Against patriotism and nationalism.

[The Comrade]

[The Dharma Bum]

The specific term I used was global governance. But whatever.

It doesn't make much sense to say the system of nation states should be retained if you are going to reject globalization. It's the same structure of organization and has the same goals. Globalization is just an agreement between nations to regulate commercial relations.

[The Comrade]

[Zeugma]

[broken robot]

Ok, so just skimming over some of these posts, I'll address two main arguments:

1) nationalism as an anthropological universal should be opposed because it depends on a distinction between the self and the other while subordinating domestic populations under a latent authoritarian state.
2) we should distinguish historically between imperialist and anti-imperialist nationalisms, because the latter serves the goal of creating international socialism.

Partha Chatterjee has discussed both these issues at length in his book Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World. Basically he accepts the political conclusions of the first argument, in particular emphasizing the suppression of subaltern groups, while rejecting the theoretical notion that nationalism is an anthropological given equivalent to religion and kinship (what he refers to as Benedict Anderson's thesis). He argues instead that nationalism in the colonial world is the outcome of accepting as an epistemological premise an Enlightenment-based Eurocentric framing of the world as composed of nations. Anticolonial nationalism uses the same vision to struggle against European empires by arguing for national sovereignty and implicit participation in an unequal world order. He argues that anticolonial nationalism is elaborated through a successive series of ideological stages that are connected to the actual movement building and articulation of class blocs in the various nationalist struggles against imperialism. These outcomes are necessarily constrained by the dynamics of capital accumulation on a global scale and which thus produce the effective "backwardness" of current postcolonial countries. In particular in India Chatterjee argues that the colonial bourgeoisie was weak and incapable of independently leading a democratic struggle to transform the state, and instead depended on compromising alliances with land-owning classes.

Chatterjee is basically the first level for addressing these kinds of debates, so with that out of the way I'd say we have to look at where we are now in the global game of sovereignty. Theoretically speaking there are levels of sovereignty (subnational, national, supranational) and these articulate in various ways; for example International Monetary Fund-sponsored programs and urban planning that are mediated by an attenuated framework of nation-state sovereignty in the current neoliberal setup.

I don't think the question is "should we support or oppose the nation-state?" but to ask "what is the nation-state right now? does it have the same functions within the global capitalist system?" The previous utopian understanding of achieving international socialism through anticolonial sovereignty is outdated. We would probably have to come up with some new frameworks for other sorts of autonomy-creating proposals and then gauge the political impact of these proposals given the balance of class forces within a given "nation-state." Proposals could be based on regions, or even linking provinces across nation-states within frameworks for political autonomy in areas such as Kurdistan, and then asking about what implication these specific movements have for a global anti-capitalist politics.

Not all struggles for subnational autonomy or national independence are going to be uniformly progressive, as always it depends on the historical conjuncture and balance of forces, the moment of ideological elaboration within the nation-state itself AND, to add to Chatterjee, the moment of ideological elaboration within global political movements. Right now goal should be to craft an alternative global (let's call it "anti-neoliberal") imaginary, which given the collapse of the last grand narrative opposing liberalism (communism) we are completely lacking. This goal is linked to problematizing boundaries and asking about the ways in which they are implicated with global political movement and ideology yet to be created. No point accepting the modernist framework of bounded nation-states, which is precisely what the programmatic goals of anticolonial sovereignty (and its socialist variant) depended upon.

[The Dharma Bum]

[broken robot]

Yeah, I don't think state socialism is the way forward either, you should look into David Scott's work as well if you're interested in the end of the "Bandung project" of Third World socialism and the possibility of an alternative political theory (I disagree with his particular emphasis on an "agonistic framework" for communitarian forms of life as a way forward, but I appreciate the overall conceptual move he makes in getting us to re-evaluate our political goals). His main article is called "Aftermaths of Sovereignty."

[WizardfromOz]

[pricklysponge]

broken robot:

I agree with you about the contigency of nationalism as a vehicle for revolutionary struggle - it seems like you were advancing the point in opposition to my arguments in this thread but I don't see it as an actual point of contention. If anything i'd expand the observation as not only applying to nationalism, but as applying to any body of social doctrine altogether, be it articulated in a systematized body of theory, or more likely through the subconscious habits of a population, or whatever else. Historical development produces the context in which any anti imperialist organization operates; the success of the organization in its struggle is contingent upon its ability to concretely analyze the concrete situation in which it finds itself and to produce a revolutionary practice which coheres to that concrete analysis. One revolutionary org may find itself in a context where a strong current of nationalist sentiment can be easily channeled into the struggle while another revolutionary org may find itself in a context where nobody has the slightest idea of what nationality even means.

As I pointed out earlier - in one of my responses to dak, i believe - anti-imperialist struggle is an economic process whereby the economic resources of some peripheral locality are transferred from the control of foreign capital to the control of a local administrative body of some sort. The political program which facilitates that transfer can fly any number of flags.

My original problem was with the type of categorical rejection of nationalism characteristic of neoliberalism and anarchism. If I gave the impression that I was arguing that nationalism was the ideology of anti imperialism it was because Dharma was offering a completely ahistorical critique and I wanted to emphasize that nationalism can play an historically progressive role. Indeed, nationalism has played a central role in the struggle against Western imperialism; and it is telling to note that the imperialist system and Dharma's breed of categorical anti-nationalism both originate from the same place.

[The Dharma Bum]