councilor.org
| Source | Louis Proyect |
| Date | 99/10/09/19:20 |
| INTRODUCTION I suppose most people who got their Marxist education in Marxist parties share certain basic assumptions about how First World economic and political hegemony over the so-called Third World has been achieved. It was a function of economic exploitation going back to the discovery of the New World and the several hundred years of advantage this gave the First World, as it expanded its control over countries to the East as well. Gold and silver mined by indigenous peoples, colonial plantations, disruption of local handicrafts in places like India all worked together to give nascent capitalist institutions in Europe the "supercharging" they needed to leapfrog over other countries where similar institutions were also gestating. So I was surprised, if not shocked, to discover that Robert Brenner, a leader of the left-wing American group Solidarity, wrote a series of articles in the 1970s denying such connections. Brenner's critique was directed against a group of thinkers who, like Paul Sweezy, viewed themselves as operating in the Marxist tradition, and others, like Andre Gunder Frank, who rejected Marxism altogether. What they all had in common was a perspective that development in the core countries is a cause of underdevelopment in the so-called periphery. The prosperity and global power of nations like the United States was a function of the poverty and weakness of countries like Vietnam, Nicaragua and Angola. But in Brenner's words (New Left Review, 104, 1977), these thinkers "move too quickly from the proposition that capitalism is bound up with, and supportive of, continuing underdevelopment in large parts of the world, to the conclusion not only that the rise of underdevelopment is inherent in the extension of the world division of labour through capitalist expansion, but also that the 'development of underdevelopment' is an indispensable condition for capitalist development itself." I will argue that the 'development of underdevelopment' is indeed an indispensable condition for capitalist development itself, but before doing so it will be necessary to provide some historical background into Marxist thinking on these questions. Since Brenner claims to be defending classical Marxism against newfangled, neo-Smithian deviations, it would be useful to now review what Marx and Marxists have written. WHAT MARX BELIEVED In "The German Ideology", Marx writes: "Manufacture and the movement of production in general received an enormous impetus through the extension of commerce which came with the discovery of America and the sea-route to the East Indies. The new products imported thence, particularly the masses of gold and silver which came into circulation and totally changed the position of the classes towards one another, dealing a hard blow to feudal landed property and to the workers; the expeditions of adventurers, colonisation, and above all the extension of markets into a world-market, which had now become possible and was daily becoming more and more a fact, called forth a new phase of historical development, into which in general we cannot here enter further. Through colonisation of the newly discovered countries the commercial struggle of the nations amongst one another was given new fuel and accordingly greater extension and animosity. While Marx explicitly ties the introduction of "masses of gold and silver" to changes in the "positions of classes to one another," Brenner on the other hand dismisses the importance of such connections. In the NLR article, he argues that the "build-up of wealth, and its concentration in the hands of specific potential 'investors,' has occurred time and again without discernible effect" and adds, "We are left to wonder why any wealth transferred from the core to the periphery did not result merely in the creation of cathedrals and starvation in the periphery." Leaving aside the question of actual starvation in the periphery, the answer to why wealth was not frittered away on cathedrals, diamond-studded knickers and gilded toilet seats is quite simple. Commodity production had begun to sprout up in Europe, just as it had in China and India. I will return to this question, but there is no evidence that there was anything special or unique about the European economy on the eve of Columbus's "discovery of America," which is being ghoulishly celebrated 3 days hence. LENIN You get a very strong sense that Brenner's fight was against Maoism. Since this current had already fallen into disrepute when his articles were written, could we be dealing with the beating a dead horse phenomenon?. The notion of "core" versus "periphery" does suggest the Maoist People's War schema of the countryside surrounding the city, but by the late 70s, China had become an ally of the United States and Maoist groups had disintegrated internationally. The Monthly Review itself had begun to disassociate itself from the excesses of Maoism and was about to orient to new political developments internationally, including the Central American revolution. So was Brenner's