looks like you're all doing great work!
> Sometime in the 21st century economists and historians will come to see
that
free trade is to economic theory what phlogiston is to chemistry and
physics. The rich are the real protectionists and free trade's twin
brother
has always been imperialism.<
heh heh. too true. and more specifically, it seems that protectionism is/was the basis of an alliance between the rich and the petty borgeoisie. since the p-b has been rather traumatised of late, wot with all that proletarianisation and degradation of Culture and authentic experience going on, they seem to reach quite easily for blaming someone/something for their position which has little to do with what's been happening, and which, more importantly, means that they're still playing footsoldiers for the rich.
a citation from John Holloway's essay:
"The global nature of capitalist social relations is thus not the result of the recent 'internationalisation' or 'globalisation' of capital, both concepts which imply a moving out from a historically and logically prior national society. ... The political then, as a moment of the relation between capital and labour, is a moment of a global relation. However, it is expressed not in the existence of a global state but in the existence of a multiplicity of apparently autonomous, territorially distinct national states. Historically, the liberation of the relations of exploitation from spatial constraint was accompanied by the development of a new territoriality in the form of national states. The particularisation of the state, the abstraction of coercion form the immediate process of exploitation, was expressed in a contrasting movement: as the relation of exploitation was liberated from spatial bonds, the coercion which provided the necessary support for capitalist exploitation acquired a new territorial definition. An important activity of the emerging national states was the territorial definition of coercion, the limiting of the mobility of the newly 'free' workers through measures such as the series of laws to define and control vagabondage. ... The contrast between the spatial liberation of the process of exploitation (mediated through the flow of capital as money), on the one hand, and the spatial definition of coercion (expressed in the experience of national states), on the other hand, is expressed as a contrast between the mobility of capital and the immobility of the state...
The competition between states and the changing positions of national states in relation to global capital can therefore not be adequately discussed in terms of competition between 'national capitals'. The discussion must start not from the immobility of capital but from its mobility. In so far as the existence of any national state depends not just on the reproduction of world capitalism, but on the reproduction of capitalism within its boundaries, it must seek to attract and, once attracted, to immobilise capital within its territory. ...a struggle to attract and retain a share of world capital (and hence a share of global surplus value). In order to achieve this, the national state must try to ensure favourable conditions for the reproduction of capital within its boundaries ... and also give international support ... to the capital operating within its boundaries, largely irrespective of the citizenship of the legal owners of that capital.
... Global capital is no more 'external' to Cochabamba, Zacatlan, or even Tannochbrae than it is to New York, Tokyo or London, although the forms and consequences of its presence differ enormously."
from John Holloway, 1995, "Global Capital and the National State", from _ Global Capital, National State and the Politics of Money_ , (eds Bonefeld and Holloway) pp.123-28. US: St. Martin's Press.
Angela _________