Date: Thu, 22 Feb 2001 04:07:02 +1100
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comedu.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Re: empire & globalization, was... Re: AUT: Re: autonomist crisis


G'day Peter,

Another terrific post, comrade!  I do think the incommensurability between
the 'statist' and 'internationalist' positions can be overdone, as you go
on to imply.  After all, one way of internationalising progress is to take
a lump out of the bourgeoisie via the state.  As you know, I'm quite
excited about New Zealand's decision to start up a people's bank to
discipline the banking sector there - this only twelve years after the BNZ
had been privatised and Big Finance's fortunes looked irreversibly
ascendant in terms of its political economic hegemony.  If they pull that
off, that's fuel for the international proletariat, I reckon.  It's morale,
it's example and it's real substance, too.  That's gotta be a positive step
in the process of composition Negri talks about.

Modest, but that'll have to be the order of magnitude for right now.  From
little acorns big trees grow, eh?  And the pace has a way of picking up
once some beach-heads have been secured.  Of course, it could as easily be
perceived as a call to reclaim the welfare state compromise as to begin
something scarily new, but that depends on the then-and-there - and I'm not
at all sure we have the sort of institutional setting ever to recapture
that essentially
world-of-autonomous-nations-in-balance-with-domestic-bourgeoisie-and-proletariat
arrangement, for a start - which might force disappointed - and thus
enlightened - statist-socdem-leaning folk to look further afield for
satisfaction

Anyway, in general, yes, of course -  'globalisation' even if it were gonna
be exactly what our besuited betters have in mind - will always constitute
the geographical extension of all the contradictions to which capitalism is
heir.  That said, and in light of your important stress on agency, this
should not be taken to mean the process may just sail on while we await the
inevitable fate of the system.  Inevitability makes no sense within the
materialist conception of history, anyway.  And, as the New Zealand
Alliance show, we can mess with it while it takes shape, too.  We can't
mess with its DNA, perhaps, but we can surely do a bit of plastic surgery
on the run ...

And one last thought - to argue against the whole idea of 'globalisation'
is not only to fail to see opportunity amongst the new constraints; it is
also to sound precisely as silly as the media like us to sound.  They
choose their grabs cruelly during the Melbourne WEF demos, I thought.

Best to all,
Rob.






     --- from list aut-op-sy-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---