Page 104 - Culture Society and Economy

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CAPITALISM ORGANIZED AND DISORGANIZED

social movements arising in the developed countries and forming alliances
with similar movements in the developed world, although that is precisely
the tendency in the global justice movement This weakness is made even
worse by an uncritical borrowing of extremely dubious characterization of
areas inhabited by impoverished (black) people in the US ‘wild zones’.
This term simply shows how far most European scholars are from an
understanding of the continuing strength of progressive movements among
African Americans – indeed, of American politics as a whole – as well as
in the developing world.
Yet it has become exceedingly obvious to most people – including
people in the developed countries – that the present global order has
been established by global monopoly and finance capital to meet their
interests and no one else’s. If this is the case, it would seem obvious that
the only viable answer is an equal – indeed stronger – transnational orga-
nization across the boundaries of the nation–state of the forces which are
opposed to the dominance of monopoly capital – including working-class,
Green, gender and national and social movements in the Third World. In
so far as one remains wholly within the boundaries of the nation–state
therefore, it would seem that the chances of reconstituting a progressive
politics are practically non-existent.
This would not mean that such a transnational politics would abandon
or ignore nation–state boundaries for this would be both premature and
suicidal. Corporate capitalism, while it fosters internationalism, is a global
force which is still firmly rooted in the inter-relations between powerful
nation–states which protect the interests of its corporate capital against
the interests of others. What is more, the historic task of national libera-
tion and national economic development is a very long way indeed from
being exhausted for the billions of peoples in the developing nations.
Because of the collapse of the Non-Aligned Movement, the depth of
their debt crises, the feebleness of their economies and the postcolonial
demoralization and decay from which their populations and nationalist
political movements suffer, the usually Eurocentric analyses of globaliza-
tion simply take it for granted that no significant global political actors
are to be looked for from this Third World quarter. By one cliché or the
other – ‘failed states’, ‘wild zones’ and ‘black holes’ – they are easily dis-
posed of. But the idea that the historic aspirations of billions of human
beings have somehow ceased to exist and are no longer a significant
national and global political force is a wrong-headed and extremely
dangerous one.
This geopolitical reality in which national power is intertwined with
and in contradiction to international power, particularly evident today, is

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