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

To: JohnM who wrote (60148)	12/6/2002 12:10:30 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

First, the off hand way he treated serious intellectual positions--Marx, Chomsky, whomsoever. Marx, as you may know, wrote some of the most glowing prose ever written about the US. And Marx' views of the capitalism of the middle 19th century certainly should not be extrapolated directly into views of early 21st century US. Thus, in my view, he was simply using Marx and Chomsky as the usual straw folk caricatures. A terrible way to argue. But Harris is not alone in that. This misstates Harris' position completely. He was not extrapolating Marx, he was discussing the Baran-Wallerstein revision of the classical immiserization thesis into its global context. This is a twentieth-century thesis, not a nineteenth century one. Now if this thesis is to be believed, America is enriching itself at the expense of the rest of the world. If you believe this, who wouldn't be angry? Who wouldn't demand that America make fundamental changes in its system? Who wouldn't forthrightly describe themselves as being "anti" such an unjust American system? Now, does anybody believe this thesis, whether explicitly or as an unexamined premise for other beliefs, or not? That is a question that should be answered, not merely deflected. If this thesis does underlie a good bit of leftist thinking, and I think it does, generally in unexamined fashion, then the American Left, for its own sake, had better sort out what it does and does not believe about America's place in the world. Because reflexive anti-Americanism just got less popular in most (American) quarters. The current response, whining about being called "unpatriotric", also has limited popularity imo. One can argue about specific folk, Chomsky, whomsoever, they have such views So, Chomsky, like Said, is too "complicated" to judge offhand? I see.

To: JohnM who wrote (60148)	12/6/2002 10:19:11 PM
From: frankw1900	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

But Harris made two very serious mistakes in his essay. First, the off hand way he treated serious intellectual positions--Marx, Chomsky, whomsoever. Marx, as you may know, wrote some of the most glowing prose ever written about the US. And Marx' views of the capitalism of the middle 19th century certainly should not be extrapolated directly into views of early 21st century US. Thus, in my view, he was simply using Marx and Chomsky as the usual straw folk caricatures. A terrible way to argue John, You have made a mistake in your estimation of Harris's essay. He has definitely done his Marxist research. His description of evolution of Marxist thought with regard to "immiseration" from its origins through the mid 20th century to its most recent development would be a wonderful crib for an undergraduate wanting to get up to speed on the topic. But I'll skip that and get to where his essay turns to present application. He says, policyreview.org Baran?s global immiserization thesis, after its initial launch, was taken up by other Marxists, but it was nowhere given a more elaborate intellectual foundation than in Immanuel Wallerstein?s monumental study The Modern World-System (Academic Press, 1974 ), which was essentially a fleshing out in greater historical and statistical detail of Baran?s thesis. Hence, for the sake of convenience, I will call the global immiserization thesis the Baran-Wallerstein revision. America as ?root cause? What i now would like to consider is not the thesis itself, but the role that this thesis played in bolstering and revitalizing late twentieth-century Marxism. For it is here that we find the intellectual origins of the international phenomenon of America-bashing. If there is any element of genuine seriousness in this movement ? if, indeed, it aspires to be an objective and realistic assessment of the relationship of America to the rest of the world ? then that element of seriousness is to be found in the global immiserization thesis: America has gotten rich by making other countries poor. Furthermore, this is no less true of those who, like Chomsky, have focused on what is seen as American military aggression against the rest of the world, for this aggression is understood as having its ?root cause? in America?s systematic exploitation of the remainder of the human race. If American exploitation did not create misery, it would not need to use military force. It is the global immiserization thesis that makes the use of force an indispensable tool of American foreign policy and that is responsible, according to this view, for turning America into a terrorist state. This explains the absolute centrality of the global immiserization thesis in the creation of the specter of America now haunting so much of our world. Say what you like, he definitely has an argument and even an explantion for the positions of those who see the US as the world's greatest threat, terrorist, and so forth. I have to say from my experience and reading, it certainly is the case an extremely large number of people throughout the world, including the US, hold to the position of America as universal villain, or if not that, as the source or cause of what's gone wrong, and ascribe to it precisely the motives Harris brings forth. It's a good essay. Definitely worth a read. Harris is not at all unsympathetic to the "left" but he does want it to get it right: [Edit: well, I mean not "right" but...you know what I mean] Those who, speaking in Marx?s name, try to defend the fantasy ideology embodied in 9-11 are betraying everything that Marx represented. They are replacing his hard-nosed insistence on realism with a self-indulgent flight into sheer fantasy, just as they are abandoning his strenuous commitment to pursuit of a higher stage of social organization in order to glorify the feudal regimes that the world has long since condemned to Marx?s own celebrated trash bin of history. America-bashing has sadly come to be ?the opium of the intellectual,? to use the phrase Raymond Aron borrowed from Marx in order to characterize those who followed the latter into the twentieth century. And like opium it produces vivid and fantastic dreams. This is an intellectual tragedy. The Marxist left, whatever else one might say about it, has traditionally offered a valuable perspective from which even the greatest conservative thinkers have learned ? including Schumpeter and Thomas Sowell. But if it cannot rid itself of its current penchant for fantasy ideology of the worst type, not only will it be incapable of serving this purpose; it will become worse than useless.