max wrote:
> To me the term "internationalism" connotes an
> overarching, radical vision of worker solidarity.
in order to organise nationally, workers have to take a leap out of a particular occupation and/or firm, have to account for different laws, different occupations, different cultural practices, etc -- in short, to see themselves as a national working class, a whole series of debates over those differences gets provisionally resolved and remains contested in an ongoing way. who or what gets posed as representative of such a class formation is always a matter of conflict and debate. we always touch on those debates when we discuss which issues should be granted strategic and/or organisational priority (childcare, wages, health care, welfare, etc). the leap to an internationalist conception of working class organisation supposes all of those debates on a grander scale, and unless you want to presuppose that there is some natural and uncontested unity which obtains within national working classes -- or rather that workers within a particular country confront the same sets of laws, economic histories whose unit is national, or even suggest the need for the same organisational models in all national sectors of the economy, to name a few -- then claiming that internationalism is abstract or 'overarching' doesn't make sense.
Angela _________