Re: Hardt & Negri on Genoa

At 02:23 PM 7/21/2001 +0800, kjkhoo@pop.jaring.my wrote:
> From the little I've seen, it strikes me that Hardt-Negri have their 
> finger on something when they focus on the trans-border movement of 
> people, a process which, if unleashed, may well do more to equalise wage 
> rates across the world than campaigns to get transnationals to pay in 
> accordance with American wage rates which would 'distort' local price 
> structures such that dependence upon transnational capital would become 
> total, something which is already happening at the managerial end.

Socialists are not interested in equalizing wage rates. They work for 
proletarian revolution which will create the material basis for freedom. 
The problem with Hardt-Negri's book is that it preempts revolutionary 
socialism in the name of a kind of Spinoza-ist "communism" that ill serves 
people in struggle all over the world. That is the reason it is getting so 
much play in the bourgeois press. It is Thomas Friedman mixed with Italian 
ultraleftism of the 1970s.

>Should they continue to live that way? I may not think so, but the only 
>way that they can get away from living that way is to enter the capitalist 
>labour market with all that that implies.

TINA? No wonder you gravitate toward "Empire". This is the unstated 
assumption the book rests on.

>Should we not also recognise that to address some of the problems 
>identified -- of health and infant mortality, of education (a term used 
>most unself-consciously to mean formal schooling, as if "local peoples" 
>didn't have education), etc. -- is itself to participate in, to urge, a 
>globalising of systems of medical practice, of schooling practice, etc.?

Cuba has health and education statistics that compare favorably to G8 
nations. This came about through a rejection of "globalization". 
(Capitalism, to use plain language.)

>  But of course the movement against child labour is thinking of child 
> labour in the capitalist economy -- and yes, there is a fate worse than 
> full-blown capitalism, and that's a half-baked capitalism, caught in a 
> limbo -- the religious version of which has it as a place of no exit, 
> can't go to heaven, can't go to hell, and can't return to earth, can't 
> even do a stint a purgatory.

Have you read Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal"?

>It is also depressing to be told that globalisation currents are all about 
>Coca-Cola, Macdonald's, etc. Not to mention that it manifests a curious 
>lack of faith in the local and in local people. Five centuries ago, the 
>Indian curries which we all love today were made with pepper, not 
>chillies. Yet who today can imagine curries with pepper and not chillies? 
>But then, equally, that quintessential English practice of tea didn't 
>exist five centuries ago.

Who can be opposed to voluntary adoptions of foreign culture? I listen to 
African music all the time. However, in places like Zambia you will find 
that most clothing is purchased off the racks in open air markets, whose 
ultimate source is Salvation Army or Goodwill plants in the USA. Sort of a 
grotesque, postmodern version of what Great Britain did to Indian 
handicrafts in the 18th century.

>In point of fact, the current globalisation currents are about who -- not 
>just what -- moves, and under what conditions, and how those moves do 
>undermine the nation-state. For the -- how would one label them? -- the 
>managerial classes, the nation-state is increasingly coming to resemble a 
>club in which membership is optional.

There is nothing new about this. Great Britain cultivated native elites 
everywhere it went at the height of its empire.

>Repeating the mantra of exploitation is not going to get us anywhere.

I am not sure what you mean by "us". I am a proletarian revolutionary. I 
have no idea what you are, but it certainly is not that.



Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org