>[I'm cc'ing this to Michael Hardt since the debate is somehow related
>to his ideas]
I await Michael Hardt's clarification, but in the meantime....
>Well, I would imagine that what you do is you 'push capitalism's promises'.
>For instance, the Zapatistas strategy of globalising a local conflict
>in Chiapas through injecting their struggle into an international network
>of support and discussion heavily depends on the ability of activists
>in to bridge the enforced divisions which are fundamental to imperalism.
Well, yes, but what's _new_? Don't tell me it's the Internet!
>This is all pretty standard Marxism - Trotsky idea of a transitional
>programme is talking the same language.
Right.
>Where Negri and co. - and
>other 'autonomists' - differ from orthodox Marxism is that they see
>the refusal of the relations of capital as happening constantly - the
>capital relation constantly needs to be re-imposed.
I don't think that insights into the presence of constant struggles against capital & capital's ceaseless endeavor to re-impose the ensemble of social relations necessary for its expanded reproduction have been missing in the Marxist tradition aside from "autonomists." What were Marx, Lenin, Luxemberg, Trotsky, Postone, Gramsci, Mao, Braverman, Althusser, Mandel, O'Connor, and so on, and so forth? Chopped liver?
In any case, what's more progressive about the present (the post-Socialist/post-Social Democratic era) than about the past (the Socialist/Social Democratic era), aside from some advances in women's & GLBT rights in some corners of the earth, a little more awareness of ecological dimensions of struggles against capitalism, etc.?
Compare the Cuban Revolution with the Zapatista strategy. _Not because of any fault on the part of the latter, but because of the drastic change in the balance of the forces_, the latter has yet to achieve one hundredth of what the former has.
Whither the Zapatistas (and the Zapatistas are us) in the era of the triumphant Progress of the Empire?
Yoshie