Globalization and political strategy

New Left Review

Volumn , Issue 4, 2000, Pages 49-68

  Jameson, Fredric ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0002941293     PISSN: 00286060     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (18)

1. See, for a sampling of views, Masao Myoshi and Fredric Jameson, eds, The Cultures of Globalization, Durham 1998.
2. The allusion is to Samir Amin's useful term, la déconnexion; see Delinking, London 1985.
3. Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations, New York 1998.
4. I have made an approach to such an analysis in The Cultural Turn, London 1999; and see also chapter 8 of Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London 1991.
5. I have made an approach to such an analysis in The Cultural Turn, London 1999; and see also chapter 8 of Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London 1991.
6. I have taken the unpopular position that the 'collapse' of the Soviet Union was due, not to the failure of socialism, but to the abandonment of delinking by the Socialist bloc. See 'Actually Existing Marxism' in C. Casarino, Rebecca Karl, Xudong Zhang, and S. Makdisi, eds, Marxism Beyond Marxism?, Polygraph 6/7 1993. This intuition is authoritatively confirmed by Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, London 1994.
7. I have taken the unpopular position that the 'collapse' of the Soviet Union was due, not to the failure of socialism, but to the abandonment of delinking by the Socialist bloc. See 'Actually Existing Marxism' in C. Casarino, Rebecca Karl, Xudong Zhang, and S. Makdisi, eds, Marxism Beyond Marxism?, Polygraph 6/7 1993. This intuition is authoritatively confirmed by Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes, London 1994.
8. See Leslie Sklair, Sociology of the Global System, Baltimore 1991.
9. John Gray, False Dawn, New York 1998. It should be noted that his official target is not globalization as such, which he regards as technological and inevitable, but rather what he calls the 'Utopia of the global free market'. Gray is an admittedly anti-Enlightenment thinker for whom all utopias (communism as well as neo-liberalism) are evil and destructive; what some 'good' globalization would look like, however, he does not say.
10. See, on this and the general lessons of the Thatcherite strategy, Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left, London 1988.
11. See Kirkpatrick Sale, Rebels against the Future, Reading, MA 1995.
12. It is no accident that when one tries to imagine delinking in this way it is always the technology of the media that is at stake, reinforcing the very old view that the word 'media' designates not only communication but transportation as well.
13. The words 'nationalism' and 'nationalist' have always been ambiguous, misleading, perhaps even dangerous. The positive or 'good' nationalism I have in mind involves what Henri Lefebvre liked to call 'the great collective project', and takes the form of the attempt to construct a nation. Nationalisms that have come to power have therefore mainly been the 'bad' ones. Perhaps Samir Amin's distinction between the state and the nation, between the seizure of state power and the construction of the nation, is the relevant one here (Delinking, p. 10). State power is thus the 'bad' aim of 'national bourgeois hegemony', while the construction of the nation must finally mobilize the people in just such a 'great collective project'. Meanwhile, I believe it is misleading to confound nationalism with phenomena like communalism, which strikes me rather as a kind of (for example) Hindu identity politics, albeit on a vast and, indeed, 'national' scale.
14. Partha Chatterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World, London 1986.
15. Cuba and China might be the richest counter-examples of the way in which a concrete nationalism could be completed by a socialist project.
16. This is not exactly his take on it, but see anyway Régis Debray's wonderfully provocative and sympathetic A Demain de Gaulle, Paris 1990.
17. Eric Wolf's classic Peasant Wars of the Twentieth Century, London 1971, is still instructive in this regard.
18. Anyone who evokes the ultimate value of the community or the collectivity from a left perspective must face three problems: 1) how to distinguish this position radically from communitarianism; 2) how to differentiate the collective project from fascism or nazism; 3) how to relate the social and the economic level - that is, how to use the Marxist analysis of capitalism to demonstrate the unviability of social solutions within that system. As for collective identities, in a historical moment in which individual personal identity has been unmasked as a decentered locus of multiple subject positions, surely it is not too much to ask that something analogous be conceptualized on the collective level.