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Re: a false dichotomy: economic vs. political issues [was:Darwin's God]

On 3/10/07, Yoshie Furuhashi <critical.montages@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: 
The insulation of the West from a crisis may not last, but we can't
count on its not lasting either, so if there is to be a future of
socialism in the West, we have to figure out how it can make a
political difference here even without a crisis.


okay, how do you propose that we bell the cat?

Since the Paris Commune, there have been at least three moments when
the possibility of transition to socialism was on the political
horizon: the Spanish Civil War, France of 1968, and the Meidner Plan.
Two of them were anarchists in fact (in Spain) or spirit (France) --
both held back by the largest current of the Marxist tradition then --
and the last was social democratic.


some might deny that the CPs were truly Marxist. In fact, I feel that
way. (NB: I will not defend this proposition, since it gets into a
silly debate about what "true Marxism" is.)

So, when and where movements
existed in the West to which intellectuals could attach themselves,
Marxism as understood by many Marxists then ironically played the role
of a brake or had a little role to play.  Could it be because many
Marxists by then had ceased to think about transition to socialism in
the North (while still hoping for it in the South)?


I don't know. Unfortunately, empiricism is usually the dominant
vision, so when the actual movement shuts down or bureaucratizes, then
the empiricists say "it can't happen here."

me: 
> I get the feeling that you just don't want to discuss political
> economics, Yoshie. Maybe talking about economic issues is boring to
> non-economists, but broad generalizations of the sort in the paragraph
> above don't help at all. They're talking about economics without
> presenting any content.

Yoshie: 
I basically wish to highlight the fact that the entire theoretical
debates on such question petered out (without making judgement about
this or that participant's theory in the debates); and in a similar
fashion, the Marxist/socialist feminist debate on domestic labor
faded.


could it be that the discussion of domestic labor was (a) solved or
(b) deemed to be unimportant?

me: 
> Or maybe the problem is that you don't like political-economic
> _theory_, as opposed to empiricist explorations like finding
> economics-related stories on-line and then posting them to pen-l.

Yoshie: 
I'd love to see debates on theory of imperialism, for instance, but
analyses of imperialism today (which have gotten revived to a certain
extent for obvious reasons) made by leftists and even Marxists seem to
me to be mostly or entirely empiricist in character.


whose? which one?

Marxists and other leftists have little to say about the political
economy of Iran, Iraq, the Persian Gulf, the Middle East in general,
etc. either, empirically or theoretically.  MERIP used to carry
Marxist takes on such questions, but it basically has gone in the
direction of NACLA*, much more liberal, much more empiricist than
before.


for relatively limited questions such as the political economy of
Iran, empiricism isn't all bad. You don't need much theory to figure
out that the mullahs rule there and use oil revenues for their own
benefit, allowing them to slowly (or in some cases rapidly) join the
capitalist class. On the other hand, if the issue is that of Iran in
the imperialist system, that's requires a less empiricist analysis.
Have you looked at Nitzan & Bichler's stuff? (search the pen-l
archive.) I'm pretty solid in my satisfaction with the theoretical
framework that I use to understand imperialism, however, and don't
find N&B's research to be extremely useful.
--
Jim Devine / "The truth is more important than the facts." -- Frank Lloyd Wright

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