What is a globalist? The working definition thread

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Re: What is a globalist? The working definition thread

Postby Sounder » Fri Feb 19, 2016 7:29 am

Such dumb, lazy stuff as we often see from tapitsbo- and a few of their equals- makes me think of this:


As much as I love Umberto Eco, your use of that cut-n-paste had nothing to do with globalism.

I would also very much like it if you would stop slurring people in such a broad and general manner, thank-you.

(If you feel the need to slur, at least tie it in to a specific expression of the thing that so insulted you.)

Also, backing up your slur with conflation and false associations does nothing to advance the discussion.

I do like quite a lot of that Negri article, and wonder if you know what folk like Negri think about central banking.

(i have thought for a long time that many problems develop when value no longer has a proper relationship to production.)
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Re: What is a globalist? The working definition thread

Postby American Dream » Fri Feb 19, 2016 8:52 am

Your point is well-taken, though I do find a few usernames here highly objectionable- and a few of those seem like poorly programmed robots of bigotry. Not only are their objectionable posts often centered on elevating white, male, nativist, etc. sensibilities (which effectively make unwelcome here people who are different from them), they don't even project much of any real humanity. I lump a few together in this way. Perhaps I shouldn't, but I do.

Anyway, as to Negri, haven't studied him in depth but I know enough to know he wouldn't like finance capital- as well as Capitalism generally. He would certainly see that this it being globalized brings unique problems but would not therefore endorse the "good" factory owner over the "bad" banker.

Really, it's nothing personal though as it's rooted in deeply established social relationships. Get rid of one and another will rise to take their place.
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Re: What is a globalist? The working definition thread

Postby Sounder » Fri Feb 19, 2016 9:15 am

Your point is well-taken, though I do find a few usernames here highly objectionable- and a few of those seem like poorly programmed robots of bigotry.


AD, you include me in that group, and considering that I know on good authority that I have nothing to do with the encouraging of various forms of hatred, (which are more correctly seen as expressions of insecurity), I also imagine that others here are less deserving of your analysis than you insist on making them out to be.


I just don't buy "The Anti-Imperialism of Fools" which loves any tin pot dictator or wannabe imperial power as long as they compete for power with Uncle Sam.


That ‘tin pot dictator’ Assad has the support of all good Syrian people, because he stands between them and annihilation and the people know it.

As to Putin, he didn’t start the Ukraine thing; that was done by the imperial power because they were pissed that he put his hand in to stop the annihilation of Syria and its population. You know, the little regime change operation that produced the refugees that people want to claim to have compassion for, after the fact.




Sounder » Wed Feb 17, 2016 4:08 pm wrote:I believe in human solidarity across borders, workers' struggles and the like, by my light quite a bit more than you do. And you believe the same about yourself.

The experience may have shaped me more than I care to admit but ATM my heart goes out to the Syrian people, united in their resistance toward those trying to kill them.



I'm all for distinguishing the People from [b the State[/b] but that requires even more nuanced and critical thinking, not less.


All right then, show us your nuance. (Lots of leg really turns me on.)


In what way does any of that stop Putin from being a reactionary populist who stokes the fires of nationalism, homophobia and the like (whilst jumping in bed with ultranationalists even farther to the right) in order to help restore the reach of a crumbled empire?


Admit it AD, you hate Russians.


Just because the governments of the U.S. and Israel do horrible things, does that mean that the governments of Russia, Syria, Iran somehow don't do many horrible things also?


So then, shall we make up a list of the horrible things that the respective ‘sides’ facilitate and then use our ‘basic principles’ to weigh the relative horribleness so we may then absolve the less horrible party?
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Re: What is a globalist? The working definition thread

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Feb 19, 2016 9:19 am

American Dream » Fri Feb 19, 2016 7:52 am wrote:Your point is well-taken, though I do find a few usernames here highly objectionable



:roll:
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Re: What is a globalist? The working definition thread

Postby stefano » Fri Feb 19, 2016 9:50 am

Cool thread, thanks all. Bit of sniping probably inevitable, but better-natured than it has been in other threads. And thanks kool maudit for the OP.

kool maudit wrote:A lot of my own positioning is derived from a deep democratic stubbornness. In order for a position to be valid, for me, it needs to be advanced by a person or insitution with a popular mandate. This doesn't mean that all such positions or mandates are good, only that they are legitimate. As such, I often find myself using the term "globalist", but this position itself has a lot of baggage.

