"But millions of workers move all over the world. Places like New York, London, Sydney, and Kuala Lumpur are full of migrants, some there legally, some not. Most European, Japanese, and American capitalists stay in their homelands or places much like them - and generally require the protection of a national government to enforce contracts, guarantee money, and bail them out when they get in trouble.
Doug"
I might be missing the point here, but I've just been reading in Empire where Hardt and Negri talk about nomadism and miscegenation. They see migration as a positive form and the kind of multiplicity that results as the first basis of anti-empirial ethics. The destruction of the third world state, ostensibly creates conditions for "subjective circulation";
"the mutlitude's resistance to bondage - the struggle against the slavery of belonging to a nation, an identity, and a people, and thus the desertion from sovereignty and the limits it places on subjectivity - is entirely positive." (Empire 361)
This "nomadic singularity is the most creative force and the omnilateral movement of its desire is itself the coming liberation" (363)
"the concrete universal is what allows the mutlitude to pass from place to place and make its place its own" (362)
Is there something positive about the movement of labour or is this a gloss where Hardt and Negri are painting the word 'choice' over what is a need set by the objective workings of capital. When it involves 50 Chinese immigrants freezing to death in a re-fridgerated truck trying to cross the English channel it all sounds a bit more sinister.
Any pointers?
The major point though about capitalists staying at home is a useful counter to the heady idea that because capital can move so quickly around the globe, this somehow dissolves the relevance of the nation and their relationship to the domestic state - presumably they don't pay tax to the WTO do they? But I don't know.
cheers
Erik
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End of lbo-talk-digest V1 #4685 *******************************