>Well, for one thing, if South Africans are all buying their cars from local
>Ford branch plants, how are they ever going to develop their own automobile
>industry? Or shipbuilding or semiconductors or aircraft or any of the other
>things that turn poor countries into rich countries? Don't they in some way
>need to delink?
Can every small country in the world develop its own car, shipbuilding, chip, or aircraft industry? South Africa with 41 million people? Zimbabwe with its 12 million? There's a lot to be said for an international division of labor - not the distorted exploitative one of capitalist reality, but a better one we can start to imagine. I don't see how retreating to national or subnational spaces is going to do anything for that re-imagining.
Hardt & Negri also talk a lot about migration - the positive value of people moving from one place to another, and mixing it up with those not like themselves. Of course, this should be voluntary, not the result of economic desperation or political persecution - but isn't there some value to this? I mean, look at Patrick himself - born in Belfast, educated in the U.S. and Britain, now in SA, talking to hundreds of us all over the place? Isn't there something appealing about that? Why should it just be the privilege of a relative elite, or the fate of the truly desperate?
>And couldn't the struggle to delink itself involve international solidarity
>-- wouldn't it have to? Why couldn't the AFL-CIO join with the Brazilian PT
>to kill the FTAA and promote a more progressive Mercosur as an alternative?
>Wouldn't this involve solidarity accross borders too?
Why is Mercosur any better a model? You could read Mercosur as Brazil's attempt to become a regional hegemon, with the U.S. excluded. Any African delinking might well boost SA's role as regional hegemon. Is it any consolation that your boss is your neighbor; isn't bossness itself the issue?
Doug