>well, if you think that nestor was posting "an apologia for the capitalist
>state," I really have nothing more to say to you. That's _beyond_ mere
>disagreement.
No, I think you are prone to apologias for the capitalist state, since you continue to assert a model of social change in which the character of the capitalist nation-state is defined by who has "taken power" of it. I don't happen to think this is the decisive criterion; but you continue to beleive you are debating with someone who does, and come up with the strangest claims based on such a fancy.
>Thanks anyway for your replies, though -- they have
>clarified for me what you think of marxists who think like nestor in the
>periphery.
And i'm sure there are "marxists in the periphery" who don't share nestor's wish for the middle ages in the third world. Your little homogenising move in the service of a moralising rhetoric founded on the statements of one individual is really quite astounding, even for you.
> Apparently, you think you know more about imperialism than they
>do, and those who fail to agree with you, and, worse yet, commit a sin of
>thinking that their respective countries could have been better places had
>leftists not been prevented by imperialists from taking power, are
>afflicted with "nostalgia."...
Ah, "sin"... But what tales you tell.
A) I have never once asserted that I know more than nestor about imperialism. I take issue with nestor's wish for absolutism; and I take issue with your crude "leftists take power" notion which has yet to seriously account for what the scope of state action is. Seriously, what do you think happens when "leftists who have taken state power" do awful things? Personal betrayal? It wouldn't surprise me at all if you thought in such terms.
B) I have never claimed that imperialism is preferable to nationalism; but rather that they are inseperable moments in the organisation of capitalism.
C) as for nostalgia, this is what I wrote: "nestor's invokation of an imaginary nationalism that might have existed outside imperial and colonial history had latin america, africa, etc had their own periods of absolutism.
Ie., This nostalgia."
In short, I don't pick and choose in the terms you insist on and remain enthralled by: nationalism versus imperialism; market versus state; et cetera. And just fyi, I don't even bother much with trying to set aside a confident place in reform versus revolution; party versus networks; party versus unions; use-value versus exchange value; 'postmodernism' versus marxism; objective versus subjective; manual versus intellectual labour; ...
Angela