meiksins-wood article

["Mark Jones" <jones118@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I've lost the email in which Lou (I think he) cited Wood's article which
ends like this:

"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."

And I haven't picked up on the context of debate here, either, so sorry if
this is all up a gum tree. But this para encapsulates (for me) Woodism and
therefore all that I object to/have problems with in the MR world view. Can
national states still be the primary terrain? I am sure this is wrong,
wrong, wrong. If it was wrong for Lenin and the Bolsheviks (superstate
builders of their own day) then how much more so today? It is impossible to
construct mass_revolutionary_ trends/parties/movements which conduct their
business on _that_ terrain; it just ain't gonna happen. It couldn;t in 1917
and a fortiori can't now. Therefore, what Wood does is point her clients
AWAY from revolutionary praxis into accommodationist kinds of struggles,
which she thereby endows with a very thin veneeer of legitimacy. Seattle and
A16 are exactly that kind of struggle, and there is a strong sense in which
they need to be DElegitimised, ie, we should resolutely call into question
any struggle which does not contain within itself the seends of its own
self-transcencind, its own relocating onto the only universal
social/moral/historical/political terrain that matters: _international_
revolutionary class struggle.

And secondly, what on earth is this mealy-mouthed formulation about
"detaching social life from the logic of capitalism"? Is Wood in favour of
the revolutionary, insurrectionary smashing/overthrow of the state? Or of a
new deal for multiplex-goers, with more social realism in cinema? For eg?

In the other wood piece, "The Politics of Capitalism", which I think is from
a talk she gave in S Africa and is located on a  critique of the famous
Brenner NLR piece, she writes:

"As for what lies between protective or maintenance strategies and real
transformational struggles?well, that's the hard part. But at least a few
things are pretty clear. We may not know exactly what to do, but we should
at least know what not to do. It makes no sense at all to pursue strategies
that pull the economy ever further into the intensifying contradictions of
the global economy?like deregulatory and export-led strategies beloved by
the World Bank and the IMF, which simply deepen the contradictions of
market-dependence.

The best that socialists can do is to aim as much as possible to detach
social life from market-dependence. That means striving for the
decommodification of as many spheres of life as possible and their
democratization?not just their subjection to the political rule of "formal"
democracy but their removal from the direct control of capital and from the
"impersonal" control of market imperatives, which subordinate every human
need and practice to the requirements of accumulation and
profit-maximization. If that seems utopian, just consider how unrealistic it
is to adopt a strategy of export-oriented competitiveness in a crisis-ridden
global economy with an irreducible structural tendency to overcapacity."

Isn't this just complete, arid piffle? What on earth is the use of
distinguishing between 'maintenance strategies' and 'real transformational
struggles' if the latter turns out to be just a more theoretgically-vacuous
version of the former? What am I missing?

Mark Jones