What is a globalist? For me, while there is a lot of "you know it when you see it" (you see it at Davos, at the Bilderberg meetings, etc.), that is obviously unsatisfying. Ultimately, a globalist is somebody who is involved in the medium- to long-term planning of transnational affairs without a mandate. After the 20th century's parade of big ideas, new worlds, and grand structural solutions, I have a deep suspicion of ultra-macro-scaled plans; their scope means that they are necessarily untethered from consensus and thus must be forced, to whatever degree, into being. And we have all seen what that looks like.[/b]


That's a good definition, and by that definition, you're absolutely right, democrats should oppose globalism. But it's worth dwelling on where globalism - or maybe internationalism - comes from. Nation-states, that are now so in vogue around here, caused a thousand years of basically uninterrupted war in Europe, culminating in the biggest war in history in 1914-18. That war was fully a consequence of the great nation-states - France, Germany, England (for which 'Great Britain' was then just a disguise, and to some degree still is) and Russia - competing for their interests... but, for the first time, with industrial arms. That's where the League of Nations came from. But that failed, and the 1919 peace failed to a large degree because of the nation-state logic: Clemenceau insisted on punitive reparations imposed on the Germans, and on Alsace-Lorraine, and that peace was accepted against the advice of what we'd probably now call globalists - especially Smuts and Keynes, who wanted better terms for Germany. So then, a bit later, we had an even worse war, again fought on the logic of the nation-state.

'Nation-state' probably wants defining, too, it gets used much too loosely. Not all states are nation-states, and the US definitely isn't. Nation-states - states in which the state is defined as the institutional expression of a certain nation, living in a certain place - were themselves the creations of central powers that everywhere erased local identities and imposed flags and languages, and centralised taxation systems, to increase the power of the capital at the expense of the provinces. It wasn't that long ago that little kids in France were beaten for speaking Provençal or Basque in school. I'll get back to this point in a minute.

Anyway, so during the 1939-45 war the conflict in Europe was essentially Europeans defending themselves against the explosive expansion of German control, while the Germans were inspired by the idea of their right, as a nation, to the farmland of the east and to safety from the French by occupying France. The Holocaust also followed from the German nationalism of the time, as suddenly German Jews were not-Germans, and persecuted accordingly. People under occupation in the Slavic countries were treated almost as badly, and China and Indochina under Japanese occupation looked pretty much the same. This is another thing about nation-states: they require the sacrifice of others. That is the logic of the nation-state, and the only logic that supersedes it is one of a sort of democracy of nations, in which it is acknowledged that nations have the same rights. On the ideological level that is how the Allies portrayed their war, although inevitably the interests of the participating states played the most important role.

It was after the war that the UN and the EU could be established as credible institutions for providing a kind of international democracy, and it's important to recognise that, at that point, they had a strong popular mandate. Now they don't - the UN doesn't have all that much effect (although people in weak nations tend to put more store in it than people in strong ones, which might say something positive about it), while the EU works very hard to go around any kind of democratic control. When did this change? For the UN I reckon it was pretty immediate, at the time of the Korean war; I think the EU became self-aware when it pushed through the Lisbon Treaty. So, yeah, the EU is a globalist organisation by your definition, and the way it goes about things, especially the TAFTA thing at the moment, should be opposed by democrats.

But it's interesting how the EU has created space for real nations to flourish now that there is a system overarching the competing mess of nation-states. The Basque country has never been more prosperous, Scotland's going to be independent in a few years, Corsicans aren't blowing shit up anymore, and Catalonia is becoming more of a real unit. I think this is A Good Thing.

This is getting long-winded now, but I put it to you that the move towards global institutions was A Good Thing in the same way. For starters, war between France, Germany and England is now unthinkable, and that hasn't been true for a very long time. The way the EU, IMF and World Bank have become tools of Western capital is A Bad Thing, but that's a matter of the how, not the what, and can be changed. Nation-states were artificial anyway, and the progress to some higher political unit is generally positive, and even, I'd say, inevitable - that's the direction of human evolution. The nation-states themselves were the outcome of duchies and earldoms and other lower-level units that arrived at an agreement at some point. It's what we do.
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Re: What is a globalist? The working definition thread

Postby Sounder » Fri Feb 19, 2016 10:23 am

Thanks Stefano, excellent summary.

This is getting long-winded now, but I put it to you that the move towards global institutions was A Good Thing in the same way.


As Kool Maudit said; global institutions can only be legitimate to the degree that there is a popular mandate. TPP then would not qualify.

ATM it's hard to trust global institutions when they appear more to be creations of the deep state, rather than the creation of nation-states.

Of course global institutions will and will need to develop in this global community.

The fear is that they may also serve as neo-colonial enforcement and asset stripping tools.

I am no nationalist and would like to see boundary's fade into history also, but forcing the situation will cause still more suffering.

