>Having read next to nothing about national liberation and Marxism,
>I'm (only) assuming that Yoshie's favourable attitude towards
>nationalism (given also what you've posted before, Yoshie) stems
>from a sort of "protectionist" concept: build up the national
>bourgeois into something capable of joining the world market on a
>somewhat "even" footing (let me know if I'm off-base, Yoshie, as
>well as how far). This also leads to greater proletariat
>consciousness, sharpened even further by trade and production on the
>global level when that appears on the scene.
>
>As to Carrol's comments about the hopelessness of Hardt & Negri:
>I've been reading Empire, off and on, and I can't really say that
>the authors are all fatalistic. A bit flighty maybe but hardly
>fatalistic. Their idea of "pushing through" Empire to come out the
>other side in a better place seems to echo Marx' thinking as per
>above. I haven't yet come to the part knocking nationalist
>projects, but I would have to agree with Yoshie at least somewhat:
>why not engage in them? Granted, to paraphrase Doug, such projects
>haven't shown much promise from past experiments, but that's the
>standard poop I get from people who knock any kind of
>anti-capitalist stance (not that I'm stating you do, Doug; don't get
>your hackles up): look at Russia, it didn't work there, so the whole
>thing is crap, yadda, yadda, yadda. No reason not to keep trying,
>especially when the alternative will get worse.
Naturally, I agree with Todd on the second paragraph above entirely. As for nationalisms (note the plural), here are my thoughts:
(1) Nationalism in rich imperial powers (the USA above all) should be resisted.
(2) Nationalisms in the periphery and semi-periphery have to be examined case by case. Some nationalisms (e.g., Cuban nationalism) have helped people resist imperial powers, empowered the most oppressed and marginalized, etc.; others (e.g., nationalisms of constituent nations -- Slovenes, Croats, Bosnian Muslims, Albanians, & Serbs -- in what used to be Yugoslavia) ended up inviting the occupation of imperial powers, reducing some people to wards of protectorates, throwing the exercise of self-government & self-determination out of the window in the process, nationalist rhetoric notwithstanding.
(3) The presence of "nations" is not a given -- it is, rather, a costly achievement (cf. Ernest Renan, "What Is a Nation?"), and a precarious one at that in the periphery. It cannot be taken for granted at all, except perhaps by those who already enjoy citizenship of a rich & solid imperial power. The more the world capitalist market exercises its power to discipline labor freely, the more economic upheavals all of us experience; and such upheavals can easily capsize weak states and disintegrate only recently achieved & weakly integrated nations, sometimes descending into endless civil & regional wars, with sub-national groups easily turned into proxies of imperial & sub-imperial regional powers -- hence the expansion of the Empire. Recall that "more than 190 states that exist at the beginning of the new millennium are less than 50 years old" (Larry P. Goodson, _Afghanistan's Endless War: State Failures, Regional Politics, and the Rise of the Taliban_, Seattle: U of Washington P, 2001, p. 6). Moreover, "[b]oth nation building and state consolidation in certain transitional (formerly Second and Third World) states have been delayed or even arrested by factors both domestic and international. Domestically, societal cleavages between competing ethnic, linguistic, religious, and economic groups frequently cause or exacerbate fragmentation, undercutting the concept of the nation....Economic underdevelopment, coupled with poor political institutionalization, further fractures society between modernizing and traditional elites, leaving peasants and the urban underclass alienated and largely outside the struggle for domestic power" (Goodson, p. 9) -- easy preys for domestic and foreign predators. This is the dangerous condition that those on the periphery must overcome by achieving nations & building states.
(4) There are no "national" bourgeoisie in the periphery, even where "indigenous" bourgeoisie can be said to exist at all (for instance, where is "bourgeoisie" in Afghanistan???). Left to their own devices, landlords & capitalists in the periphery would rather engage in _anti-national_ activities, avoiding taxes, eschewing domestic investment and modernization, parking their capital in safe banks in imperial metropolises. When social movements outside imperial powers engaged in populist reforms or socialist revolutions, they were inevitably led by intellectuals often of petit-bourgeois backgrounds (doctors, lawyers, teachers, military officers, etc. -- think of Che, Castro, Allende, Arbenz, Mossadegh, Nasser, Torrijos, etc.), who sought to serve and were in turn supported by peasants, proletarians, civil servants, etc. -- Yoshie
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