Doug says:
>I'm all for the internationalization of people. I'm confused but
>fascinated by the fact that some of the strongest defenders of
>nationalism/localism on this list are people living in lands far
>from their birth. Is this some fantastic longing for rootedness
>playing itself out through politics?
As I said, I like travel, not travail....
At bottom, I'm interested in neither localism nor nationalism (nor is
Pat, I imagine). What I think leftists should become interested in
is the _state power_ (here I don't presume that Pat will concur with
me). No state power, no chance of putting a leftist program -- even
a mildest reform, ********* Maybe it's because I've been re-reading the dialogue between Michael Burawoy and Adam Przeworski, but waaaaay before you can get possible leftists thinking about _the state_ again, we have to organize outside production. To my mind this means linking up with environmental/racial justice issues which are always local. This is not to espouse localism by any means, but gets us to admit we have to trust those who are strugggling somewhere else on the planet when we may feel all the solidarity in the world but can't really help, other than to engage in similar struggles right where we are. In many cases this means confronting capital directly, not necessarily via the state [city hall, county councils whathaveyou], in/with community coalitions. The left, such as it is, needs to pick the proper scales at which capital is exposed at it's ugliest. This means being patient, strategic with our militancy and media savvy.
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.). *********
None of these guys heard of global warming, desertification, deforestation etc. Greening people who share our concerns means getting out from the know it all attitude some of these guys had [which is NOT to deny their brilliance].
Now, what does "the internationalization of people" mean _within the
Progress of the Empire_? 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_.
******
This is mush. US style Federalism was the substantive beginning of Westphalian style sovereignty-the "solidification/codification" of that paradigm. The "tradition" it displaced [minimally, "corporate welfare" is old news] was laid out pretty accurately by William McNeil, Braudel and Charles Tilly. Negri and Hardt miss completely the Roman unconscious of US political culture, something William Appleman Williams hit right on the head.
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>).
Yoshie
**********
The US is Roman; "we're" not interested in the intellect.
Ian