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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (59967)	12/6/2002 9:48:20 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 281500

Bill, I've read the Harris piece and have a short version response and a long version response. Let me try out the short version and see where it goes. 1. Who is the American left that Harris considers as so demonic? He offers three names--Chomsky, Wallerstein, and Baran. Baran, I think, is dead, so let's leave it with these two. He offers no quotes from nor readings of Chomsky's work which would seriously demonstrate the fantasy argument abounds in Chomsky's work nor, and this is more important, that Chomsky is a good surrogate for "the American left." Perhaps he could find such in Chomsky's work. I don't know it. But there is no way I can see he could argue that Chomsky's views are the views of the Am left. And since he makes that one of the reasons for the article, that's a strong indictment of the piece. On Wallerstein, I recall a debate in the 70s, might have extended into the 80s, as to whether W was Marxist. Views went both ways; I wasn't interested; so I don't really know how it turned out. Strange that Harris doesn't bring that debate up. One of the points of that debate was the W's core concepts were core and periphery, not notably class based concepts and that his work was too structural. By that, the critics meant that the periphery countries, the dependent countries, lacked agency in the theory. The critics noted that periphery countries actually carved their own spaces out of the periphery in very different fashions, none of which could seriously be understood within W's theory. I also don't know how those discussions turned out. But, none of this focused itself on US capitalism making workers in third world countries poorer. It was more about an international economic structure in which the structure within a state was dictated by its location. Thus peripheral states, let's take a typical Central American country as an illustration, had an economy structured around US business interests in coffee, bananas, whatever. The principle role of the state then was to protect those interests. The problem, however accurate that might represent El Salvador or Guatamala, is Costa Rico. Doesn't account for it. Moreover, Harris needs to find some documentation that from W about the fantasy stuff. 2. Perhaps a path not taken. He could look at Stan Greenberg's work. Stan, as you may know, was Bill Clinton's political pollster for a while, is a prominent one still, worked for Barak in Israel and for Tony Blair in England. Stan's clearly a lefty and has a body of work to prove it. amazon.com amazon.com amazon.com Stan was an academic. At Yale in the early 70s. Is connected to a succession of magazines on the left. Yet you could not find substantion for these assertions Harris makes in Stan's work if your life depended on it. The fantasy here is Harris. 3. His treatment of Marx is not competent. He makes a series of debatable propositions about Marx while showing no knowledge of the relevant literature. His treatment, I think I've already stated, of the thing he calls the Baran-Wallerstein thesis is not competent. He needs to show enough familiarity with their work to demonstrate that he has accurately represented it to us and enough familiarity with the disparate interpretations of their work to suggest his is better than the others. Now I know one objection to that is that is not the piece he wrote. And I agree. But he needs to show via footnotes or short phrases that he knows the literature. Finally, I did a bit of google searching and could find nothing but the two articles. So I don't know who he is. And, another finally, I had a better impression of the Policy Review based on the Kagan piece and on the Pollack piece. This one reminds me that is does come out of the Hoover Institution and doesn't edit it's more political pieces carefully. Someone should have caught this one before it wound up in this issue. And, now for a finally finally, my apologies for the harsh stuff here. I've found sometimes bad articles are the best kind of read since arguing with them prompts thoughts of my own and I'm off and running. Perhaps that's what happened to you with this one. Or perhaps you disagree with my assessment and we have some more talk to do on it. I would be happy to dig down on any of these points. I'll keep my notes for a few days. And, oh yes, there is another finally finally, if you wish some more serious evaluation of the competence of the Marxist treatment herein, you might ask tek to ask his wife to take a look. I doubt she will disagree with me but we would see. She's certainly read in this stuff more recently than I have. At least that's my impression from reading some of her work.