attack more of a "mopping up" operation than anything else? Brenner writes, "So long as capitalism develops merely through squeezing dry the 'third world,' the primary opponents must be core versus periphery, the cities versus the countryside--not the international proletariat, in alliance with the oppressed people of all countries, versus the bourgeoisie." Now who can argue with such an alliance, except aging members of Bob Avakian's Revolutionary Communist Party? Furthermore, the notion that workers in the United States and Europe enjoy privileges derived from "squeezing dry the 'third world'" couldn't have anything to do with Lenin himself, could it? Since Lenin's famous "Imperialism, the Latest Stage of Capitalism" has very little to say about the periphery, one might conclude that this was not an important part of his analysis. But Lenin's writings on imperialism are much larger in scope than this particular essay, which focuses on the rivalries that led to WWI. In reality, Lenin did have ideas on core-periphery relations that sounded exactly like the sort of thing published regularly in Monthly Review in the 1960s. Furthermore, some of these ideas were simply an elaboration of those found in Marx and Engels themselves, who were grappling with the relative conservatism of the British working class. Lenin wrote "Imperialism and the Split in Socialism" in October, 1916 in order to answer the question: "Is there any connection between imperialism and the monstrous and disgusting victory opportunism (in the form of social-chauvinism) has gained over the labour movement in Europe?" This he regarded as "the fundamental question of modern socialism." (After witnessing the victory parades following Bush's victory over the Iraqis, one might conclude that this still remains the fundamental question.) Lenin notes that neither Marx nor Engels lived to see the imperialist epoch of world capitalism, which began not earlier than 1898-1900, but they were already aware that England had already revealed at least two major distinguishing features of imperialism: (1) vast colonies, and (2) monopoly profit (due to her monopoly position in the world market). Lenin cites a letter from Engels to Marx, dated October 7, 1858, which states: "...The English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that this most bourgeois of all nations is apparently aiming ultimately at the possession of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat alongside the bourgeoisie. For a nation which exploits the whole world this is of course to a certain extent justifiable." Was Engels a premature Maoist? Lenin thinks that such a proletariat can not be mollycoddled: "The bourgeoisie of an imperialist 'Great' Power can economically bribe the upper strata of 'its' workers by spending on this a hundred million or so francs a year, for its superprofits most likely amount to about a thousand million. And how this little sop is divided among the labour ministers, 'labour representatives' (remember Engels 's splendid analysis of the term), labour members of War Industries Committees, labour officials, workers belonging to the narrow craft unions, office employees, etc., etc., is a secondary question." The Communist International that was founded in opposition to the verbal socialism of the trade union bureaucracy, parliamentarians, etc. not only refused to cater to the prejudices of privileged workers in the cosmopolitan centers, it was also committed to supporting revolutions of "peripheral" countries against the "core" EVEN when they were LED by the national bourgeoisie. Brenner's anxiety that dependency theory could open to the door to the national bourgeoisie seems ill-placed in light of the Comintern's support to the Kuomintang. It is often forgotten in the river of Trotskyist polemics against Stalin's misleadership of the Chinese Revolution that nobody, including Trotsky, was opposed to participation in a KMT-led struggle for national independence, only that the Chinese CP had to keep its own organizational and political integrity intact. Opposition to the Kuomintang IN ITSELF was not the policy of Lenin or Trotsky. In the Second Congress of the Communist International held in 1920 at Baku (depicted memorably in Warren Beatty's film "Reds"), the interests of peripheral nations were put at the core of the Marxist agenda. (Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, edited by John Riddell, Pathfinder, 1991) In reports by Lenin and numerous delegates, there was little of Brenner's anxiety to be found. Constant reminders of how one NATION exploits another were made. In Session 4, July 26, 1920 Lenin remarks, "First, what is the cardinal idea underlying our theses? It is the distinction between oppressed and oppressor NATIONS." He also refers to Comrade Quelch of the British Socialist Party who said that "the rank-and-file British worker would consider it treasonable to help the enslaved NATIONS in their uprisings against British rule." STALINISM Unfortunately, the revolutionary internationalism of the Baku conference was to give way to the cautious policies of "socialism in one country." Although Marxist scholarship as a whole suffered during Stalin's reign, colonial questions perhaps suffered most. Wherever Communist Parties sank roots, the intelligentsia who gathered around and joined such parties tended to de-emphasize the question of oppressed and oppressor nations. This was partially a function of the rise of the Popular Front, which discounted the role of imperialism to begin with. It was also related to Stalin's re-introduction of "stagism" into the workers movement. Where Lenin and the early Comintern looked for ways to bypass capitalist development and proceed directly to socialism, the Stalinists tended to align with "modernizing" elites in peripheral countries, who could be counted on to welcome foreign investment provided that it derived from "enlightened" sources, like North American corporations in the time of FDR's New Deal. Against these utopian hopes, Andre Gunder Frank argued that bourgeois development in Latin America was impossible. Brenner hails this as a step forward: "Frank's original formulations aimed to destroy the suffocating orthodoxies of Marxist evolutionary stage theory which the Communist Parties' political strategies of 'popular front' and 'bourgeois democratic revolutions' had been predicated. Frank rightly stressed that the expansion of capitalism thorough trade and investment did not automatically bring with it the capitalist economic development that the Marx of the Communist Party had predicted." CARIBBEAN MARXISM Actually, the first turn against Stalinist orthodoxy predated "dependency theory" by quite a few years. It was the product of a number of highly original African-Caribbean thinkers, including Eric Williams, Walter Rodney and CLR James. Not only did they manage to develop an approach to Marxism that had little in common with Stalinist preconceptions, they also felt the need to develop a better understanding of why their own African Diaspora countries, and Mother Africa itself, could not seem to achieve the sort of modernization and civilized standards predicated on the introduction of capitalism. While there was plenty of capitalism in Africa and the Caribbean, there seemed to be very little development. They sought to answer the question why development in some countries was associated with underdevelopment in others. CLR James's 1938 "Black Jacobins" set the standard for scholarship followed by others. While James emerges from the internationalist-minded Trotskyist movement, he was always much more sensitive to racial and national oppression than other movement leaders. His study of the Haitian slave revolt is filled with sharp observations on how the underdevelopment of the colonies was related to capitalist development in the mother countries: "The slave-trade and slavery were the economic basis of the French Revolution. 'Sad irony of human history,' comments Jaurès. 'The fortunes created at Bordeaux, at Nantes, by the slave-trade, gave to the bourgeoisie that pride which needed liberty and contributed to human emancipation.' Nantes was the centre of the slave-trade. As early as 1666, 108 ships went to the coast of Guinea and took on board 37,430 slaves, to a total value of more than 37 millions, giving the Nantes bourgeoisie 15 to 20 percent on their money. In 1700 Nantes was sending 50 ships a year to the West Indies with Irish salt beef, linen for the household and for clothing the slaves, and machinery for sugar-mills. Nearly all the industries which developed in France during the eighteenth century had their origin in goods or commodities destined either for the coast of Guinea or for America. The capital from the slave-trade fertilized them; though the bourgeoisie traded in other things than slaves, upon the success or failure of the traffic everything else depended." Kent Worcester's fine biography of James ("CLR James: a Political Biography", SUNY, Albany, 1996) describes Eric Williams' debt to his mentor. "Capitalism and Slavery", a book that figures in some ways as the root of all intellectual evil in Brenner's scheme of things, was published in 1944, 6 years after "Black Jacobins". Based on his dissertation at Oxford, Williams met with James, his former tutor, on numerous occasions when both were living in England. It seems that James read both drafts of the dissertation and had a significant role in formulating the book's primary thesis, namely that sugar plantations, rum and slavery trade helped to catapult Great Britain into world domination at the expense of the African peoples in the Diaspora. Without the underdevelopment of Jamaica, Trinidad, etc., capitalist development in Great Britain would not have had the supercharged character that it did. DEPENDENCY THEORISTS; WORLD SYSTEMS THEORY Dependency theory was associated with the journal Monthly Review, which was launched by Paul Sweezy and others in the ferment of the Wallace campaign. It was an attempt to provide an independent voice for American socialism, while it retained some degree of sympathy for the CPUSA. Sweezy himself was never a member, although he was witch-hunted from the academy