----- Original Message -----
From: "Chris Burford" <cburford at gn.apc.org>
Hardt:
> >One of the great achievements of the globalisation protest movements, in
> >other words, has been to put an end to thinking of politics as a contest
> >among nations or blocs of nations.
If true, this would be a big big problem. Thank goodness it's not. E.g., see Walden Bello's recent take on geopolitics (albeit with a strange conclusion) in the latest ATTAC newsletter (let me know if you need it).
> >Internationalism has been reinvented as
> >a politics of global network connections with a global vision of possible
> >futures.
What's new? That's how virtually all our pre-Seattle left solidarity could be described, from anti-slavery to Spanish Civil War to Vietnam to many other Third World revolutions, to the SA anti-apartheid movement and beyond...
> >In this context, anti-Europeanism and anti-Americanism no longer
> >make sense.
And when did they ever? People use anti-yank imagery as a heuristic device all over the world. When it comes to allying with the Left in the US or the north, it's trivial, pure theatre.
Chris:
> True. And one of the ways internationalism has been created is to have US
> speakers at anti-war rallies elsewhere in the world. They in turn have
> taken the trouble to come.
And always did... and were always welcome, from John Reed to Jane Fonda and beyond...
> Hardt's position is consistent with the broad outline of "Empire" which I
> take to be opposition by the multitude to the new imperial structures in
> the spirit of the Wobblies rather than that of the Third International.
That's because they're not formal parties -- but it doesn't mean that the demands of the multitudes are so different than traditional oppositional movements, since they typically focus on local grievances and insist upon redistributive state policies to solve these. (This include the Zapatistas, as they made clear at the San Andreas tables and in their appropriation of electricity, and the MST, whose dual-power settlements made demands upon the state for access to the water and electricity grids, as I witnessed last month.)
> But while the boundaries of the "right of intervention" are being thrashed
> out over Iraq, the inter-imperialist rivalries are still important in
> shaping the future world government. France has just hosted the conference
> of African nations. On Sunday Gordon Brown is quietly going to present his
> strategic plan for world development proposing a fund of the order of $500
> billion. These positions are implicit challenges to US leadership.
And they disprove the first point above.