"Economic Nationalism"? (was Re: Who Killed Vincent Chin?)

[rc-am]

yoshie wrote:

> Does "economic nationalism" mean the same thing, wherever and whenever it
> is said to appear?

if you mean to ask 'do you think there are good nationalisms and bad
nationalisms?', then the answer is 'no'.    the difference between the
nationalisms of countries like the US and countries like Indonesia's is
that the former affects more people than the latter; but quantitative
morality has never been a favourite of mine, as you know.  not to mention
that i think it constitutes an abrogation of any solidarity with the
workers and poor in those countries in favour of a kind of kissingeresque
calculation.  but even then, kissinger made policy for a state.  which
state do you make policy for?

plus, i don't think of 'us' and 'them' in terms of national blocs but in
terms of class.  the cold war ambassadorial style of leftist politics (and
indeed splits -- pro-moscow, pro-china, etc) is well and truly redundant,
if it wasn't already a shameful deafness to the conditions of workers in
those countries.  moreover, the fantasy that one's globally-relatively
downtrodden bourgeoisies are the vanguard of the revolution or the first
stage in such seems to be pretty well redundant too, and only survives in a
sure form amongst so-called core country leftists.

patrick has written eloquently about the impasse of a radical history
premised on such; and the most emphatic racism in australian history has
been garbed in apparently anti-imperialist intentions: the 'white australia
policy' required two pillars to make it popular amongst white australian
workers: the promise of protecting wages and conditions which never
eventuated, and anti-british dimensions [*] which transformed it -- in the
eyes of irish-australians who constituted the most significant section of
the trade union movement -- from an anti-chinese law into an anti-british,
anti-imperial gesture.  without these two pillars, the 'white australia
policy' would not have come into force, would not have been in fact one of
the most significant elements in the australian social democratic
tradition, an element embraced all over again but with the added twist of
detention camps as a job creation scheme.

[*the 'white australia policy' was the first law passed by the australian
national state in 1901, a law and a 'national liberation movement' built
upon a conflict between british foreign policy toward china (insistent upon
the right of movement of colonials within the empire) and australian
economic nationalism.]

> What do you think of the following post?

>> Imperialism has either deformed,
> >thwarted or drowned in blood the processes by which our peoples
> >would have been able to constitute nations out of our local
> >realities.

what do you think?   using nations (and nationalities as well) in a
in this way is anachronistic and retrospectively fanciful, to say
the least.  there's something particularly ahistorical about talking about
some qualitatively different formations in a language drawn from a
different time; and what it suggests is an attempt to legitimate certain
claims via that ineffable sense of Tradition or The Past that nationalism
deploys so necessarily vaguely upon what is unmistakably a twentieth
century political terrain (in particular that of the early to mid 20th C).

what exactly is a nation, and should i refer to stalin/herder for that
somewhat idealist definition?  maybe we should resurrect 'the lesbian
continuum' whilst we're at it, but i thought we were over that particular
kind of legitimating move.

> Also, I reproduce here a part from one of my posts to which you haven't
> replied.

and will you give me a dollar (ted too!) for every post of ours you haven't
replied to?  all credit cards accepted.

> >Open borders sound good on paper, but insecure borders are often
symptoms
> >of, and contribute in turn to, a very weak, or barely viable,
above-ground
> >economy -- an economy fundamentally dependent on underground smugglings
of
> >everything from cars and TVs to drugs and weapons.

but you're not a liberal are you?  so you're not going to argue that
"insecure borders" are the same as "open borders"; that the law is negative
and stops things from happening -- right?    and, you're not going to
suggest in all seriousness that smuggling, informalisation, and an
underground economy is a function of legality.   i guess a reference to
Prohibition is still in order...

>>"Anti-border control
> >activism" makes sense only where the state is actually functioning
enough
> >to control the borders to begin with.

no, it makes sense because the line between legality and illegality is what
is at stake, always.  border controls don't close borders, they decide
under what conditions that border will be regulated, the character of a
labour market, and so on.

>> The same
> >goes for the state under capitalism -- the only thing worse than living
> >under state power is not living under state power and instead being at
the
> >mercy of competing local & foreign powers, from gangs to international
> >"aid" orgs.

what are you saying, that states are referees, or even better bulwarks
against local and foreign capitalists?    !!   national states are moments
in an international economy.  without those enclosures, the international
economy would not function as smoothly as it has managed to.  for instance,
capital strike, or really, the constant threat of such, requires national
states through which to deploy a discipline and austerity upon 'their'
workers in the name of national economic health.  either that happens, or
so-called international agencies would have to step in directly, often
enough by force.   but without that first step, the process would be less
smooth, less prone to engaging the support of national organisations (like
national workers' organisations) under patriotic auspices.

then again, a country can lurch into war and ongoing wars of fragmentation
because the state fails to impose austerity: indonesia, yugoslavia -- both
of which precede 'international intervention' to hasten the imposition.
interventions that, of course, make it possible to revive (but poorly,
since there's less possiblity of delivering on any nationalist bargains) a
jaunty nationalism-as-antiimperialism thing.

> I think that people in many countries would
> materially benefit from having an effective state controlled
democratically
> -- something which they don't have at present.

in the current conditions, there's a profound contradiction between
democratic control and a strong state, not least in the sense that a strong
state means being able to impose austerity, or at the very least, a wage
restraint bargain -- esp inasmuch as those economies aren't capable of
drawing greater shares of a global surplus a la the US, EU and Japan.
every time you emphasise the apparent need for a strong state in the
'periphery', you occlude the fact that this means undemocratic.
attaching 'democratic' to it is just a rhetorical afterthought.  if it was
a serious committment, you wouldn't be emphasising the need for a strong
state -- from such a comfortable distance.

Angela
_________