Date: Fri, 18 Oct 1996 10:57:44 -0400 (EDT) From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu> Subject: Notes on Jim Petras I'm glad that Zeynep brought up Jim Petras's name. I've known of him for years and have some strong opinions on what he represents. Petras is a Sociology Professor at the SUNY in Binghamton. He was one of thousands who went through the revolving-door of American Trotskyism in the 1960s. He stayed in long enough to get himself a proper Marxist education and then went on to carve a career out for himself in left academia. Nowadays Petras positions himself as a foe of all manifestations of opportunism and compromise. This wasn't always the case. In the early 1970s, he closely identified with the Allende regime in Chile and was as surprised as anybody when the "neutral" and "professional" Chilean army wiped out the socialist experiment. This experience chastened him to a very high degree. From that point on, this Sociology Professor would identify only with the most authentic revolutionary currents, and not the wishy-washy ones like the Sandinistas. It was now to be Fidel Castro, the Cuban people and Sociology Professor Jim Petras face-to-face with US imperialism. I sit here now looking at the May, 1990 "NicaNews", a publication of the NY Nicaragua Solidarity Network that I used to edit. There is an article in it co-authored by Rick Congress and myself on "Some Thoughts on Recent Leftist Criticism of the FSLN". It is a reply to Petras's article "Flawed Strategies Planted Seeds of Sandinista Defeat" that appeared in the "In these Times" of March 21-27, 1990. This was Petras's main criticism: "But five more years of intensified warfare and concessions from the FSLN created optimal conditions for electoral victory [for UNO], and the FSLN committed the strategic mistake of agreeing to elections under these circumstances...For the Sandinistas the elections were an attempt to end the war and begin development. But they should have ended the war and begun reconstruction and development before holding an election." Our reply: "The new Nicaraguan constitution mandated an election in November of 1990. The first election, which the FSLN won with 63% of the vote, was in November of 1984. As a concession in the regional peace process Ortega agreed to holding the election nine months early. Would waiting until November of 1990 given them time 'to end the war and begin development?' If not, then -- following Petras's logic -- they would then cancel the elections outright. Would this have brought peace and development? Far from it. It would have guaranteed a renewal of the war, isolated Nicaragua internationally, demoralized the people further, and created favorable conditions for a U.S. invasion." Even though I have little sympathy for Petras's generally ultraleftist politics, I do try to read everything he writes. He is an important barometer of leftish thinking in the academy. I only wish that other academicians would err on the ultra-left, as he does. This led me to pick up "Empire or Republic", co-authored by Petras and Morris Morley. It was sitting on my shelf along with a thousand other books I've been meaning to get to. After Zeynep's post, I decided to take a look at it. I'm glad I did. It appears to be a valuable little book. It attempts to show how consistent Clinton's global strategy is with Reagan and Bush's. So much of the left continues to be confused between the struggle between Democratic Party "lesser evilism" and Republican "ultrarightism", that is useful to have books like this at its disposal. I quote from the conclusion: "Class divisions persist and have become accentuated in the United States. The classes of empire, the electronic movers of capital world- wide, are anchored in the international circuits while the classes of the republic are rooted in vulnerable and immobile national communities. Today the politics of empire (Bush's 'global leadership,' Clinton's 'enlargement') monopolize the political agenda: global actors permeate the Democratic and Republican parties and their political leadership. But the national economy is straining to the limits to support global power. Military and ideological supremacy cannot count on unlimited state resources and overseas capital to sustain it. These global structures that have facilitated the outflow of capital confront a shrinking revenue and tax base. State budget transfers in the form of overseas subsidies, loans, and military spending have sapped domestic programs. Moreover, in the present context, military and ideological dominance is not conducive to accumulating advantages in the New World Order. But the elites linked to the new international circuits continue to shape the political agenda. Under their influence, economists pontificate on the 'global imperatives' and media pundits highlight the need for greater 'international competitiveness' -- to induce greater productivity, lower wages, and new large state transfers >from social programs to corporate subsidies. The problem of U.S. 'decline' is not due to unfair Japanese competition or inability to 'obtain real, even access to the Japanese market'; nor does it stem from the failure of American institutions: the multinationals are investing...overseas. It is the success of the nation's elites in converting the domestic economy into a trampoline for global leadership that has seriously undermined the domestic foundations of state power and eroded domestic society. It is not a question of 'saving and investing' in the abstract or merely converting military to civilian production, but rather of transforming the state--from an imperial to a republican state--and that means confrontation with the major political parties, banks, and corporations that have profited from the exploitation of American society and the public treasury in the name of global leadership." Louis Proyect
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