----- Original Message -----
From: "Yoshie Furuhashi" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Nathan:
>One reason the US had fewer "past gains" for the working class compared to
>Europe is that, to its credit on a historical plain, it was more open to
>immigration from poorer nations
-So, the main cause of fewer social democratic gains of the US working
-class is not racism & imperialism but immigration?
My point is that you cannot separate racism and imperialism from both the
lesser gains in the US versus the greater gains in European social
democracy. Its effects played out differently in each place- Europe
separating its domestic labor markets from its colonialist goods markets,
while US capital mixed the two phenomena in ways that had both progressive
and regressive effects on working class interests.
>The promise of globalization- Empire - whatever we call it - is the end of
>the game of shuffling inequality around the global chessboard, pretending
>that local autarchic versions of equality- themselves sitting on a sea of
>global starvation and misery- are somehow incremental signs of
>semi-socialism attained.
-Why do you think Empire represents "the end of the game of shuffling
-inequality"? There is no evidence for the end. Living standards of
-workers in rich & poor nations are diverging further (especially with
-debt servitude & the collapse of socialism in the Eastern Bloc),
-instead of converging, even while workers in rich nations, too, are
-beaten by capital.
This is just bad reading and editing of a previous post, since you left off
my exact comments that in the short-term, working class forces are worse
off. Emphasize the word "promise" in the above statement, not the word
"end" as in already happened.
Maybe working class forces are incapable of coordinating across a global
political sphere and thus will always be at the mercy of global capital, but
I don't think so. What we have is a lag in institutional development, one
that we have seen repeated historically. Workers had one point had most
power in free cities, but found themselves losing out to the new industrial
towns, so they had to organize nationally- at the time of the domain of
power by big capital. Working class forces became so successful at
operating at the national level that it became an ideological trope of
capital to argue for "devolution" and decentralization in hopes that
coordinated capital could more easily dominate decentralized policy.
Right now, global capital is more organized at the level of international
institutions, especially given the weakness of democratic control of those
institutions. However, there is no reason that as working class forces
build solidarity and coordinate strategy, they cannot build exactly the kind
of political reach in the global institutional sphere that they built at the
national level.
And such a global democratic polity would be based on a far more egalitarian
set of forces and impulses than the relative privileges upon which social
democracy was built in the immediate post-war period.
Nathan Newman
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.openflows.org/~nathan/
