Nikolai S. Rozov wrote:
>
> Dear Mark and All,
>
> as far as i know this list is designed not for political debate but
> for academic discussion of world-system approach and theory with
> possible application to global practice,
>
Then why post Amnesty-International PR here?
> i answer Mark here first
> because our correspondence occured to be of interest for other
> wsn-ers and second because i see an essential connection between
> rights and w-systems, that i wish to discuss below
>
> it is known the human rights and their previous forms (defence of
> person and property, principles of legal equality, liberties, civil
> rights) were always developed in more scale and degree in the cores
> of world-systems.
>
> I use to distinguish two forms of rent (Tilly's
> principle and my terminology): the rent by extraction (of
> tribute) and the rent by attraction (of capital).
>
Both forms of rent are forms of expropriation, ie exploitation, or
do you think that 'capital' enjoys a 'right' to a 'reward'?
Presumably you do, in light of all that follows: and your defence
of 'rights' is actually a pitiful apology for the 'rights of capital'
for which, BTW, no-one from Michel Camdessus to Mikhail Khordokovsky
will bother to thank you.
You seem to believe that protocapitalism did not grow out of
pre-capitalist organic societies, but IN OPPOSITION to them
(very marxian). But trade did not happen in a vacuum. It occurred in
the interstices of those 'massives' you mention, and was to begin
with a form of plunder, slave-trader and parasitism. The freedom
of the polis and indeed the buildings of the polis weres always
and everywhere built upon the bones of the exploited and upon the
preservation of precisely those precapitalist, brutish empires
which we all deplore. The idea that bourgeis right exists without
its historical and logical counterpart: the ABSENCE of right -- is
not WSN theory, it is VOA theory.
The USSR, like East Asia (Indonesia for example) was integrated into the
World System a long time ago, and has paid the price just as Indonesia
has, for being one of those subordinate, dependent and highly necssary
'massives'.
> The first form was
> more useful in large agricultural territorial massives (Eastern
> Europe, agricultural France, continental India, Northern China),
>
> the
> second form is a charachteristic of trade and protocapitalist, later
> capitalist regions (Western Europe, especially Venice, Genova, marine
> France, Netherlands, etc according to classical Braudelian history,
> also trade cities in Arabo-Indo-African bassein and Southern China
> with Malacca, etc).
>
> Braudel writes that everywhere (not only in Europe) large
> commercial cities had much more tolerance for religion, styles of
> clothing, behavior, guarantees for property, defence of life and
> privacy, etc. - that is the political-ecomic basis (just in Marxian
> terms) of human rights. Without these guarantees the capital simply
> flows to other places.
>
> The rent by extraction need not following by powerful elits to
> these high legal (or traditional) standards because peasants cannot
> pick up and take away the land as merchants can change trajectories
> of their trade trips.
>
> This fundamental basis was integrated (and mutually supported) in
> Europe and later US with ideas of democracy, civil equality,
> with liberal ideology etc.,
>
> and eventually an idea of human rights
> emerged first as an antidote against return of fascism, then as a
> main instrument of liberalism agains communist ideology (that's why
> the flame attack of marxist-leninist Mark Jones's was no wonder for
> me).
>
The idea of human rights is at least as old as Rousseau and therefore
predates Marxism by about a century. The purpose it served was to
turn merchant capital into industrial capitalism by 'freeing' labour.
The symbiosis of abstract right and direct personal subjugation and
exploitation was deepened, intensified and made more contradictory thereby.
> I don't think that good ideas are spoiled if once in history they
> served for somebody's utilitarian purposes. The rejection of slavery
> in US during Civil War can be understood eventually also just as
> instrument of Northern capitalists, but does it mean that to forbid
> slavery as a bad idea?
Also true of social-ism, is it not? Why rest your defence of human
rights ona defence of private property, when you could better
rest it on something as wholesome as human solidarity in societies
of co-operation not exploitation? When I said 'war communism' BTW
I meant specificaly what will happen or not happen this winter
in Russia: and if it had not been for the granting by the West
of unbridled rights of plunder and exploitation to criminals like
Khodorkovsky and Mayor Luzhkov (the Moscow police as upholders of
civil rights??? I lived in Moscow, Kolya, so who are you trying to kid?)
then the logical corelative: the broad denial of rights amid the mass
expropriation of 'private' property, would never have been called for.
But without drastic popular mobilisations and 'war communism', millions
in cities like your own Novosibirsk will simple starve this winter.
You cannot eat abstract rights.
>They think that the fact that they are not afraid each night to
> be arrested, then tortured and murdered after criticising government
> or president is a natural state of things just as daily sunrise, they
> do not see all modern merits of save social system just like fishes
> do not see water...
And this unfreedom is a property of capitalist states everywhere,
and it is a property of life in Moscow, too.
> But the fact is that only one billion lives now in conditions
> of normalcy of human rights order: core countries and top level of
> semieriphery. All other billions suffer not only from povertu and
> hunger but from absence of normal, minimal or even any human rights
> order.]
