Cheers, Rob.
>***** Finally, before offering our political critique of the
>left-liberal consensus, it is useful to note the close parallels
>between our methodological critique and Rosa Luxemburg's critique of
>Bernstein's more original form of revisionism. Luxemburg notes, for
>example, how Bernstein takes certain (positive or negative) aspects
>of capitalism out of their class-exploitative, hence contradictory,
>structural context: Bernstein's theory does not seize these
>manifestations of contemporary economic life as they appear in their
>organic relationship with the whole of capitalist development, with
>the complete economic mechanism of capitalism. His theory pulls
>these details out of their living economic context. It treats them
>as the disjecta membra (separate parts) of a lifeless machine.
>(Luxemburg, 1970: 61) As a result, says Luxemburg, Bernstein's
>revisionism has a close affinity with the viewpoint of `the isolated
>capitalist [who] sees each organic part of the whole of our economy
>as an independent entity . . . as they act upon him, the single
>capitalist'. For, insofar as revisionism limits its analysis to an
>uncritical acceptance of `the economic facts . . . just as they
>appear when refracted by the laws of competition,' then `revisionism
>is nothing else than a theoretic generalization made from the angle
>of the isolated capitalist'. Luxemburg then argues that such an
>a-historical, non-holistic perspective necessarily `ends in utopia'
>because it is incapable of seeing how `the contradictions of
>capitalism mature'; indeed, like the isolated capitalist, revisionism
>`wants to lessen, to attenuate, the capitalist contradictions' (1970:
>60-3).15 The similarity between Luxemburg's classical critique of
>revisionism and our critique of the left-liberal consensus on Japan
>becomes even clearer when we consider the political implications of
>the latter. As we shall see, because this consensus is based on an
>understanding of capitalism that also `pulls . . . details out of
>their living context,' views the economy `from the angle of the
>isolated capitalist,' and `is guided by the . . . possibility of the
>attenuation of the contradictions of capitalism,' it must also, like
>Bernstein's revisionism, `end in utopia'. (Paul Burkett and Martin
>Hart-Landsberg, "The Use and Abuse of Japan as a Progressive Model,"
>_The Socialist Register_ 1996, at
><http://www.yorku.ca/socreg/burkett-landsberg96.txt>) *****
>
>Yoshie