Long post, Frank. And well done. Let me just pick a few items to offer a response. If I wait until I come up with an integrated long essay, you and I will never post to one another again. I'll just keep putting it off.
1. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.
Yep, that is a very famous Marx quote. One faculty member at City University of New York, Marshall Berman used it as a title for his work. Not a bad book.
amazon.com
2. Well what about Harris? He's clearly read the the thing . . . . I don't doubt he's read it. I have a low level concern, Bill likes to chide me that it's nit picking, that Harris presents himself as a Marx expert but doesn't know the interpretive literature. Read some Marx and thinks it is what it says to him. It's a bit more complicated than that and some editor at the Hoover outfit should have caught that.
3. About immiseration. Harris says,. . . This is pretty tout court. Yep, again I agree. It's just that it's far too basic, again for this kind of journal. You could pick that out of some introductory lecture to Marx in any economic theory course. I don't keep up with the literature on the "immeseration theory" so I don't know whether he's got it right or not. But he certainly didn't indicate he knew that literature. At all.
4. It can be derived from Marx that capitalist form of production leads to immiseration of the proletariat and lots of folk have done it Definitely. It's a little less straightforward than that sentence, though I'm certain you know that. But I agree, obviously, with the way you've specified the causal chain. There is a second level of debate, though, as to whether better working conditions, unions, enfranchised working class, is a consequences of capitalism or of a long, difficult struggle to capture those rights for workers. I agree, you might guess, with the latter.
5. Sweezy. Forgot about him. Yeah, now that you remind me, much of those articles were Baran and Sweezy. As for the concept of the immiseration of the proleteriat being internationalized with Wallerstein, that's not direct. Rather it's indirect. At least that's my read of him. His focus is on the system, the structure, not on the immiseration. In that regard, he's different from Marx. But Wallerstein is more a structuralist than anything else. And his structures have power built into them and they are zero sum in character. That doesn't make him a Marxist. But I can see how, from some far distant place, someone unfamiliar with this literature--I'm talking about Bill now not you--might think the connection is direct.
6. Though he is not typically considered a dependentista,. . . Hmm, a fine point to me. I would have considered him a kindred soul at least. But the little I've read of their stuff and nothing at all in about ten years, they focus more on the degree to which the core extracts resources from the periphery. Wallerstein tends to take the larger picture, not pay too much attention to that. Though, I quit reading him sometime in the middle 80s.
7. Wallerstein's work is definitely an elaboration of the idea, no question. He is a practitioner of world systems history which can be summarized, too simply, as 'over time hegemony shifts from location to location' and there are quite a number of folk who have undertaken such efforts. (The one I'm faintly familiar with is Braudel). Braudel is a different sort. Definitely not a Marxist. I recommend his books on capitalism. But if you start, be prepared for having to focus. I've read some of his stuff but it never grabbed me enough to try to incorporate his stuff into my thinking. The notion that hegemony shifts is, to my way of thinking, not particularly Marxist. Lots of folk talk that way.
8. If you did not read that long post you offered on Wallerstein, I strongly recommend you take a look. I think the strongest criticisms of his work are those offered by Theda Skocpol at Harvard. They are not only mentioned in that article but are summarized quite well.
9. It's also the case that most objectors work from a perspective very much in captivity of marxist critical apparatus, . . . You were talking about globalization critics in the prior sentence. Should have clipped that as well. This is where I disagree with you and Bill and Harris. I think the case has to be made. And Harris didn't do it. If all Harris is arguing is that something he calls the "Marxist left" draws on this, then fine. It's something of a tautology and not terribly interesting. But to assert that "the left" draws on it, or, as in Bill's case "environmentalists" do, or those who object to globalization, in your phrase do, I think that case has to be made. That's finally, when all else is done with the Harris essay, is my concern. We can debate ad nauseum the quality of his work. It's fun. But that's not the point. It's rather the hypothesized connection between Marxism and the left, that's the issue.
Thanks again for taking the time and the trouble. You've reminded me of a great deal of reading, thinking, talking, and a wee bit of writing I've done in the last twenty five years.
If you have more to say, heave to. |
