Re: Hardt & Negri on Genoa

At 8:26 AM -0400 21/7/01, Louis Proyect wrote:
>Socialists are not interested in equalizing wage rates.  They
>work for proletarian revolution which will create the material
>basis for freedom.

They aren't? Ah -- perhaps socialists in the USA aren't, being quite 
content to defend their wage rates against the rest of the benighted 
world, while working for proletarian revolution -- where? in the USA, 
or we are going to see yet another group of US socialists lauding the 
proletarian revolution elsewhere, even as those proletarians are 
driven into the ground?

Face it, the American working class is, today, increasingly resident 
in China, managed and disciplined by the Communist Party of China. Is 
it a wonder that in places like Canton and Shanghai, it's become a 
badge of pride to have made it illegally to New York and elsewhere, 
do a stint there for -- what? 20x or 40x what they get in China -- 
and then return to talk about it, some dying along the way? The other 
side of it being that that's also putting a cap on US wage rates, 
while allowing for an explosion of consumption in the past twenty 
years or so?

And that's really the rub, isn't it?

You see, the rest of us out here for the most part can't really get 
very far with socialism, whatever -- unless you can guarantee us 
you're going to have your proletarian revolution in the USA in the 
near future. So should we be noble and suffer in misery, to satisfy 
someone's desire for proletarian revolution which they can cheer 
without having to live it?

It seems that to you, we are in that night where all cats are grey, 
if it's not your cat. For us, we'd rather be a Malaysian cat than a 
Ghanaian one (both former Brit colonies, getting independence within 
months of one another), a South Korea than an Argentina, much less a 
North Korea, etc. And to those of us who might be more ideological, 
even if not proletarian revolutionaries, we hope that while the cats 
are coloured, we continue to step back from the flipside of grey cats 
and not start mouthing that it's the mice that count, not the colour 
of the cats. But the colour does count -- for a difference between, 
say, a Toddler Mortality Rate of 14 per thousand rather than 110, and 
a life expectancy at birth of the low-70s rather than the high 50's.

Please don't turn this around in a polemical flourish to suggest that 
this is TINA. If indeed it were TINA, a Malaysia and a Ghana should 
be about the same, having gained independence in broadly similar 
economic conditions (primary producers dependent on one or two 
commodities). We aren't, and we hope we can keep from descending into 
a downward spiral in the current reconfiguration of E Asia -- and 
yes, we do have a pretty good health delivery system, initially 
developed under a colonial order, then extended by a developmentalist 
regime, but which we are now having to fight to keep against the 
drive to privatisation, a drive that is only partly due to 
'globalisation', and much more to do with the internal political 
economy, though the regime is not above blaming it on 
'globalisation', or contrariwise holding up 'globalisation' as the 
bogey with which to attempt to discipline the population.

>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.)

Sorry, I think there was some miscommunication here. Health systems 
and medical practices are, to some degree, a question of culture; as 
is education. My comment was in relation to that defence of the 
"local". But evidently, your view of the "local" does not cover 
peoples which, even today, remain very much on the margins -- not 
periphery -- of the capitalist economy. As we extend schooling, even 
health/medical systems, to cover them, they move from the margins to 
the periphery and become the impoverished. But if we don't extend the 
health/medical systems to cover them, and accept the concomitants of 
such an extension, then we have a situation of high infant mortality 
and premature adult mortality. As it stands, the state, with its 
homogenising intent, cannot and will not conceive of a variant school 
system for such peoples.

As for Cuba, unless your proletarian revolution is about to happen in 
the US, it's not a pretty future to look at, is it? Actually, it 
wouldn't have to be a proletarian revolution even -- can you just 
manage a truly liberal one, willing to lift the blockade?

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

Sorry, I haven't. And since you aren't interested in equalising wage 
rates, let me say that books are increasingly unaffordable, out here 
in this night. What's USD20 for a book in the US -- a couple of hours 
work, or at most 4 hours work at the federal minimum wage? Well, here 
it would be a day's income for a teacher, and 4-5 day's work for a 
better-paid production worker, not counting over-time. Thirty years 
ago, a Penguin or Pelican, an Anchor or Vintage paperback was the 
equivalent of a day's or two day's wage of a production worker.

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

Sorry, another miscommunication. The native elites used to be 
recruited to control the non-elite natives. They wouldn't be deployed 
elsewhere in the empire -- that was reserved to the imperial 
overlords. The only natives so deployed would be the soldiers -- 
whether to put down natives, or to serve as cannon-fodder for the 
empire.

Now, the 'native elites' as you put it, are deployed everywhere, even 
to the imperial heartland, quite unimaginable in the old empire -- 
have the wogs running the show? If you don't think this to be a 
significant change, so be it. But let me say that it does change 
considerably the cache of nationalism.

>>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.

I wouldn't dream of including you in the "us". The "us" refers to 
those of us in your night where all cats are grey. For, in your 
estimation, the one term 'exploitation' should be a sufficient 
shorthand to cover everything; hence, we should not be interested in 
wage rates nor in equalising them, nor in the modalities of 
exploitation, and what that means for our life chances. we should 
just work for the proletarian revolution to create the material basis 
for freedom -- and never mind if in the process many do not even 
acquire the material basis for life -- and even if we succeed, we'll 
just have your guys breathing down our necks and squeezing us in ever 
which way.

But then perhaps we are among your lost causes.

Still, what makes you so sure that it is not indeed your US 
(proletarian and otherwise) that isn't the lost cause? And might not 
that be the mother of all lost causes -- requiring the rest of us to 
re-think our (national) options just to be able to live somewhat 
decently?

Sorry, if this is all a bit tiresomely polemical. But it does begin 
to get tiresome to be given hand-me-downs when we are trying to 
understand what is happening to and around us -- and we are a part of 
the world that has proved uncomfortably confounding for many 
theories, bourgeois and otherwise.

kj khoo