Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Nor could even our
> very minimal welfare state in the U.S. survive free traffic across
> the Rio Grande. It makes me uncomfortable to confront these sorts of
> facts, but they're real. What do you make of them?
>
First of all, I would recommend not being uncomfortable about them; such facts (or any facts) need be uncomfortable only for the writer of theodicies. Given that, it's not so much what we make of them as how we respond to them, in the sense of how we incorporate them into left program, strategy, and tactics. And finally, it's also a fact that whatever _is_ "done" about them is going to be within the framework of national states. That fact apparently makes many uncomfortable, but there it is.
Carrol
P.S. Chavez in Venezuela in labelling his program "Bolivarian" has in effect declared that the _particulat_ nation-state borders within Latin America are artificial, imposed from outside. Also, it seems to be post-World War 2 imperialist policy to generate as many such artificial borders as possible. For example the Indian independence movement had always included Hindu and Moslem in one nation: England manipulated the partition. The break up of Yugoslavia under German & U.S. manipulation and interference is another example. Many Marxist Humanitarian Bombers (oxymoron?) have used (or rather abused) Lenin's principle of self-determination to justify this imperialist policy. (What is a non-artificial borderd? Struggle will determine.)