another dialogue broken

This was forwarded to me by Louis Proyect.  I had expressed to him
privately my disgust for the mail he received from Ergene Lee.  He asked me
to forward this to the list.  He has unsubscribed from wsn.  These views
are his, but I don't necessarily disagree.


========
This will be my last communication to WSN (World Systems Network mailing
list). I simply do not want to be abused by right-wing students. I put up
with enough abuse living in imperialist America on a daily basis without
receiving an extra helping from list members in a discipline nominally in
the Marxist tradition.

I strongly urge Christopher, Immanuel and Andre to think deeply about what's
going on here. The rest of the left-wing lists on the Internet are
completely consumed with trying to understand the causes and meaning of the
war in Yugoslavia. Attempts to open up a discussion here on the topic have
resulted in the following:

--A request from a contributor to the Journal of World Systems Research to
stop "bombarding" him with information about the war.

--Mailbombs and obscenities from the president of a "World Systems" campus
club.

I came to this list to find out more about world systems theory as such. I
had never encountered anything directly written in its name, but am very
familiar with the work of Braudel, A.G. Frank and Janet Abu-Lughod. Andrew
Austin can back me up on this. My presence in both print journals and on
the Internet is to defend a version of Marxism that owes much to this
theory, as much as I understand of it. If Marxism can not relate to the
oppression of "peripheral" peoples like the American Indian, then it is
worthless.

I suspect that the cause of the strong reaction against me is rooted in the
"theoretical" turn of world systems away from the more class-oriented roots
of dependency theory. People like A.G. Frank knew what it meant to be a
citizen of a third world country from their direct involvement in places
like Allende's Chile. When this kind of experience becomes detached from
the theory, what you end up with is a very sophisticated form sociology
that unfortunately shares the "value free" assumptions of western social
science, no matter how many times you genuflect before Marx the "social
theorist".

If this theory can not engage with the key question of core-dependency
relations in this moment of history--the Balkans War--then it is worthless.
A war of this kind should be an acid test for this branch of knowledge. I
am afraid that by the evidence of this mailing list, it has not passed it.

For the dozen or so people who have been supportive, especially the Cuban
comrades, all I can do is urge you to check out the Marxism mailing-list
that I moderate. Information on its goals, and how to join can be found at
http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html

Louis Proyect



forwarded by,
______________________________________________
Ian R. Douglas  |  Watson Institute for International Studies
Brown University, Box 1831, Providence, RI  02912  USA

tel: 401 863-2420     fax: 401 863-2192

 "It is not by confining one's neighbor that one is
  convinced of one's own sanity."  -  Dostoyevsky

http://www.powerfoundation.org