Re: empire & globalization, was... Re: AUT: Re: autonomistcrisis theory

["Chris Wright" <cwright@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Knee deep in mud and happy as a pig in... well you know what I mean...
This is a great discussion, btw.

>
> Tahir: Thanks for this reference and, having checked it out, I see how it
connects with what I was suggesting. What worries me in your comments though
is just the idea of being "pro-globalisation" - and I'm not talking about at
a purely rhetorical level here - obviously that would be very problematic.
But your theoretical points notwithstanding, one should acknowledge that a
great many very vulnerable people across the globe cling to national
institutions of various kinds as a way of trying to protect themselves from
the forces we're talking about - the example of Cuba, amongst others, comes
to mind. However misguided that may be in the bigger scheme of things, one
should be very careful politically about who you line up with and how it
will affect people in the shorter term. Otherwise one is just being 'clever'
in the sense that sometimes gives the ultra-left a bad name.
>
> I'm reminded of an anecdote that Chomsky related in Cape Town when he was
asked by Martin Legassick: why do you seem to support certain state
institutions when you're an anarchist and anarchists are supposed to be anti
the state? He replied with an analogy that he'd got from some Latin American
comrades: if you were inside a cage and there was a sabre-toothed tiger
outside the cage you would not want to destroy the cage. You'd want to
strengthen the bars, although you might also want to enlarge the cage a bit
to make more room to live in. The cage here is the state. This is how a
great many people are seeing globalisation at this time - it is the
sabre-toothed tiger - and one has to be cognisant of this.

Chris: I think Chomsky has no real conception fo killing the sabre-tooth,
however.  And that is what makes  liberal a liberal.  They don't see anyway
out.  Also, the analogy assumes that we are outside, that capital is "a
thing" which somehow exists "out there".  But capital is alienated labor
(something I think Chomsky does not grasp, alongside dialectics, which he
hates with a passion), which means that we do not have some neat, clean
separation or autonomy from capital - my whole point about us being
in-and-against capital.

Why does that matter?  Becuase a sabertooth could go elsewhere, but capital
can't.  There is no cage outside us.  Capital and labor are fighting it out
from the inside, from within a relation, and the state is nothing more than
one of the forms that relation takes, a form of the conflict between labor
and capital.  Chomsky's approach and analogy becomes an apology for national
chauvinism, the state and Keynesianism.  What is there to defend?  I am not
pro- or anti-globalization: I am anti-capitalist and a communist.  The shape
capital comes in is relevant to me only in so far as it indicates new
openings and new arenas of struggle, new crises.  I have no interest in
defending any state.  I am for people living better, and in so far as those
pat struggles became condensed into laws and social programs, i defend those
things as gains, but not in and of themselves.  i don;t fetishize them.
Chomsky does, at least here.  I had the displeasure of watching Chomsky
defend the embargo against Iraq and the UN sanctions, at a time when that
really meant defending US imperialism against the people of Iraq.  I like a
lot of his books, but for their information, not their politics as such.

> Taking this political point further, I would say that what is really
important is to avoid the alternative notions of citizenship that are being
posed in response to the crisis of the nation state: European citizenship, a
united states of Africa, etc. To me this is really sinister stuff. I'm not
sure that 'global citizenship' is the best term for what I have in mind, but
it does roughly capture what I'm suggesting, as long as citizenship is is
conceived of in active terms, not as the bestower of 'rights' to the
passive.

Chris: I want the end of citizenship, since that implies the state, and the
state implies the maintenance of the capital-labor relation, of the
exploitation and domination of labor, i.e. inhuman social relations.
Citizenship implies non-citizenship, which implies exclusion adn inclusion
determined by some state.  I am for an end to borders and the unrestrained
movement of people with no barriers to full access to society's resources.
Today, capital has that more and more, but the national states move to
restrict the movement of labor and contain it within structures of
citizenship and control.  On that basis alone, the national state is
stronger than 20 years ago, and more reactionary.  To be anti-globalization
is to court Pat Buchanan, Francois LePen, etc.  To be pro-globalization,
well we know what that means, eh?  We need to be internationalists, a term
capital will not be picking up any time soon, i think :)

> There are many political and cultural difficulties also around questions
of language too. Globalisation does mean the destruction of languages and
the homogenisation of culture, which has a very negative impact on third
world peoples, at least in the shorter term. Try taking part in an internet
debate in Xhosa! Even such an international language as Spanish is of
limited usefulness here, which is why many Latin American comrades rally
around it. Your points about standardisation need to be considered
carefully. The standardisation of national languages in Europe after 300
years or so is still only partially achieved and the extent that the masses
benefitted from it relative to the bourgeoisie is a complex question. Why
should this play itself out differently on an international level?
Chris:  This is a good point.  If anyone wonders why the struggle for
national liberation can have a revolutionary character, it is here.  The
struggle to defend one's language, culture (I know, Edmund, shoot me for
saying that), life from commodification and absorption into wage slavery has
a revolutionary edge as well as a potentially reactionary one.  That's why
we have to battle with the nationalists over the meaning of national
liberation in the poorest countries, that national liberation should not
mean the liberation from foreign capital in order to be exploited by "our
own" capitalists, but for liberation from all capital and all capitalists.
The struggle for national liberation is a struggle for dignity, for
autonomy, in the hands of the mass of people, which can become reactionary,
but not always.

This is too complicated to get into detail on here, but I think it is a
point worth taking up seriously.

>
Cheers,
Chris



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