>
The reason why the other 4/5 of humankind do not enjoy those rights
is precisely because of the privileges enjoyed by the core
countries, which absord 80% of energy and resources. Or do you think
these things are unconnected? Surprising if you do, since you have had
the benefit of wtinessing with your own eyes the process of capitalist
plunder, which gave 'right' and gave 'food aid' as a result of which
Russians now have no rights, and no food either! Because even their
agriculture has ben destroyed, which is of course what 'aid' was
designed to achieve.
> As for Russia, she unfortunately slopes down from semiperiphery to
> periphery (in spite of Moscow that managed to grasp even some
> features of the core and greatly impresses Westerners who think that
> Moscow is an image of Russia),
Actually, that remains to be seen. Perhaps Russia is about to
consummate a fourth Revolution. I very much hope so. And I
see that you very much fear so, which is no doubt is why you
have suddenly begun to pray Amnesty in aid: but where were you
when millions of your fellow countrymen and women were dying of
disease, hunger and homelessness during the past 8 years?
>
> I surely agree with Mark in his care for savenes of Russians (and
> anybody else) from mass death, colonialism, and imperial plunder.
> But he just defends human rights here!
Well, better late than never.
>
> It is a right for life, a
> right to live in a sovereign country (politically and economically),
>
> also there is a right to be saved from inflation, a right to have
> banking accounts defended, a right to live in a country with food and
> energetic security. Last mentioned rights were violated by our
> Russian stupid rulers, not by 'world emperialism'.
Nonsense. These same stupid rulers were simply installed by western
imperialism. You would have to have been not in Novosibirsk
but on another planet not to have noticed.
>
> Nothing is more wrong than
> to think that modern misfortune of Russia is only an effect of
> insidious world capitalism that wished to make harm for innocent
> Russians.
Ah, so you blame the Russians, yes?
>
> and i really never will agree with appeals from old nice Europe and
> still blossoming US for 'war communism and mass mobilization' in
> Russia or anywhere. The effect will be isolation, totalitarianism,
> return to the rent by extraction, mass repressions (if not new
> wave of grand terror), later - inevitably peripheral position, new
> corruption of elits, new dissidense, new trial for perestroika in
> much more weak position, etc
The choices facing Russia are stark, indeed. Either war communism:
or disintegration. Either the sternest forms of social discipline and
authoritarian rule by the left: or hunger, darkness and death.
I don't SEE any third way. I think that Gaidar, Chubais and the
other tomb-robbers have had their chance.
>
> finally and briefly on the possible positive program: the struggle
> for human rights sooner or later must lead to thinking of and then
> negotiations and consolidation in work on POLITICAL, ECONOMIC and
> LEGAL GUARANTEES for human rights,
I think a good start will be made when town workers are first
mobilised to dig potatoes and bring in the harvest (do you
think that won't happen? But is is already a condition of everyday
life for the so-caled 'intelligentsia', now for the most part
reduced to being stallholders, taxi-drivers and backyard pig-keepers).
>
> including mentioned above rights
> to live in national sovereignity (here i support Richard Moore's
> program), rights for food, energetical, political, ecological
> security, rights to save money and property from inflation and too
> high taxes (or extracted tribute), etc.
Yes, yes, yes, we al support all these wonderful 'right', but
how will you feed the cities?
>
> It is a program of not
> rapid romantic revolution (as Mark seems to starve for) but of
> long routine construction of social institutes, norms, standards,
> development of infrastructure, industry, and agriculture.
*I* am the romantic but *you* are still romanticising
about the quest for 'rights' which precisely has plunged your own
motherland into chaos, the collapse of all institutes and norms,
the total anihilation of infrastructure, industry, and agriculture.
Who's the dreamer here?
> I have no illusion of future equality of countries. Moreover I am
> sure that US will rest a world leader for many decades (because of
> fortunate investement in science and education, a factual
> monopolization of international services in this area that now has
> the same status as spices had in XV-XVI),
But you maybe wrong about that too.
>
> but i see no theoretical contradiction in the picture of one core
> (say 'golden billion') and the vast 'second level' where
> countries and world regions are all 'semiperipheral' because in
> various fields they play role of 'patron' or 'client' to each other.
Ah, right, so you're happy to be an academic coolie in a 'developmental'
backwater...
> that's why I appeal for a new grand alliance:
>
> 1)human rights movement,
>
> 2)intracore anti-mainstream movements
> (includings offended world capitalist elits like South-Eastern Asian,
> and intellectuals like global practical bias of CSF and WSN) and
>
> 3)world leftist and nationalist ('anti-imperialistic')movements,
>
That you should become politicised at all seems entirely remarkable,
that you should be calling for such things as anti-imperialistic
movements, is a testament to the profound and rapid radicalisation
of Russian society, which I repeat is perhaps entering the first stage
of a new revolution, the fourth this century. We shall see who is the
romantic and who is the realist.
Mark Jones