in the 1950s. Sweezy and Paul A. Baran collaborated together to develop an analysis of capitalism that basically was updated for the 20th century. When Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto, capitalism was an extremely dynamic system. Baran and Sweezy argue that with the advent of imperialism, stagnation and under-utilization characterize the system. In "The Political Economy of Growth", written 1957, Baran describes the awful fate of countries in the periphery: "Thus the peoples who came into the orbit of Western capitalist expansion found themselves in the twilight of feudalism and capitalism enduring the worst features of both worlds, and the entire impact of imperialist subjugation to boot. To oppression by their feudal lords, ruthless but tempered by tradition, was added domination by foreign and domestic capitalists, callous and limited only by what the traffic would bear. The obscurantism and arbitrary violence inherited from their feudal past was combined with the rationality and sharply calculating rapacity of their capitalist present. Their exploitation was multiplied, yet its fruits were not to increase their productive wealth; these went abroad or served to support a parasitic bourgeoisie at home. They lived in abysmal misery, yet they had no prospect of a better tomorrow. They existed under capitalism, yet there was no accumulation of capital. They lost their time-honored means of livelihood, their arts and crafts, yet there was no modern industry to provide new ones in their place. They were thrust into extensive contact with the advanced science of the West, yet remained in a state of the darkest backwardness." Resting on Sweezy and Baran's broad theoretical framework, Andre Gunder Frank published a series of very influential studies on Latin America, including "Accumulation and Underdevelopment in Latin America." His work and the work of other Monthly Review authors, including Samir Amin, Eduardo Galeano, Immanuel Wallerstein and Pierre Jalée, were basically empirical confirmations of Sweezy and Baran's theory, as applied to Latin America, Africa and Asia. Their scholarship was wedded to activity on behalf of revolutionary or left-reformist governments. For example, Frank worked at the highest levels of the Allende government. The impact of their scholarship and the growing influence of the Monthly Review obviously had to be connected to the Vietnam war and the movement that arose against it. Vietnam itself was seen as the latest example of the "development breeding underdevelopment" thesis, while positive examples such as Cuba and China proved that there was at least one road open to peripheral countries: socialist revolution. As the Vietnam war came to a conclusion and the 1960s radicalization wound down, a number of these thinkers lost their connection to the radical movement and helped to transform dependency theory into something called "world systems theory". Most closely associated with the work of Immanuel Wallerstein, Harpur professor and director of the Fernand Braudel Center, this methodology can be described as sub-genre of sociology and political science. It attempts to integrate global economy, ecology, demographics, etc. into a high-level perspective. In addition to taking a very broad geographical view, it has also become associated with very long chronological perspectives. Specifically, economic "long waves" have become integral to world systems theory and Andre Gunder Frank, who has made the shift into this academic specialty, has lately been entertaining the possibility that we are on the cusp of a new 5000 year long wave, which would raise all sorts of Y2K type issues. Although much of this stuff is interesting, and I try to integrate its insights into some of the things I have been writing about American Indians, it is basically a retreat from political engagement. CONCLUSION There are good reasons to be alarmed by the inability of thinkers like Wallerstein and Frank to conceptualize class questions. The answer to this, however, does not lie in denial about national inequality. For a genuine worldwide socialist movement to re-emerge, it will have to be imbued with the spirit of Baku. Key to this is an understand that there are indeed oppressed and oppressor nations. In my next post, I will examine in some detail the fallacy in Brenner's thinking about "precapitalist" societies. By drawing a contrast between capitalist Great Britain and what he alleges to be precapitalist societies in Latin America and other peripheral areas, Brenner fails to understand these places and times in the complex and dialectical manner that they deserve. While some of the more recent theories of the world systems constellation of thinkers must be rejected, their empirical work can be deployed to help us understand the exact nature of forced labor, modes of production, etc. in 16th to 18th century Latin America. Since Brenner has totally ignored this area of the world, it is incumbent upon us to remind ourselves of its crucial role in the launching of the modern-day capitalist system. |
Copyright (c) 1998, Joongpil Cho