Travis
Doug Henwood wrote:
> 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
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