[lbo-talk] Re: Indology: Vandalism and preservation

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Wed Jan 21 08:43:43 PST 2004



>Hundreds of millions of migrant workers are travelling throughout
>China as we type. 1.9 billion trips are going to be made in the next
>few weeks there. This isn't a national border-crossing, of course,
>but perhaps we should be thinking beyond the nation-state, as
>traveling from the countryside to the city in China is probably
>*more* disorienting that most trips between countries.
>
>The nomads are on the move.
>
>Jonathan

The process of primitive accumulation -- separating peasants from land and proletarianizing them -- is surely at work in the poorer nations worldwide, pushing multitudes of ex-peasants onto nomadic paths of internal migration, in part replicating the process of what happened earlier in the richer nations. What's different is that the richer nations' power elite had a much easier time dumping their surplus populations into other countries -- often in their colonies -- when their nations were experiencing primitive accumulation. "[A] youngster enjoying dual citizenship of India and the US, and marrying a Guatemalan of mixed Greek-Slav extraction" is exceptional, and such an experience will not be generalized (much less as "a right for all"), to quote from the exchange between John and Doug to which I was responding. Whether today's primitive accumulation will lead to a deeper "national integration" (to use Doug's term) or a catastrophic national dissolution depends on many factors in each case. In the case of China, the developing China bubble is worrisome (Cf. Keith Bradsher, "Is China the Next Bubble?" <http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/business/yourmoney/18china.html>). -- Yoshie

* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list