G'day Hugh - nice to hear from you again,
>Rob provides a lot of food for thought on the internal manoeuverings of the
>various factions of the bourgeoisie (national and international) in
>Indonesia/East Timor, but nothing regarding the problems of organizing,
>mobilizing and leading the working and peasant masses to a real independent
>class solution -- ie one that's revolutionary and socialist.
If I ever had any ideas, I've run out of 'em.
> ... to a real Marxist analysis of the need for Bonapartist solutions to
save the skin of
>the bourgeoisie.
Yeah, I was kinda trying to say just this - but it's a particular
bourgeoisie, in a particular superstructural setting that has long combined
the modern and the pre-modern. And I wouldn't be surprised if the Bonaparte
in question is to the taste of some. Anyway, just how much this particular
case tells us about the senility of our order is moot. This could as easily
be seen a 'rolling adjustment' towards a globalised and standardised
technocratic management of the political on behalf of the economic. You can
call that fascism if you like, but it's the road we're all on, and, as Wall
St wants us on that road, it's hard to imagine the US kicking up much of a
fuss about this relatively unremarkable genocide (they've already butchered
more people in a week than the demonised Milosovic did in the whole of 1998
- but, hell, there's 214 million of 'em, eh?).
But, certainly our international regulatory mechanisms are well past their
hegemonic prime. Our institutions aren't up to the new ways of the world.
They constantly exacerbate where they purportedly ameliorate and they more
obviously localise benefits and globalise costs than ever before. I know
you don't like the regulationist template, Hugh, but there's a case to be
made for the proposition that the only mode of regulation left to the
salient regime of accumulation is ideology and yank shoot'n' irons - the
ideology had better be wholly internally coherent, because there's fucking
nothing in the sensuous world to support an iota of it any more. And one
wonders whether even the Yanks' arsenal is up to handling this remorseless
pattern of mounting global belligerent fragmentation.
>It's pretty obvious in Indonesia that the local conditions require a
>Bonapartist solution (= "fascist military dictatorship") for the national
>bourgeoisie, and that the imperialists want more control than this would
>admit.
I actually think the 'Magalang generation' which now runs the military is
pretty well just what the doctor ordered as far as TNC capital is concerned.
Their nationalism is deep (but no deeper than that of the Yanks), but it's
technocratic and its economics is not as Keynesian as that of their dads -
it was, after all, the west that trained 'em. Habibie has actually
exhibited worrying ambitions of economic independence and central planning
in the past, and I reckon an explicitly junta-run Indonesian economy would
be very, er, outward-looking. Of course, that won't stop the whole country
splitting open like an old bean bag ...
>So the first thing for us to do is not to get dizzy staring at the
>oscillations of the bourgeoisie, as Rob does (however clearly he may see
>and present these) but to stand on our own ground and see this instability
>and this turbulence as symptoms of the decay of bourgeois property
>relations in the political sphere both nationally and internationally. I.e.
>to realize that we're in the epoch of the (long-drawn-out) death agony of
>capitalism, and this is the kind of thing we'll get all the time (wars,
>revolutions and -- under the right political conditions -- the transition
>to socialism) until the whole question of the property relations is brought
>into synch with the needs of the forces of production on a world scale.
>Simple.
Simple and, perhaps for that reason, oft-said. Nationalism, ethnocentrism,
theocracy and plutocracy etc are the salient manifestations at the moment
though - not exactly the building blocks of internationalist solidarity,
I'da thought ...
>This means joining one of the currents aspiriing
>to be such a party and working to forge unity among such currents generally
>(as we're doing in the LIT with initiatives like the KOORKOM) and working
>to build an independent revolutionary working-class force in each country
>where you have sections.
Keep us posted.
>Otherwise you'll spend for ever rocking on your porch sipping a cold one
>and reeling at the bourgeois vomit spewed over you by the media, till the
>final day when they come themselves in their material jackboots and take
>you to the camp...
At this rate, it might be boot camp yet! Imagine ... a nice pair of jack
boots of my own ...
Yours absolutely uselessly clueless in the face of seemingly irresistable
obscenity,
Rob.
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