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

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Angela:
>> 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).

The history of imperialism that Nestor Gorojovsky is referring to above is
not "that ineffable sense of Tradition or The Past" (though it may be so in
your mind).  What's so "ineffable" about the U.S. support for Contras to
destroy the Sandinista Revolution, to take just one recent example?


>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.

Look, whenever Patrick Bond speaks about South Africa, should he put it
between quotation marks or under erasure, just to make sure he won't even
remotely be associated with an "idealist definition"?  Is what he discusses
below a form of "economic nationalism" that you claim to oppose (or was it
to "critique," "deconstruct," etc.)?  If so, why?  If not, why not?


>From: "Patrick Bond" <pbond at wn.apc.org>
>To: "Nathan Newman" <nathan.newman at yale.edu>, lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
>Date: Fri, 17 Dec 1999 11:46:14 +0200
>Subject: Agreement RE: state & markets
>
>On 17 Dec 99, at 0:12, Nathan Newman wrote:
>> ...While jumping to the global level is obviously harder, there is a reality
>> that some form of international political power is ultimately needed to take
>> on the power of global capital.  The IMF, World Bank and WTO are obviously
>> not the right form of that power and there may be an argument, as Patrick
>> Bond notes, that the first step to building real democratic global
>> institutions is to burn the present ones to the ground.  But I do believe
>> that the long-term goal has to be one way or the other building a global
>> democratic political structure - a global state that is democratically
>> representative with full human, social and economic rights guaranteed.
>
>Fair enough. What's long-term though? Given the conjuncture of
>1999 and the balance of forces, an immediate reconstitution of
>national sovereignty (in relation to int'l financial capital, direct
>investment and trade), towards reflation and reconstituted social
>policies domestically and, regionally, more coherent modes of
>political-economic-social-environmental integration in the interests
>of working-class and poor people, makes most sense from where I
>sit in Johannesburg right now.

Yoshie