Hardt

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Fri Feb 21 12:27:39 PST 2003


Patrick Bond wrote:


> > >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).

Is that the same piece Ian Murray forwarded? If not, could you supply?


> > >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...

Yeah, but it's quicker now. Info spreads almost instantly, and events can be planned. I used to see you once a year maybe, and now we communicate almost every day.


> > >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.

Since when is symbolism trivial? The kind of anti-US'ism that Hardt is talking about not only effaces our domestic left, it ignores the complicity of lesser imperialist powers (like the EU) and comparador elites in the poorer countries.


>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 landless movements and utility liberators are taking matters into their own hands - and learning from each other too. They're not petitioning some state to reconnect the water - they're doing it themselves.

Doug



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