Re: lumps in the gravy -- uneveness and interimperialist war

Andy's comments are below. As I said before, processes can have a "logical
conclusion." Marx and Engels (and I) believe that the logical conclusion of
class society and class struggle will EVENTUALLY be a classless society. But
EVENTUALLY can be a long, long time; there are a lot of zigs and zags along
the way, and just as capital within a nation needs a state to enforce its
power, capital, even transnational capital, still needs political-military
structures (nation states) to protect its interests. I'm not saying that a
"NATION-STATE" with extreme "autonomy" from class forces will determine
politics and wars, but rather that with all their supposed "relative
autonomy", nation-states will continue to be a key way that capitalists and
banks will fight it out. And economic struggle becomes political struggle
becomes military struggle.

It may be "irrational" and counter-productive to their world system for
major capitalist nations to engage in major war, but they are not driven by
our intellectual theories of what is rational for the whole picture. They
are driven by what they think meets their needs for the moment, just as it
is "irrational" for capitalists to create economic crises of
over/under/distorted production. But they also are not driven by rational
considerations of long run impact on the system, only survival for the
moment, as Marx pointed out so many times.  The capitalists often behave in
ways destructive to their own long run interests. I doubt that the Nazis
expected World War II to end the way it did. Imperialists generally expect
that the other side will back down.

This is not about holding fast to some dogmatic Leninist sacrament. There is
data. There are 40 wars going on now, some with the ability to draw in
others. We shall see if we have reached the end of the era of major wars  (a
world war need not destroy the whole world, but it will be the worst thing
we ever saw), or whether there will be other major wars in the future.

I  truly wish it was coming down to the end game as Andy suggests, with a
united global revolutionary egalitarian (I still like Marx' use of the word
communist) movement preparing to battle a global capitalist class.  I just
think that such a scenario vastly oversimplifies the contradictions within
contradictions that still riddle the capitalist world.

Alan Spector


-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Wayne Austin <aaustin@utkux.utcc.utk.edu>
To: WORLD SYSTEMS NETWORK <wsn@csf.colorado.edu>
Date: Saturday, May 08, 1999 1:55 PM
Subject: Re: lumps in the gravy -- uneveness and interimperialist war


>
>The likelihood of "inter-imperialist" war has diminished not because
>capitalism has managed to develop out of conflict or because it has met
>the needs of the people, but because the upper strata of the class system
>have disembedded from their national context and globalized. The powerful
>nations simply have far more to gain from cooperation than conflict, and
>this cooperation is at a fundamentally different level of cooperation than
>previous periods of peace because of the qualitative shift in the
>intensity and depth of socioeconomic linkages -- these transcend national
>boundaries in a way different than during the previous periods where war
>was probable. This is not arguing that nation-states are powerless or do
>not determine/condition the parameters of struggle; rather nation-states
>have been transformed in ways that refocus struggle from
>inter-imperialist/nation-state rivalry to global class and race warfare.
>Beneath all this the objective basis is being laid for global class war,
>and by this I mean a class war of global proportions, not the objective
>fact of class struggle globally (which is a fact of all class-divided
>societies). It has taken the transnationalization of the capitalist mode
>of production and the class/race system, and the transformation of the
>nation-state amid this globalization, to create the objective conditions
>for global class struggle. The question now is whether the world
>proletarian and peasant classes can organize into a counterhegemonic
>movement and engage the struggle at the level of open conflict. The focus
>on nation-states in conflict, i.e., "inter-imperialist" war doesn't make
>much sense in the context of global capitalism where those who steer the
>direction of world-historical development are the global capitalist class
>and their national adjuncts, and the central organic/structural line of
>world-historical development is globalization towards world society and
>culture. In fact, the old imperialist rhetoric of the left is a
>distraction and an epistemic barrier to objective knowledge about the
>present world-historical stage of the capitalist epoch. Just to make a
>note of this, Marx and Engels predicted this would happen in the Communist
>Manifesto.
>
>Peace,
>Andy
>