Date: Mon, 1 Oct 2001 12:30:23 -0600
From: jbrandon <jbrandon-AT-maildrop.srv.ualberta.ca>
Subject: RE: AUT: empire... reply to Commie's reply to Chris.


Hi Chris, Commie,

On the issue of national first, global later, I think this is the way M&E 
described the process in their Manifesto, but this kind of issue always 
depends on where you want to start and end your history.  If you start at the 
sixteenth century, then European history looks something like this, but as 
critics of world systems theory have pointed out, the global trade networks 
that preexisted European expansion were the reason the Europeans wanted to get 
to India in the first place.  Within Europe, prior to the formation of 
national capital, commodity trade mostly occurred among archipelagos of 
bourgeois centres rather than on a national basis.

If you want to see the world from the perspective of everything leading up to 
the treaty of Versailles, then one can certainly describe a circuit of 
nationalisation, starting with the growing power of kings and capitalist 
landowners in Western Europe, followed by alliances between landowners and the 
bourgeoisie and eventually inclusion of the working classes within the welfare 
state, but there is a simultaneous circuit of globalisation, one only needs to 
remember the growing power of international finance in electing the Habsburgs 
or in financing colonial adventures or the role of the international slave 
trade in providing raw materials to the Lancaster cotton industry (which sold 
much of its product in India).   At different periods one force seems 
ascendant over the other, but I think it is rather undialectical to isolate 
either process and say that first we had the development of national capital, 
then global.  Hardt and Negri remind us that the vision of imperialism defined 
by the treaty of Westfalia was always something of an unstable fiction.

Even though industrial and finance/merchant capital were always intertwined, 
it seems to me that the former has been a force for nationalisation while the 
later have historically been a force for globalisation (important exceptions, 
for example the use of state finance capital to develop industry in east Asia 
in the post ww2 period, notwithstanding).  If this is true, then the issue of 
globalisation versus nationalisation is largely a fight between different 
factions of the bourgeoisie.  The growing strength of the pro-globalisation 
movement since the nineteen seventies is an indication that the productive 
powers of the bourgeois mode of production are largely spent, and that the 
important for strategies for sustaining profits concern the distribution of 
relative surplus value among capitals.

Empire is mostly a technique for protecting profits through patents and other 
forms of corporate monopolies.  Of course this is a trick capital has had in 
its bag for many centuries.  This does not mean that nothing is new under the 
sun.  Capital resolves its crises only by perpetuating its crises on an even 
wider scale.   Globalisation now involves more industries and a larger 
percentage of the world population than ever before.  Also, having already 
undergone nationalisation as a strategy to deal with the crisis of too much 
globalisation in the nineteenth century, the bourgeoisie is limited in the 
strategies it may use to resolve its current crises.  In this I agree with you 
Commie that:

>as for inevitability: according to marx, it has to happen for capitalism to
>survive, and the only thing that can stop it is global revolution. i agree.

My only concern is that you seem to imply that globalisation started only 
after ww2, where I see global capital as being one aspect of capitalism since 
its inception.

Josh




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