roachboy

pan: ok, let me explain what i was saying. you got it wrong.

zen is basically correct: i was talking about the ideolopgy of nationalism in general. as for teh states, i live here too, friend, and so i am obviously concerned about what these things mean for the place in which i live.

if you actually think about how globalizing capitalism is developing, the functions that the nation-state had traditionally fulfilled are being transferred to the transnational level--think about the e.u. in political terms, and the confusion/problems that are attending it. if ytou think about economic power, environmnetal regulation,e tc etc, the processes are underway that will at one point make the nation-state--and the whole ideology of nationalism--a thing of the past.

obviously things are not there yet--but as i understand nationalism to be little more than the ideological expression of the nation-state, it would follow that as the former gives way to another formation the ideology becomes unnecessary.

and what has nationalism given us anyway? what i see in it is largely a history of massacres, from the colonial period through two world wars, through the present forms of militarized delerium. of course it also has provided flags to wave and illusions of unity to defend--but these seem to me little more than flip sides of the same thing.

it also was the framework within which complex systems of democratic accountability came to take shape--the pressure points that these patterns of democratic accountability relied upon have been transferring away from the nation-state level for 30 years now...production is no longer organized around nation-states--ownership is no longer bound by nation-states--patterns of economic co-ordination operate at the transnational level--the institutions that will come to regulate transnational capital flows are starting to take shape. increasingly, the institutions that had been amenable to pressure for organized groups of citizens in the context of the nation-state are disappearing, morphing onto a different level of organization.

i think the entire politics of the bush administration is shaped by these considerations--they react absolutely against it, because they know that if this process were to go forward on a multilateral, transnational basis, that their reactionary ideology would sooner rather than later find itself with nothing to talk about. so they took a huge gamble--that gamble was iraq--it was aimed against the un as a signifier for the entire process of transnational capitalism--not as such, but as something that in its logic rendered nationalism obsolete. the idea was to alter the situation by forcing the american military hegemon on top of these institutions--that way nationalism could collapse everywhere else, but in the states folk could pretend things were otherwise. this was not about you, this was not about me, this was not about the well-being of anyone--this was an act oriented around political self-preservation.

and the bush administration fucked it up---they lost. the consequence of this fuck up will play out for a long time. but they lost.

what do you think a nation is anyway? something eternal that you conflate with other types of collective identity formation? well, it isnt. do you think a nation is a thing, endowed with an essence, something outside of history? then you are fooling yourself. the modern nation-state is a product of the late 18th-19th centuries--it has a history, it served and serves a particular function, it is a social model coterminous with an older style capitalism. as the newer forms of capitalist organization take shape, the ideology will change eventually as well. ideology is a functional entity--it adapts people to the socio-economic situation in which they operate while at the same time providing them with a way of thinking they are doing something else. within that, it is the basis for arguments floated by the dominant order to legitimate itself.

so you find what i said to be arrogant and defeatist? well, pan, i dont know what to say to you--i dont think you understood what i was actually saying---maybe now it is a little clearer, though i am sure you will not like it any better.

suffice it to say that your busby berkeley model of this fiction you call the nation is like calling for a musical to take place on a sinking ship. you seem to think that if we all sing and dance together that the ship will decide not to sink. i have nothing against singing and dancing...but i really cannot fathom how you imagine that doing so is going to stop anything at the level of structural transformation. it does not even address structural questions--and it cant. and you are not interested in these questions, it seems. to which there is really nothing i can say.

as for the question of what this means for americans--and i am one, pan, like it or not--i dont know. sometimes i am more optimistic and sometimes i am less so. it is all speculation, really. what i do know is that the run the americans have had since world war 2 is coming to a kind of end--but i ahve no idea what the end will entail or how people will react to that. i hope for the best, prepare for the worst i suppose. but i do know one thing: the contemporary type of extreme right politics you see still floating about, steaming and degenerate, here and elsewhere, has nothing coherent to say about any of this and that if i am right (sometimes i hope that i am not) they will lead the states to absolute disaster in the longer run--unless this politics destroys itself--which i think it is on the way to doing. but that is another matter.

and in the end, how do you have any idea of wherther i am "an extremist" or not if you do not take the time to figure out what i am trying to say?

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite