Re: Anti-Eurocentrism: Idealist DiversionfromAnti-racism/anti-imperialism (fwd)

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>>> Rob Schaap <rws@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 04/13/00 11:04AM >>>
G'day Chas,

>What is the difference between a strategy of anti-imperialism and a
>strategy of >international solidarity against capitalism. International
>capitalism is >imperialism.

Perhaps Rod means that 'globalism' should (on a Marxist account) be
globalising and thus on its way to standardising the contradictory
relationship between capital and labour.  That being so, we should both
think and act globally - which requires global organisation and some
difficult work - as the global working class differs not only subjectively
at the moment, but has, in the short-to-medium term at least, a pretty
wildly varying set of objective interests (eg wages, conditions, job
security and 'democratised' stock ownership).  And then there's the spectre
of racism.

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CB: Well, but Rod did say "Workers of the World , Unite!", i.e. struggle to overcome all this pretty wildly varying set of objective interests and fight capital as one.  Hasn't this always been the situation, the world working class divided, and so Engels and Marx focussed our attention on it with the main slogan ?  And then Lenin , aware that the divisive effect of racism ,  colonialism and imperialism were more important than Engels and Marx had realized, expanded the slogan to "Workers and Oppressed Peoples of the World, Unite !" Unity, unity , unity has always been the key. That is not new.



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There are ways of stressing the anti-imperialist stuff such that we
undermine what potential international labour has for coalescing.

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CB: What would they coalesce for but to fight imperialism ? (Imperialism is an economic category )

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Doug's
list in particular is working through this very topic just now, I think.
So, sure, call 'globalism' imperialism, but recognise as fundamental to
today's globe the mobility of capital; the geographical division of
(not-quite-so-mobile) labour; the concomitant global distribution of high
and low 'value-added' production; the global marketing strategies; the
demonstrable global interests, reach and resolve of the US econo-polity;
and the role of governments as hostages to currency markets.

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CB: Agreed. In uniting against capital, against imperialism, we must have a current account of the configuration of imperialism, as you summarize here and term "globalism"  ( I call it transnationalism).  We need to always be updating our empirical map of the world capitalist class or else we won't know how to unite the world working class against it.

I think we are in a new phase of the development of imperialism. It has had maybe two or three phases since it origin at the beginning of the 20th Century. But it is still has many of the same characteristics it had at the beginning of the century. It is still appropriate to term it "imperialism" in the techncial political economic sense of that term - state monopoly , finance capital, financial oligarchy, export of capital over goods, neo-colonialism. What has changed significantly is interimperialist rivalry has been substantially abated. The imperialist powers are not going to war with each other. Also, there has been the beginning of socialism. This beginning and fall of the SU is probably the best basis of defining two stages since the original phase of imperialism.  Phase l -imperialism. Phase II imperialism vs  socialism Phase III imperialism with fall of European socialism ( globalism). Something like that with the revolution in science and technology  (end of Fordism)!
 fitted in with this to define the last phase as well.

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I'm not sure I've posed the question right.  I know I haven't a clue as to
any answers.

S'pose you'll be waiting for the contradictions to show up, Lenin-style,
between the Euros, the Japanese, and the Yanks?

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CB: Well, sort of. Besides workers unite, there is also use the divisions among the imperialists. The working class must use divide and conquer in reverse against the capitalists.  (That is Engels and Marx style too. Engels was nicknamed  "the General". )


CB