> >Subject: Re: Hardt & Negri: The New Federalist? (was delinking does not
> >equal autarchy...)
> >American leftists are often anti-statist, reflecting the
> >decentralized structure of American polity; it seems to me that
> >anti-statism of many American leftists should be read as an
> >expression of political "sour grapes," so to speak.
The below misses the point being made above, "reflecting the decentralized structure of the American polity". Anarchism (to cite only one instance of anti-statism) is stronger on continental Europe precisely because the bourgeois/bureaucratic "statist" tradition is also so much stronger. That is also why individualism takes on the highly ideological form of anarchism.
In Anglo-America, individualism is deeply embedded in the state structures, reflecting the archaic historical origins of these bourgeois states (the U.S., Britain). For this very reason, these states also feature a powerfully centralized, highly autonomous bureaucratic arm. So one can act out "individualism" without separating oneself from the state. Though Anglo-American leftists _sound_ "anti-state", out of received ideological habit, they are in fact very "pro-state" in practice as Andrew has noticed in one external instance. They support the Democratic and Labor Parties (this latter no longer a worker's party, but a declasse petit-bourgeois party) and thereby lend their own strength to the state. They have no position (much less a working class position) on reducing the state revenues - surely the issue of highest importance when addressing the question of the bourgeois state - believing that all nonmilitary or police expenditures are inherently good in a state founded on the administration of "individual responsibility". _No one_ of significance among American leftists proposes the abolition of all taxes (income, sales, etc) on working class incomes, for instance.
So present day Anglo-American "anti-statism" is a fake, _except_ insofar as it disperses, atomizes and renders provincial these leftists - there its effect is real, and of immeasurable assistance to the strength of the bourgeois state. Yoshie's statement combines this, though, with the different question of a post-capitalist working class state. Different but not unrelated, since it is no coincidence that these "ancient modern" states, the results of the first national bourgeois revolution of world significance, were also the first to explore in practice the distinctions and connections of state, civil society and individuality. However archaic, limited and bourgeois-utopian these practices may be now, there are not merely functional to - or simultaneously a weakness of - the Anglo-American form of state, they also constitute a historically progressive conquest for humanity, seen in the broadest terms relative to the pre-capitalist past. This historical experience contains lessons for the foundation of the post-capitalist state that, as in the English Revolution, becomes the first decisive, permanent advance beyond the state, society and economy of the past. But our task will not be to found a "limited" state, but going beyond this to found a _selflimiting_ state, indeed a self-dissolving state, on an entirely novel social basis. This is still a unsolved problem in our theory, one that must overcome if "we shall have an association in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all."
>Nice theory except the left anti-state movement is many, many times
>stronger in Europe then it is in the US. There are considerably
>more anarchists in a single organisation (CGT union - 45,000 members)
>in Spain there there are anarchists in the entire N.American continent.
>Altogether your looking at a couple of orders of magnitude in terms
>of anarchists alone when you compare the US and Europe. And then
>there are the various anti-state marxists.
>The anglo part of your theory makes even less sense as the anarchist
>movement in Britain is probably the weakest in Europe (and not
>the strongest)!
>***************************
>International anarchism
>http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/inter.html
-Brad Mayer Oakland, CA