Date: 19 Oct 2001 09:14:34 +0200
From: "Tahir Wood" <twood-AT-uwc.ac.za>
Subject: AUT: Re: Re: national question.


Commie, I'm not yet convinced for the following reasons, though I hope this thread continues and others join in:

1. The federalism that you describe doesn't look like something new to me, although you claim that it has only become dominant since the 1940s.
2. The debate looks ominously semantic at this stage - like what do the words nation and imperialism actually mean. To me its simply a question of the national ruling classes of certain countries supporting and also subordinating others to their national interest. Globalisation, whereby the cheaper labour of other countries is exploited as a way of countering organised labour at home, seems to me a rather typical imperialist strategy. Maybe a somewhat different, somewhat similar one to what pertained in the past.
3. I can't see a world without imperialism (in my simplistic sense) while there are nation states and capitalism. The state apparatus of a country gets its mandate from its own ruling class to serve the interests of that class - it mobilises the masses to support this through national chauvinism, etc, and it acts to keep the support of the masses and to serve the ruling class at the same time. This is a juggling act which requires now collaboration, now antagonism with other ruling classes and states. This to me is the way that the US, for example, relates currently to China and Russia as well as to Iran, Iraq, etc. The crucial point seems to me to be that within the system of nation states, which I believe to be a creation of capitalism and which would be extremely hard to throw off, the state and its organs is only accountable to one set of people, the nation, and not others. It can dupe them but it can't ignore them - therefore it has to act against other countries SOMETIMES in the national interest.
4. You ask me to believe in a world where the US, Britain, Germany, Russia, China will all co-exist happily, within one supra-national federation, a sort of cosy club of ruling classes.

I may be naive, but I think you have intellectualised the notion of imperialism into a very abstruse point. The test is this: what is the practical significance of your sophisticated notion in comparison to my simplistic one? If you can answer that then I might start to see your point. The broad significance of my definition is to counter the Leninist 'anti-imperialists' who seem to still believe that you can have a non-imperialist capitalism, a national and popular capitalism, as the Samir Amins would have it. This to me is bullshit, the end of imperialism comes with the defeat of capitalism.

Regards
Tahir




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