This important debate requires explicit recognition that any serious radical, progressive, socialist, or marxist, criticism must be based in the first place on realism about what is actually happening, and the actual balance of forces.
That by no means entails that we do nothing about shifting that balance.
But although it is not the style of this list to indulge in lengthy quotes from holy scripture, I cannot resist the temptation to spank those revolutionary poseurs who scorn lists like this, on the grounds that the only true revolutionary is one who shows his proletarian spirit by deliberately ignoring the balance of forces:
How is this withering scorn from someone who was a proven revolutionary:
"the lovers of ostentation...our 'left' Communists - who are also fond of calling themselves 'proletarian' Communists, although there is very little that is proletarian about them and very much that is petty-bourgeois - are incapable of giving thought to the relation of forces, the caculation of the relation of forces. This is the main point in Marxism and Marxian tactics, but they disdainfully brush aside the 'main point' with 'proud' phrases..."
'Left-Wing' Childishness and Petty-Bourgeois Mentality." May 1918
It is interesting that Hardt and Negri are seen as promoting hopelessness when their book Empire ends with praise of "lightness of being".
But whether one is temperamentally optimistic or temperamentally pessimistic about what to do in face of the actual existing relations of forces, there is still the question of what those relations are. It is true that in the 70's when the USA had lost 58,000 dead from the Vietnam war, it looked as if there could be coalitions of national liberation movements targeting US imperialism as the main enemy of the people of the world, and even that the second world could join in as allies, with the socialist camp a crucial progessive force, in a great three worlds strategy.
Too many on these US dominated lists have not reassessed the relevance of that important struggle, and been open to a new analysis of the relations of forces. But Hardt and Negri are essentially correct that national resistance against the increasingly integrated global forces of imperialism can at best now only be rearguard resistance, and may sometimes be reactionary.
I sense a strange reversal of history: whereas it used to be an ultra-leftist Trotskyist position to argue that socialism is impossible in one country, now it seems at least in some cases to be people from a Trotskyist background who are most insistent that no radical reforms are worth fighting for at a global level as part of a global revolutionary process.
The difficult but important point is this on progressive lists dominated numerically by subscribers from the USA:
a new global coalition of progressive forces cannot demand that progressive people in the USA target their own imperialism. Although often that is a good instinct to make that a dogma above all else, that isolates American progressives from wider forces within the USA who are essential to building a new global coalition - a coaliton of the multitude against the insecurity, oppression, and exploitation inherent in the Empire of global finance capital.
The demonstrators who were in Seattle need to find ways of linking up with the demonstrators in Buenos Aires this week. Because on their own each group will fail.
Chris Burford
London