|
so it appears that here there is no analytic dimension, no questions about the categories that would underpin such analyses of a nation-state economic formation in a globalizing capitalist context--which variables continue to be meanignful, which do not, etc....instead, there is only a recycling of ideological memes, particularly from the economic conservatives above...
i tried to raise these questions above, but typically they got no response..i actually am interested in how folk are trying to square these factors (globalizing capitalism vs. nation-state modes of assessing economic activity and the relation between the two)---and i do not think the links obvious.
the reason i see the non-responses typical is that there is, to my knowledge, no american political organization that is seriously addressing these matters--mass politics still tried to function within a national framework as if it was coherent---folk seem to only demand what they know to be available--they choose from amongst existing modes of thinking/staging questions and rarely are inclined to try to work their way outside of them--demand follows supply for the most part, particularly in politics.
but consider the following factoids:
1. stock has traded internationally since 1970. that means that corporate ownership has long since been transnational.
2. capital flows are transnational.
3. vertically integration production systems routinely operate without particular regard for nation-state boundaries.
4. the collapse of the southeast asian "paper tigers" across the 1990s showed pretty clearly that there is no coherent integration of transnationally organized production and the local economies they enter/transform/exploit.
so to sum up these 4 factoids (many more could be added):
the ownership of publically traded corporations: not nationally based
the circulation of capital: not nationally based
the organization of production: not nationally based
the relation of globalizing capitalist production to the national economies they impact upon: arbitrary.
yet it still makes sense to talk about economic activity as if the nation-state was a basic organizing unit? how?
the political consequences of these transformations in the organization of economic activity are not yet obvious--they are being worked out--and it is impossible (for me at least) not to see in the various types of responses anything more than ideological conflict aimed at managing without addressing these consequences. so for the right, you have a wholesale flight from thinking in social terms. from the critique of taxation through the attacks on state regulation to the focus on petit bourgeois entrepreneur-types--everything about conservative economic ideology is little more than an attempt on the part of the political class to cut their collective losses by dismantling the interaction of the state (the political) with social spaces that are going to be or already are being fundamentally undermined by the changes happening in economic organization. these include education (reproduction of the labor pool) to social control (the exercize of the state's monopoly on "legitimate violence") to an ideological campaign directed against any and all forms of active public protest (the "war on terror" operating here as one of a series of wedge issues the effect of which is an expansion of the notion of dangerous political action) to the core assumptions of conservative ideology itself (that there is a nation, that the category makes sense, that the operative units within a nation are isolated individuals, that the distribution of wealth is a moral rather than a political matter, that poverty (the effects of an uneven distribution of wealth) can be understood by blaming the poor----since the clinton period, the democrats have offered nothing in the way of viable alternatives--their position accepts the basic premises of conservative economic ideology and offers a sequence of tactical quibbles instead of an alternative vision. someone once wrote that faced with the choice between republicans and republicans, the republicans win--such is the clinton legacy. typically, the right has responded to this by moving even further to the right so as to be able to differentiate itself...the results are incoherence. this incoherence is simply being repeated through this thread.
maybe this incoherence explains the attractiveness of fundamentalist protestant discourse as a political model--you find the categories that organize your politics have become obsolete? then talk alot about god and act as though all those categories are linked, in the final analysis, to god. that way nothing meaingful changes, everything continues as before, and no-one has to think too much about the world into which we are all drifting, whether we like it or not, whether we face it or not.
we could ask basic questions, but we dont.
why is that?
__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
|