delinking

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>Yoshie Furuhashi, quoting Patrick Bond:
>
>>That commitment has already begun to take on international 
>>proportions through New Social Movements, Michael Lowy suggests:
>>
>>Militant trade-unionists, left-wing socialists, de-Stalinized 
>>communists, undogmatic Trotskyists, unsectarian anarchists, are 
>>seeking out the paths to renewal of the proletarian 
>>internationalist tradition ... Concurrently, new internationalist 
>>feelings are becoming visible in social movements with a global 
>>perspective, like feminism and environmentalism, in antiracist 
>>movements, in liberation theology, in associations devoted to human 
>>rights and to solidarity with the third world ... It is from 
>>convergence between renewal of the socialist, anticapitalist and 
>>anti-imperialist tradition of proletarian internationalism -- 
>>ushered in by Marx in the Communist Manifesto -- and the 
>>universalist, humanist, libertarian, environmentalist, feminist, 
>>and democratic aspirations of the new social movements that can and 
>>will arise twenty-first-century internationalism.71
>
>Well, exactly. What does this passage have to do with "delinking"? 
>It's a relinking, or a new kind of linking from the capitalist kind. 
>It doesn't seem to have much to do with "national sovereignty," 
>which, as Patrick's frequently cited models (Smith's Rhodesia and 
>apartheid SA) show, has often abominable associations.
>
>Doug

De-linking from the Empire's political, economic, military, & 
ideological hegemony = re-linking the world on terms friendlier to 
the working class, in Samir Amin, etc.'s lexicon.  I don't know 
_anyone_ using the word "delinking" in the sense that Hardt & Negri 
use it.  Don't they have any specific criticism of _actually 
existing_ Marxist & other left-wing theorists?

Losing the "nation" in today's world means Congo, for example.  No 
state, no nation, no economic infrastructure to speak of, no social 
development in the near future....

Totally losing "national sovereignty" means, for instance, Bosnia, 
Kosovo, etc.  You get a bunch of armed guys haggling over the 
competing claims to fictitious "local sovereignty" under a body of 
imperial bureaucrats, peace-keepers, etc.

Losing "national sovereignty" more than half way means to be a 
military base of foreign troops potentially hostile to the local 
working class (like many nations that host the U.S. military), to 
have your economic policy determined by the Bretton Woods 
institutions, etc.

Perhaps the only nation in the world that can be said to be in full 
possession of "national sovereignty" is the USA.  Everyone other 
nation -- including Cuba & China -- has lost much of it, in so far as 
its "sovereignty" is conditional upon the political, economic, & 
military sufferance of the Empire.  Anyone against "national 
sovereignty" therefore should try to come up with a strategy to 
fragment the USA's sovereignty from inside & outside.

The rest of the world's masses should try to work toward their 
political sovereignty, for instance, via the route that Pat suggests:

At 11:36 AM +0000 1/30/01, Patrick Bond wrote:
>I think they're (we're) fighting to
>first and foremost, dissolve the power of neoliberalism and all other
>oppressions. (One day soon that will mean having to take a lot more
>states, of course, but meantime what the Zapatistas remind us of is
>that persistent, uncompromising *opposition* is the appropriate
>formula, and especially so when it comes to nixing--not fixing--the
>embryonic global state...)

Zapping _in the meantime_, but reclaiming Lenin for a possible future,

Yoshie

P.S.  The more political sovereignty the workers of the world gain, 
the less national/imperial sovereignty the USA will have.