Who me? I'm still listening and learning...
> ... you wrote in your previous post: "now that global capital has become so
> powerful, the nation-state is the only institution strong enough restrain
> it -- through capital controls, etc". this is a national strategy against
> global capital you are outlining here, is it not?
I don't know what Adam has to say (though I like his hint at a balance-of-forces analysis), but I would address this less, now, at the level of worker-capital class struggle than do you, Angela, and more in terms of the struggles within the circulation of K. And here arises an issue I would assume Doug has previously disabused anyone of raising on His list: the struggle between financial circuits of K and "productive" circuits. (That's not between the "banks" and the "manufacturers," by the way, since the interpenetration is well advanced, but about the source of profits.) I'll come back to this in a minute because I think there is a major relationship here to the nation-state and its prospects (for Malaysia, e.g., the only way to understand Mahathir's exchange controls of September 1998 is, as Jomo KS has well documented, through considering the national- based cabal's interests).
But yes, of course, displaced modes of class struggle intervene as always, particularly around the kinds of alliances that workers' organisations make -- in either implicit or explicit territorial and sectoral ways -- with different kinds of capitals. (Again, not "capitalists," as definitive, but around different moments in the circulation process.) (Here the nation-state is not merely the exec.com. of the bourgeoisie, but quite a contested terrain, over all manner of particular policies, tariffs, tax regimes, investment location decisions, infrastructure provision, interventions in labour markets, etc, etc.)
Separately off-list, if you want, I'll send over a paper that the Congress of SA Trade Unions recently commissioned on this very point: how reimposition of capital controls can allow not just for defensive currency support (as valuable as that would certainly be against periodic bear-raiders), but also for proto-Keynesian reflation. I've seen it happen in an extraordinary form next door in Zimbabwe (and devoted a chapter in a book to it recently). But even if merely as a defensive tactic, capital controls do indeed represent some kind of renewed effort at nation-state sovereignty at a time of unwarranted interference from global financiers.
That does not mean, by the way, contra Chris Burford, that we can relax now that the World Bank WDR and Joseph Stiglitz in particular give thumbs up to capital controls last week. I mentioned on another list that exactly year ago I sat next to Stiglitz in an airplane by accident (economy class only) and he was pretty livid with Mahathir, and said he wanted to encourage "dual-currency" (i.e., market-related) exchange controls instead of Malaysian dirigism because he feared there would be too successful a backlash against the Washington Consensus. (Post-Wash Con has always been based on WashCon as necessary but insufficient, and Stiglitz is no radical.) So his new line says more (to me anyhow) about the slippage we've had after that excellent opening with Russia's default and the LTCM crash a year back, where now there's apparently no danger whatsoever anymore of either renegade countries (even Venezuela?) setting up something completely new and different, or even simply more countries trying to partially delink from the most virulent of the global financial circuits. That just means that those promoting capital controls or Tobin Taxes or speedbumps must work all the harder to break their national elites' respect for Washington/NY/City of London slickers.
> there are a few unstated assumptions here: that national and global capital
> are distinct (from the perspective of workers); that the state stands aside
> or above the struggles between capital and labour rather than being an
> inherent moment in (global) capitalist relations;
Angela, by invoking the difference between global speculative financial Kism and domestic-grounded Surplus Value creation, yes, those assumptions can be (though are not necessarily) affirmed.
> ...that any national
> controls on capital movements are not an attempt by certain nation-states
> to hold a greater share of a global surplus but rather an attempt to retain
> a greater portion of a national surplus... etc.
> how, for instance, is it possible to claim that the source of capital (of
> the surplus) is national and thereby to claim a need for greater national
> controls?
Hey, there's lots of SV coming out of our working class here in South Africa (a relatively open economy), particularly from our "Minerals-Energy Complex" (the theme of an excellent 1996 Ben Fine/Zav Rustomjee book). Given worsening unequal exchange, it is common cause here that a redeployment of economic resources could better establish linkages and multipliers in the "national" interest -- and the debate here is largely between neoliberals like former workerist and now trade/industry minister Alec Erwin (also UNCTAD president) and his Sussex/Cape Town allies, who merely seek more international revenues through minerals beneficiation schemes and more harbour-oriented transport infrastructure, and those who would argue for an active internal industrial policy orientation to fill in the economy's vast gaps (capital goods Department 1 industries and basic-needs Department 2 goods) on behalf of workers (including those who would then get jobs) and, yes (for some alliance-makers in the unions), of domestic-based capital. (This conflict even plays out within the boardroom of Anglo American Corporation, whose recent capital-flight and subimperial instincts Russell has very effectively described, but which also has run a major industrial division that's been hammered by neoliberalism.)
That's probably enough for now, as I'm not able to debate the historical origins of nation-states... Patrick Bond (Wits University Graduate School of Public and Development Management) home: 51 Somerset Road, Kensington 2094, Johannesburg office: 22 Gordon Building, Wits University Parktown Campus mailing address: PO Box 601 WITS 2050 phones: (h) (2711) 614-8088; (o) 488-5917; fax 484-2729 emails: (h) pbond at wn.apc.org; (o) bondp at zeus.mgmt.wits.ac.za