RE: Reply to Jenny Lewinsky

[Julio Fernández Baraibar <julfb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yes, Lou, this is a very important article. A take the task of going to the
URL and reading it.
>From a general perspective, the author confirms our thesis about the
national character of the struggle against imperialism and the importancem
of the national states, beyond  the propaganda makers of the hegemonic
national states.

Julio FB


> Jenny, I suggest you take a look at the July-August 1999 Monthly Review
> (http://www.monthlyreview.org/volume51.htm#July) which looks at capitalism
> at the end of the millenium. It contains an article by Ellen Meiksins Wood
> titled "Unhappy Families: Global Capitalism in a World of Nation-States"
> which you should find relevant. Here is a passage from that article:
>
> ===
> Today, capitalism is all but universal. Capitalist laws of motion, the
> logic of capitalism, has penetrated ever deeper into the societies of
> advanced capitalism and spatially throughout the world. Every human
> practice, every social relationship, and the natural environment are
> subject to the requirements of profit-maximization, capital accumulation,
> the constant self-expansion of capital. At one extreme, in advanced
> capitalist countries, this means the penetration of capitalist principles
> into those social, institutional, and cultural spaces that even a few
> decades ago they hadn't yet reached. At the other extreme, it means the
> marginalization and increasing impoverishment of whole regions outside the
> advanced capitalist countries (an effect vividly described by John Saul
and
> Colin Leys in this issue in the article on sub-Saharan Africa). In a sense
> the class polarizations of capitalism are being reproduced in the
> North-South divide, not to mention the impoverishment of so-called
> "underclasses" within advanced capitalist countries.
>
> But to say that capitalism is universal is not to say that all, or even
> most, capital is transnational. The measure of universalization isn't
> whether, or to what degree, capital has escaped the confines of the
> nation-state. We still have national economies, national states,
nationally
> based capital, even nationally based transnationals. It hardly needs to be
> added that international agencies of capital, like the IMF or the World
> Bank, are above all agents of specific national capitals, and derive
> whatever powers of enforcement they have from nation-states-both the
> imperial states that command them and the subordinate states that carry
out
> their orders.
>
> It isn't just that nation-states have stubbornly held on through the
> universalization of capitalism. If anything, the universalization of
> capitalism has also meant, or at least been accompanied by, the
> universalization of the nation-state. Global capitalism is more than ever
a
> global system of national states, and the universalization of capitalism
is
> presided over by nation-states, especially one hegemonic superpower.
>
> This is a point worth emphasizing. The conventional view of
"globalization"
> seems to be based on the assumption that the natural tendency of
capitalist
> development, and specifically its internationalization, is to submerge the
> nation-state, even if the process is admittedly still far from over. The
> internationalization of capital, in other words, is apparently in an
> inverse relation to the development of the nation-state: the more
> internationalization, the less nation-state. But the historical record
> suggests something different. The internationalization of capital has been
> accompanied by the proliferation of capital's original political form.
When
> capitalism was born, the world was very far from being a world of
> nation-states. Today, it is just that. And while new multinational
> institutions have certainly emerged, they have not so much displaced the
> nation-state as given it new roles -in fact, in some cases, new
instruments
> and powers.
>
> What, then, of the decline of national sovereignty that people associate
> with globalization? Of course the global economy is highly integrated, and
> of course massive and rapid movements of capital across national
> boundaries, especially in the form of financial speculation, are a
dominant
> feature of the world economy-as the articles that follow here will
testify.
> But those same articles will show how every transnational process is not
> only shaped by specifically local conditions but also how the state is
> their indispensable instrument. If "globalization" means the decline of
> national capitalist classes and the nation-state, the transfer of
> sovereignty from the state to the organs of some kind of unified
> transnational capital, it certainly hasn't happened yet and seems unlikely
> ever to happen. It is hard to foresee the day when capital will stop being
> organized on national principles,
>
> In fact, globalization itself is a phenomenon of national economies and
> national states. It is impossible to make sense of it without taking
> account of competition among national economies, and national states
> carrying out policies to promote international "competitiveness", to
> maintain or restore profitability to domestic capital, to promote the free
> movement of capital while confining labor within national boundaries and
> subjecting it to disciplines enforced by the state, to create and sustain
> global markets-not to mention national policies deliberately designed to
> forfeit national sovereignty. It needs to be added, too, that
globalization
> has in large part taken the form of regionalization (a point emphasized by
> Greg Albo and Alan Zuege in their discussion of Europe), creating blocs of
> unevenly developed and hierarchically organized national economies and
> nation-states.
>
> To say all this is certainly not to deny that the relations between
capital
> and nation-state take many different forms. The relations among advanced
> capitalist economies and among their national states are obviously very
> different from the relations between them and weaker national entities.
And
> the room for national maneuver varies accordingly. But it is not an
> insignificant fact that all these various relations are, in one way or
> another, inter-national relations.
>
> It is not insignificant (for instance, in its consequences for
oppositional
> struggles, such as those described by James Petras and Henry Veltmeyer in
> their article on Latin America in this issue) that imperialism today is no
