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i have come to almost enjoy those moments when someone to the right of me tries to cast me out of places--the "mainstream" the country, etc.. these moments make me laugh. i dont take them as personally as host does. there are just funny. arguments like seaver's above seem to me little more than variants on the old adage:
eat shit--a hundred million flies cant be wrong.
and to have about as much power.
which is why the arguments are funny, you see.
anyway---
on the general level, i find it strange that folk from the right are concerned about this fiction of national sovereignty when it comes to transnational labor flows (legal or not, it hardly matters) but were not so concerned about it during the phase of the reorganization of production processes in ways that effectively erased most national boundaries.
it seems that the logic, such as it is, behind this is that what firms do is a priori ok, not a problem, no questions to be asked.
maybe that's because the outcomes feed consumers sense of entitlement--for example, in a supermakret produce aisle, you encounter produce from a wide range of countries presented to you in a series as if all was interchangeable---you should be able to constantly get all produce and the effective erasing the reality of seasons is simply a consequence of the imperious desires of consumers---who could imagine themselves to benefit from a highly ordered global system as they select which gas-ripened flavor free bit of produce, were the produce aisle not such an engrossing place---and if abstractions like national soveignty were being progressively erased through the modes of economic activity that enable the range of produce you want to be continually available, then so be it. convenience uber alles.
besides, the production and distribution systems behind that converge on the abstract completeness of a superarket produce aisle vanish behind the unity of the presentation of consumer goods.....and so constitute no problems.
but workers are, apparently, different from that.
the equation of legality of labor flows and national sovereignty seems to me a joke.
maybe these flows are mostly a psychological problem for conservatives insofar as they indicate the complexity of such flows and present them with the obvious fact that the american economy is not self-contained, that it is not even necessarily dominant when you look at the details. or maybe the problem is that labor flows are more difficult to erase behind the unity of outputs.
as for the op and the extension of it into the manufacturing of protests. movements, etc: this is by now an old tactic. tobacco corporations did it. the christian coalition pioneered it. pr firms rationalized it. anyone can buy it.
a such, the only clear motivation that i can see behind the fact of this kind of social-action model is the undercutting of the meaning of public protest.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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