[PEN-L:1971] The continuing discussion re: globalisation

[D Shniad <shniad@xxxxxx>]

Doug Henwood says: "Leo Panitch is right that the national state has
been essential to the development of capitalism, and that struggle over
the state is what a good bit of politics is about, but that isn't all it's
about; if you're fighting the national state, you don't have to do it
nationally. Sometimes capital needs & uses the national state,
sometimes it doesn't. Why should anticapital be any different?"

Panitch isn't arguing for the containment of struggle to any particular
arena. Elsewhere in this article, he makes the explicit point that it is
necessary to struggle at ALL levels simultaneously.

Doug's position as stated here, which I find reasonable, is radically
different from the Progressive Internationalist position expressed by
many on Pen in the course of this debate.  P-I-ers have tended to argue
a much harder version of the position that Panitch is critiquing -- that
the nation state is no longer relevant in the era of transnational capital.

Finally, a passage in Panitch's article that brought Trond Andresen's
arguments to mind, Panitch commented that "There is no need to
conjure....'an international civil society' to install a transnational
democracy'.  Rather we are likely to witness a series of movements
arising that will be exemplary for one another, even though national
specificities will continue to prevail." (p.91)

Sid Shniad