States and internationalism

Kevin Robert Dean qualiall_2 at yahoo.com
Sat Feb 17 21:29:37 PST 2001


David points out: "Somehow we've got to create multinational liberties, equalities and fraternities. If history is any guide, these will be as different from anything we've seen in the 20th century, as 20th century politics was from the 19th."

I heard somewhere that organizing an international union is illegal? I'm not sure this to be true though.

Anyway, I have always had mixed feelings on "Natonalism" (the left wing kind)--on the one hand, the problems and conditions are unique to each locality, but at the same time, the conditions that make a socialist society will exist for quite some time--especially if one is established that go aainst the "International Community" (read "USA"), there will be attempts to destroy any good that ma come out of it.

I wonder if unions should start spending union dues on internatonal orginizing rather than paying for silly Democrats ad campaigns? Although US Unions can be pretty nationalist...I was watching a rerun of Saturday Nite Live, of all things, and they were doing skits on the '92 election campaign. Of course they all did there spoofs on Perot and NAFTA--but I was surprised at how nationalistic (in the bad way) the discussion seemed to be back then (I was still pretty 'politically asleep' back in 92 so I wasn't paying attention back there)--it almost seemed that unions took the same line--worried that "Mexicans will steal our jobs" and whatnot.

I wonder also, and this may be blasphemy here on this list, if a lot of the fears of "Globalization" are based on the US being one of the "better off" of nations showing there chauvanism. If the real revolution comes, one should probably (me being one of the first ones) expect some, if not most of our middle class priveleges to go away--such as losing our "good jobs" to the "foreigners", who incidentally are much worse off than we (meaning the US) ever would be---at any rate--many of us on this list probably have middle class biases that we don't even know we have.

In the call for "Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity"one should expect to lose some of our comforts, at least for a time---for the majority of the world however, it would of course translate into much greater comforts--which is who we're fighting for in the first place.

KRD

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