphery, not just here).

We have Gramsci (among others), of course, and I believe his theory
still stands in many respects; but Gramsci's work, more often than
not, has been used for the purpose of social democratization -- as if
Gramsci had argued for "a permanent war of positions," as it were.
I'd like to rescue Gramsci from post-Marxists.  And we can learn a
lot from Jim O'Connor as well, as Michael Keaney mentioned.  But we
haven't been doing much of either, nor have we proposed alternative
theories.

Yoshie