Re: [Marxism] Re: Is the struggle to unify China an expressionof"GreatHan chauvinism" today?

["rrubinelli" <rrubinelli@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I think the relevance of  LP's remarks are not in the references to the
Georgian and Finnish past, but in showing that the historical
determinants of " national self-determination" are not simply abstract
principals, but concrete class conflicts.  The crucial, essential,
insightful element is LP's explication of these concrete elements that
makes revolutionary support for self-determination part and parcel of
class struggle of those populations suppressed, discriminated against in
general by a specific class system, a specific formation of property.

This suppleness of analysis, permeability to the concrete is what, or
what should, distinguish Marxist inquiry and criticism from Wilsonian
abstract "right to self-determination," an abstract that only preserve
the same formations of property arrayed against actual emancipation.

It is clear that the  original support for self-determination is support
for those subjugated by capital; where class struggle may first dress
itself in the fabric of  "rights," that access to labor, land, markets,
and capital encumbererd by pre-existing conditions of discrimination.

No such oppression, discrimination is at the core of any movement for
so-called Taiwanese independence.  Rather, the impetus is just the
opposite-- an attempt to maintain the terms of its exploitation, its
discrimination.   Carlos mentioned that Taiwan serves as an equivalent
to Israel in the network of capitalism.  And although I am hesitant to
agree with Carlos twice in two days, I think he has hit the mark
straight on.  In its "independence" movement Taiwan is  much more akin
to Ian Smith's Rhodesia than Mugabe's Zimbabwe.



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