>Try listening to the workers on this one, why dontcha?<
which workers, max?
let's take an example. South Africa is currently toying with a range of capital controls, new protectionism, etc. this is based on assumptions that the surplus flowing out of SA is produced by SA workers. (i'll leave aside the issue of whether any work done by anyone anywhere in the world presupposes national labour; but it's an important issue to consider when assuming that work and a surplus can be delimited in national terms.) an article by Busani Selabe in the SA Labour Bulletin (Vol 21, No. 3, June 1997) notes that the SA mining industry relies and relied on workers from Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Namibia, Swaziland and Lesotho. and what has accompanied SA's foray into national controls? nothing less than "A tide of ill-feeling against migrant workers is sweeping South Africa. ... The issue of migrants in South Africa is a contentious one. The media, members of the public and even government officials have whipped up a wave of xenophobia and ill-feeling against migrants. They are accused of 'stealing our jobs', 'taking our wives', 'causing crime', 'undermining wage levels', 'dealing in drugs' and 'occupying our homes'. Migrants are referred to by derogatory names like 'aliens' and makwerkwere. They are hounded by the police and the Department of Home Affairs. In a number of townships local communities have launched campaigns to 'hunt' them out."
looks like chauvinism to me. as i said before "these strategies are not first and foremost an alliance with different kinds of capital, but rather the organisation of the labour movement of one place against that of another. in order to establish these kinds of regimes of controls on capital flows, what is presumed first up is a competition with other workers, those who stand outside the terrain in which such regimes are constituted (here, national)."
charles wrote:
>Industrialization is complete historically. <
is it? bio-tech industries? extra-utero gestation? tisssue and organ engineering? cybernetics? the privatisation of air and water being pursued as the means of environmental salvation? there are still certain limits to capital, and capital is trying very hard to traverse those as we speak.
>We shouldn't support protectionism for the U.S. , but we should support
protectionism for the neo-colonial countries to the extent those countries
decide they want it for themselves.<
you're assuming of course that the protectionism of neo-colonial countries is not a feature in the re-organisation of regional hegemonic blocs, emerging in the interstices of US hegemony, as a feature of a new global organisation of capital -- whether it's a basis for war or a basis for stability remains to be seen. perhaps you want to hasten the demise of US hegemony? a worthwhile goal; but it's not halted or speeded up by protectionism. there are different versions of the protectionism we are talking about here: controls on speculative capital to ensure a redirection to productive investments; controls on the outflows of surpluses; controls on the price of imports. all of these are not, claims to the contrary, about regaining the mechanisms of democratic control over the surplus produced by workers in a particular country, or at least putting it to work in the interests of those workers, and nor are they about any ostensible division between national and transnational capitals. they are all about, and have always been about, gaining a greater slice of the _global_ surplus in places which act as the sites of a regional guarantor of capitalist stabilisation and discipline -- South Africa, Australia and Malaysia being instances of those, some of whose bloody effects we have just seen.
Angela _________