Re: meiksins-wood article

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> "Mark Jones" <jones118@xxxxxxxxxxx> 04/21/00 04:39PM >>>
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.

____________________

CB: My proposal is that we try to develop regional party forms.

Interimperialist  military rivalry has been transformed into its opposite. This 
is a
qualitative shift in a definitional aspect of Lenin's imperialism. The 
imperialists
substantially unified to oppose the Soviet Union, they had to substantially 
abate
interimperialist rivalry to stand up to the Soviet Union and the socialist 
nations,
and that unity remains after  the first  European socialism has ended.
__________





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.

______________

CB: There is international consciousness in many of the Seattle/A16 activists.

___________


CB