Bond against _Empire_

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
>
>>How can "a bunch of countries" make an alliance, "take a common 
>>stance with their creditors, make some serious attempt at 
>>developing serious economic and social links, and arrange some sort 
>>of trading system with a division of labor" without states?
>
>States, plural. I don't like states, and look suspiciously on any 
>proposal that would increase their power, even when they're coming 
>from "our" side. But they exist (like Israel exists) and they're not 
>going away anytime soon. So we make the best of that situation we 
>can. What's I'd like to see is for people to begin thinking and 
>acting beyond national boundaries, and the kind of cross-border 
>links I'm talking about is one way. And if these links serve in the 
>long term to undermine nation-states, so much the better.
>
>Doug

How does that differ from the Bond program against the Empire (& 
_Empire_ by H & N) theoretically and practically?

*****   Contrary to Hardt and Negri, I will conclude that the 
appropriate normative formula is not the dismissal of 
state-sovereignty as a short-medium term objective of Third World 
progressive social forces, but instead, aligned simultaneously with 
international popular struggles against the forces of Empire (both in 
Washington and transnational corporate headquarters), the rekindling 
of nation-state sovereignty but under fundamentally different 
assumptions about power relations and development objectives than 
during the nationalist epoch. Such power relations can probably only 
be changed sufficiently if the multitudes contest those comprador 
forces who run virtually all their nation-states. To do so, I submit, 
will require the articulation of a multifaceted post-nationalist 
political programme, grounded in post-neoliberal economic 
formulations....

[The full article is available at 
<http://csf.colorado.edu/jwsr/archive/vol7/number1/bond/index.shtml>.] 
*****

Yoshie