Date: Tue, 16 Sep 1997 11:31:19 -0400
From: james m blaut <70671.2032-AT-CompuServe.COM>
Subject: Re: M-I: Zionism ,racialism , and nat-libbing


Neil and Andy:

National struggle IS class struggle. See my article in *Science & Society*,
"Nationalism as an Autonomous Force," around 1984+/- and my book *The
Nationasl Question* (now out of print -- I'm not advertising it, just
falling back on its arguments).

The argument that colonial national liberation struggles cannot be
progressive would only be tenable if one also argued that no political
struggles within states are progressive and the whole world system must be
brought crashing down all at once. Most ex-colonies are a hell of a lot
better off than they were in the days of direct colonialism. Look at India,
for example, in terms of the reduction of disease, the increase in life
expectancy, and the increase in agriculktural production. Its still odious
capitalism, but it is a less oppressive capitalism. People in most
liberated ex-colonies understand this as do fighterts for national
liberation. And if you talk about all the horrors of the Mobutu, Suharto,
etc., regimes, remember that the oppression which proceeded independence
was not spoken of by the bourgeois media and most bourgeois scholarship.

And to call national liberation movements "bourgeois nationalism" is to
fall back on the discredited theory that national movements are peculiar to
the "period of rising capitalism."

In struggle for national liberation and socialism

JIm Blaut  


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