[lbo-talk] MR & Maoism

[Doug Henwood]

So I was catching up on my Workers Vanguards last night - always a  
salutary experience - and came across this in the course of an  
excellent article on China. WV criticizes Paul Burkett & Marty Hart- 
Landsberg's work on China, which is hostile to China's rapid economic  
growth, preferring instead a more localist/green model. The Sparts,  
by contrast, take a more traditionally orthodox Marxist position,  
which holds that you can't have socialism without the (centralizing)  
development of the productive forces, and which sees capitalism as a  
brake on such development. WV comments that "it is, as they say, no  
accident that" Burkett & Hart-Landsberg's work was first published in  
Monthly Review, which "has long been the main journal of American  
intellectuals of the Maoist persuasion." They quote Paul Sweezy as  
saying back in 1974 that "a low level of development of the  
productive forces is not an insuperable obstacle" to socialism. WV  
comments that this thinking is based on a binary model of the world  
as a false set of forced choices between "integration into the  
capitalist world market or one form or another of pseudo-egalitarian  
national economic self-sufficiency."

If true, this would present Yoshie's fondness for Iran in an  
interesting context.

Since we've got several MR people here , I'm wondering - is this a  
fair characterization of MR's history and position?

Doug