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

[rc-am]

yoshie wrote:

>Perhaps you think that it would be better if Indonesia disintegrated into
>many little islands without the central political authority, for then there
>would be no "nation state."  

no.  and you're nuts to even pretend to infer such from what i wrote.  

>It's my impression, however, that Indonesian
>workers would want more democratic control over what its government does or
>doesn't do.  Maybe you are saying that such a demand cannot be met under
>the present conditions, so they might as well not bother?

you're deeply confused.  you insist that a strong state is necessary; and
when i argue that this entails the erosion, if not disappearance of
democracy (esp inasmuch as a strong state requires the ability to reign in,
ignore and/or crush working class demands), you then write, as if by way of
argument (with yourself?) that indonesian workers are demanding democratic
reforms!    if you can manage to drop your perspectival premise for just a
moment -- that of a state-in-waiting -- then perhaps you might consider
seriously that democracy in indonesia (or elsewhere) is not acheived by
'taking state power' but rather by forcing a gap between the state and
capital.  in indonesia, this means ousting the military from the polity,
since the military constitute by and large indonesian capital.  the only
conditions under which that can happen, and began to happen, is by way of
the movements outside the state.  it doesn't matter if megawati actually
gains some degree of authority within the indonesian state; what matters is
how much the ruling class are prepared to concede, irrespective of whether
it's megawati or wahid or rais.  i don't think you know the first thing
about indonesia or are prepared to be remotely honest about what i've
written for that matter.

<snip>
>None of the above is in my assumptions.

on the contrary, the vanguardist premise is indispensible to your
arguments.  without them, none of the things you write even begin to make
sense.  every time you complain about 'the weakness of the left' and call
for 'leftists to take power', you resort to the formula of the vanguard,
but this time a non-existant one, which is why you must forever ask others
to draft the vanguard programme even and especially when they -- like me --
do not think in those terms. in fact, you can't see any class struggles
taking place unless they're in they look like they're about to storm the
winter palace.

>alternatives, you might as well tell us, unless you are saying that the
>only hope for the Third World masses are to immigrate to the capitalist
>core.

funnily enough, the World Bank has been implicitly proposing as much.  one
of their reports on the explosion in migration suggests that the only way
to 'stem the tide'  (since it appears that many people are taking your
advice already) is to launch a massive round of social expenditure in those
source countries.  now, that's unlikely to occur since the resort is to
tighter border controls; but it does suggest the continuing presence of an
internationalist keynsianism even whilst many apparently leftist keynsians
can only think of more nationalism.

>You speak of decomposition and demobilization, *as if* movements capable >
of inducing "crises for capital" existed now,

what are you talking about?  decomposition and demobilisation:
post-apartheid SA that russel, peter and to a lesser extent patrick have
all referred to; the anti-austerity campaigns in yugoslavia (see below);
the anti-austerity protests in indonesia prior to soeharto's resignation;
on a small scale, the various debates over post-seattle politicking in the
US; ...  

and, no, i didn't say that these movements were or are capable of putting
capital (rather than us) into crisis.  what i did say was that these
movements had the potential to do so.  which is why the question of their
decomposition and demobilisation, whose history can easily be traced, is
important to think about.  not least because the issue of political
organisation can't be assessed without that.  (i'd suggest you read mario
tronti and/or sergio bologna -- any translations you can find -- for what
class composition means.)  

moreover, these processes -- as i said before, but again you pretend you
can't read -- are not all due to something like your preoccupation with
state power, but they are due to strategies premised on nationalism, in
which the nation-state (or, in the case of N30, the WTO) takes the place of
the favoured mechanism of representation and indeed organisation.  

(once again, on yugoslavia see "Class Decomposition in the New World Order:
Yugoslavia Unravelled", _Aufheben_ 2, 1993; "Yugoslavia: From Wage Cuts to
War", _Wildcat_, 18, 1996; "Conkers or Bonkers? Humanitarian War in
Kosovo", _Aufheben_, 8, 1999.  The first two are on the web.)

Angela.