>--- Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> wrote:
> > Hardt & Negri breathlessly write as if we could and
>> should assume
>> that "a new nomad horde, a new race of barbarians"
>> will be be of the
>> Left
>
>Yoshie, for your information, Negri was very impressed
>with the way that movement of people, especially out
>of the ex-Soviet Union and eastern block, can bring
>about the collapse of a system. When he was in Paris
>he personally participated in the "sans papiers"
>movement...he believes that one of the first demands
>that should be put forward is "universal citizenship".
It is rather naive to argue that movement of people brought about the collapse of the Eastern bloc. The fall of the Berlin Wall was merely a final symptom, rather than a (much less the) cause, of the dissolution of the USSR & Eastern European socialist states. Consult David Kotz & Fred Weir, _Revolution from Above: The Demise of the Soviet System_ (NY: Routledge, 1997) for a decent analysis of the end of the USSR, which traces the origins of the "revolution from above" to economic stagnation that began in the mid-1970s, struggles within the party-state elite (many of whom came to favor capitalism, against the wishes of the masses), and chaotic effects of ill planned economic reforms. The debt crisis also played an important but little remembered role in the dissolution of a number of socialist states.
Here is an example form Yugoslavia:
***** Dismantling Yugoslavia
by CATHERINE SAMARY
...The increasing decentralisation of the economy without democratic checks and balances, and its opening up to the world market, cost the country very dear in the 1980s. While all regions underwent development, wide gaps in per capita income opened up between the different republics, whose population patterns and production structures varied considerably. This was the regime's most important failure.
In this situation, the sudden increase in foreign debt brought about by the jump in oil prices and the subsequent rise in interest rates in the early 1980s spelt the death of the system. In 1980 foreign debt reached $ 20 billion, marking the beginning of a decade of crisis and conflict during which thousands of strikes broke out. The federal authorities were unable to force the republics, or the provinces of Kosovo and Vojvodina, to shoulder their fair share of the debt. The richer regions considered themselves penalised by inefficient bureaucratic management designed to redistribute resources to less developed areas. The poorer regions complained that the rich regions were able to export large quantities of goods - and hence earn large amounts of foreign currency - because they, the poorer regions, were supplying them with cheap raw materials.
In short, although the causes of the crisis had little to do with inter-ethnic hatred, the crisis itself encouraged the rise of nationalist feeling....
<http://www.en.monde-diplomatique.fr/1998/11/14yugo1> *****
As for migration out of the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc in general, there is no reason to assume that its effects have tended toward greater democracy and human liberation.
***** Flight Into the Maelstrom: Soviet Immigration to Israel and Middle East Peace
By John Quigley, Ithaca Press, 1997, 256 pp. List: $40; AET: $30.
Reviewed by Michael S. Lee
April/May 1999, pages 122-124
Beginning in the late 1980s, as the Soviet Union weakened and then collapsed, large numbers of Jews began to leave the several Soviet republics for various locales, chief among them, Israel. The consequences were far-reaching. Many of these new arrivals to the Jewish state came to feel that they were being used as pawns by those within Israel who wanted to tip the demographic balance within the West Bank decisively in favor of the Jews at the expense of the Palestinian population.
John Quigley addresses this complex topic in a very unique and engrossing style in Flight Into The Maelstrom. The book allows the reader to see the problems which developed within both Israel and the occupied territories through the eyes of a fictional Palestinian couple and a Soviet-Jewish immigrant family, both living in East Jerusalem, and the people who interact with them. Quigley notes that he based these characters on real people and their actual experiences, and that he employed this method to protect the identities of those who have suffered much pain and hardship over the years on both sides.
Quigley also writes in detail on the history of the Zionist conquest of Palestine from the late 19th century up until the present. He makes the case that the settling of Soviet immigrants in the West Bank at the expense of the indigenous Palestinian population was simply the latest in a long history of activities intended to solidify the hold of Zionist Jews on the homeland of the Palestinian people, and to make it increasingly difficult for any Israeli government to relinquish any part of that homeland to form a Palestinian state.
Documenting this case, Quigley quotes New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, who stated at the end of World War II that the Jews of Europe were "helpless hostages for whom statehood has been made the only ransom," by efforts of the Jewish Agency to limit their migration to any place but Palestine.
Support by the United States during the late 1980s and early 1990s for this policy by restricting the number of Soviet Jews who could immigrate into the U.S., which was actually the first choice of virtually all of them, is also documented in Quigley's book. On the whole, it is a very damning piece of scholarship, which makes no bones about the fact that Israel forced unwilling Soviet Jews to come to Israel in order to drive even more Palestinians from their land.
Quigley also recounts how this policy kept many Palestinian refugees from being able to re-enter the land of their birth. Such is the plight of a Palestinian refugee in Lebanon who asks, "Under what justice can a Russian Jew go to a Palestine he has never seen, while we who were born there must remain as refugees?"
<http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/0499/9904122.html> ***** -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Anti-War Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Anti-War Activist Resources: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/activist.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osu.edu/students/CJP/>