> longer a matter of direct colonial domination but a relationship between
> national entities. In a sense, the new forms of imperial domination by
> means of debt and financial manipulation, or even foreign direct
> investment, are what they are precisely because they provide a means of
> penetrating national boundaries, barriers that hardly existed for older
> forms of colonial domination by direct military means. And, of course,
this
> kind of imperial power, no less than earlier forms, is exercised by
> nation-states, whether directly or through international agencies.
>
> The other side of the new imperialism is a new kind of militarism. This
one
> doesn't generally have territorial ambitions, and generally leaves
> nation-states in place. Its objective is not hegemony over specific
> colonies with identifiable geographic boundaries but boundless hegemony
> over the global economy. So instead of absorbing or annexing territory,
> this imperialist militarism typically uses massive displays of violence to
> assert the dominance of global capital-which really means exercising the
> military power of specific nation-states to assert the dominance of
capital
> based in a few nation-states, or one in particular, the United States,
> enforcing its freedom to navigate the global economy without hindrance.
>
> There is very little, then, that can be said about the global economy
> without reference to its national constituent parts, and very little that
> can be said about global economic processes without reference to relations
> among national economies and states. What can we say about globalization
> without invoking the relations between the United States and Japan, or
> between both and the European Union, or each of them and various third
> world countries? What can we say about the European Union without
> acknowledging the complex and contradictory processes (explored by Albo
and
> Zuege) generated by the uneven development of its various constituent
> economies, and the tensions between integration and competition among
them,
> or between impulses toward integration and assertions of national
> sovereignty? What can we say about the dynamics of global capitalism in
> general without acknowledging the constant tension between international
> cooperation and struggles for dominance among national capitalisms-such
as,
> say, the consistently contradictory relationship between the United States
> and Japan?
>
> What implications, then, does all this have for our understanding of the
> prolonged crisis-or the long downturn-that is the hallmark of capitalism
> "at the end of the millennium"?
>
> On the one hand, it's certainly not just a Japanese or Latin American
> crisis, or the consequence of specific national strategies or policy
> failures. As the articles in this issue show, it is not a function of
> "crony capitalism," nor of any other specific and defective form of
> capitalism. It is not exclusive to deficient capitalisms, such as the
> parasitic Russian form analyzed by Stanislav Menshikov, or to the victims
> of imperialism, such as those portrayed by Petras and Veltmeyer or by
> Prabhat Patnaik in his article on Asia. It is a consequence of capitalism
> pure and simple, and it manifests itself, as Doug Henwood demonstrates in
> his piece on the United States, even in the most ostensibly successful
> capitalism. Crisis is a consequence of systemic processes inherent in
> capitalism as such, which are playing themselves out in every capitalist
> economy and in the relations among them.
>
> On the other hand, those systemic processes manifest themselves in
> different ways in different contexts. The global crisis is shaped by the
> specific national forms of its constituent parts, each with its own
history
> and its own internal logic, and by the relations among those national
> entities. It is also shaped by the uneven development among the national
> components of global capitalism. All capitalist families today are
unhappy,
> and all for the same fundamental reasons, but each is unhappy in its own
way.
>
> This is so not least because the principal economic actors and classes are
> still organized above all on a national basis. Each nation's working class
> has its own class formations, practices, and traditions. And while no one
> would deny that capital is far more mobile and less place-rooted than
labor
> (with consequences outlined in this issue, for instance, by Bill Tabb), we
> are still a very long way from the global capitalist class depicted by the
> "globalization thesis." No one is likely to have much trouble
> distinguishing U.S. from Japanese capital, or either one from Russian or
> Brazilian. In fact, global integration itself, whatever else it may mean,
> has meant intensified competition among national capitals. It would be
very
> hard to make sense of recent crises and the long downturn without
> acknowledging that fact.
>
> To say, as Marx did, that capitalists have no nation is certainly to say
> that they have no national loyalties and will move wherever the
imperatives
> of profit-maximization take them, but it certainly doesn't mean that they
> have no roots in, or no need for, the state or for their own nation-state
> in particular. The need to maximize profit has always involved certain
> requirements of organization and enforcement (among other things, to keep
> the working class in place) which up to now have been, and in the
> foreseeable future still promise to be, fulfilled above all by
nation-states.
>
> The fact that capitalism is a global system organized nationally means two

> things, both of which are amply demonstrated in the articles that follow:
> on the one hand, its systemic weaknesses and contradictions, its endemic
> crises, are not national in origin. They are global, and they are inherent
> in the system, rooted in capitalism's basic laws of motion. This means
that
> no specific national policy caused them, nor can any specific national
> strategy resolve them. On the other hand, because global capitalism is
> nationally organized and irreducibly dependent on national states,
national
> economies and national states can still be the primary terrain of
> anti-capitalist struggle. At the same time, really effective oppositional
> struggles can't be directed at resolving the contradictions of capitalism,
> which aren't national in origin, but must be aimed at detaching social
life
> from the logic of capitalism altogether.
>
>
> Louis Proyect
>
> (The Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org)
>