On the contrary. I recently did a bit of an evolution from Zapatista-style avoidance of the state (or certainly a national electoral party-political project, at a time a few people here in SA were thinking about a Workers Party to challenge the ANC). What I realised, moving from grassrootsy work in the Jo'burg townships during the early 1990s, to thinking a lot more about social policy during the late 1990s, is how much really can be done to improve people's lives with entitlement-based benefit structure. The one we're really battling with now is free water, an ANC promise in the 12/00 election (as 40,000 people have come down with cholera since last August), which is being rapidly sabotaged by neoliberal plus apartheid-era bureaucrats.
Doug is probably anti-statist in a way uncommon in European left circuits not only because of the weakness of the US working class and Left, Yoshie, but because as a direct consequence, when it comes to social benefits, the US state is the most ungenorous, stigmatising and corporate-oriented (allowing most important social wage components -- housing, pensions, healthcare -- to be delivered by the employer, in another manifestation of class power that continually erodes the miltancy of employees). I think Gosta Esping-Andersen's typology of "worlds of welfare capitalism" is still on target (notwithstanding some problems), and if more US radicals followed these social policy issues, and won a national health insurance or cancelled workfare, the broader perspective on the US left would be far healthier.
Here in SA,. I spend some teaching time trying to help reproduce the bureaucratic petit bourgeoisie on a nice elite campus away from Wits U's main intellectual hub (we share the space with Africa's leading business school).
> No state power, no chance of putting a leftist program -- even
> a mildest reform, not to mention the abolition of capitalism & other
> sources of oppression -- in practice on a large scale (not to mention
> worldwide). You know I'm a fan of Machiavelli. So are Hardt &
> Negri, in fact, as you can see from _Empire_; they just draw a
> different lesson (= the Empire is "progressive") from the man than
> mine (= an anti-imperial synthesis of Machiavelli, Marx & Engels,
> Lenin, Gramsci, Althusser, etc.).
>
> Now, what does "the internationalization of people" mean _within the
> Progress of the Empire_?
A tiny correction, Yoshie. I like Jim O'Connor when he highlights this semantic distinction: Their Team globalises. Our Team internationalises.
> In practice, doesn't it tend to translate
> into the globalization of the most _banal_ parts of _provincial_
> American culture? Hardt & Negri write, paradoxically seeing a
> revolutionary potential in the _Federalist_ (of all things!): "The
> American Revolution and the 'new political science' proclaimed by the
> authors of the _Federalist_ broke from the tradition of modern
> sovereignty, 'returning to origins' and at the same time developing
> new languages and new social forms that mediate between the one and
> the multiple. Against the tired transcendentalism of modern
> sovereignty, presented either in Hobbesian or in Rousseauian form,
> the American constituents thought that only the republic can give
> order to democracy, or really that the order of the multitude must be
> born not from a transfer of the title of power and right, but from an
> arrangement internal to the multitude, from a democratic interaction
> of powers linked together in networks....The contemporary idea of
> Empire is born through the global expansion of the internal U.S.
> constitutional project" (Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, _Empire_,
> Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000, pp. 161, 182). In contrast, I think
> that "the internal U.S. constitutional project" is not at all based
> upon "an arrangement internal to the multitude, from a democratic
> interaction of powers linked together in networks"; in fact, _the
> former is dedicated to making the latter impossible_.
Yes, tell 'em!
> Why do Hardt & Negri insist on calling the American Empire
> "progressive"? Such an optimism of the intellect can only help those
> who think like a Marine Colonel in _Full Metal Jacket_ who proclaims:
> "We are here to help the Vietnamese, because inside every gook there
> is an American trying to get out" (at
> <http://www.sawnoff.demon.co.uk/script.txt>).
Funny, I overheard some US AID people saying much the same at a Pretoria sidewalk cafe the other day!