We have enough of that already.
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Re: What is a globalist? The working definition thread

Postby American Dream » Fri Feb 19, 2016 10:28 am

Sounder » Fri Feb 19, 2016 8:15 am wrote:
Your point is well-taken, though I do find a few usernames here highly objectionable- and a few of those seem like poorly programmed robots of bigotry.


AD, you include me in that group, and considering that I know on good authority that I have nothing to do with the encouraging of various forms of hatred, (which are more correctly seen as expressions of insecurity), I also imagine that others here are less deserving of your analysis than you insist on making them out to be.


No, actually I don't include you in that group- you seem like a full-on human being to me (and I am not accusing any other particular username, either). As to racism, I'm not recalling anything other than a heated defense of that one militia who wanted to start a race war. You should stop running around with characters like jakell in my opinion, if you want to keep your own views on these matters more clear.


That ‘tin pot dictator’ Assad has the support of all good Syrian people, because he stands between them and annihilation and the people know it.

As to Putin, he didn’t start the Ukraine thing; that was done by the imperial power because they were pissed that he put his hand in to stop the annihilation of Syria and its population. You know, the little regime change operation that produced the refugees that people want to claim to have compassion for, after the fact.


While I don't specifically mean Assad as ‘tin pot dictator’ there is a pretzel logic to what you say here. "All good Syrian people support Assad, therefore those who don't must be bad and/or not really Syrian.

I also didn't say that Putin did or did not start the conflict in the Ukraine- in my view, Russian State has had imperial and expansionist designs for a long, long time. However, I am from the territory controlled by the USG, the very model of expansionism and of global hegemony. In my view, both players have been competing for a while now and "who started it" is just for the playground.

As far as Syria goes, there seems a lot of agreement between these two competing powers: Assad will stay in place for now and innocent civilians will be put through a living hell. Business as usual.


In what way does any of that stop Putin from being a reactionary populist who stokes the fires of nationalism, homophobia and the like (whilst jumping in bed with ultranationalists even farther to the right) in order to help restore the reach of a crumbled empire?


Admit it AD, you hate Russians.


Not even slightly. The People are not the State. Same holds true in Cuba where, despite the things I didn't like about the Castro regime, I've always found the People, awesome.


Just because the governments of the U.S. and Israel do horrible things, does that mean that the governments of Russia, Syria, Iran somehow don't do many horrible things also?


So then, shall we make up a list of the horrible things that the respective ‘sides’ facilitate and then use our ‘basic principles’ to weigh the relative horribleness so we may then absolve the less horrible party?


Nope- it's not a zero sum game. That's a false dichotomy.
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Re: What is a globalist? The working definition thread

Postby seemslikeadream » Fri Feb 19, 2016 10:42 am

I do find a few usernames here highly objectionable


I WANT YOU TO NAME NAMES...so Womby can just ban them all right the fuck now
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Re: What is a globalist? The working definition thread

Postby kool maudit » Fri Feb 19, 2016 10:44 am

stefano » Fri Feb 19, 2016 8:50 am wrote:But it's interesting how the EU has created space for real nations to flourish now that there is a system overarching the competing mess of nation-states. The Basque country has never been more prosperous, Scotland's going to be independent in a few years, Corsicans aren't blowing shit up anymore, and Catalonia is becoming more of a real unit. I think this is A Good Thing.

This is getting long-winded now, but I put it to you that the move towards global institutions was A Good Thing in the same way. For starters, war between France, Germany and England is now unthinkable, and that hasn't been true for a very long time. The way the EU, IMF and World Bank have become tools of Western capital is A Bad Thing, but that's a matter of the how, not the what, and can be changed. Nation-states were artificial anyway, and the progress to some higher political unit is generally positive, and even, I'd say, inevitable - that's the direction of human evolution. The nation-states themselves were the outcome of duchies and earldoms and other lower-level units that arrived at an agreement at some point. It's what we do.


I agree with you here, and find calls to mutual detachment both parochial and quixotic given this history.

(This process is very personally relevant to me today as the Brexit debate rages on...)

The problem for me is not the scale of the ultimate top-level political units, but their granularity and democracy.

I very much like being a citizen of Europe and moving about Europe in the way I do. I do not like things such as European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker saying things like...

"When it becomes serious, you have to lie." (Greek crisis, 2011)

“If it's a Yes, we will say 'on we go', and if it's a No we will say 'we continue’,” (French referendum on EU constitution)

"I'm ready to be insulted as being insufficiently democratic, but I want to be serious ... I am for secret, dark debates" (On the ECB)


...without apparent worry. This offends me. This is a step backwards from the rights that were so hard-won in the individual European nations.
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Re: What is a globalist? The working definition thread

Postby jakell » Fri Feb 19, 2016 10:44 am

seemslikeadream » Fri Feb 19, 2016 2:42 pm wrote:
I do find a few usernames here highly objectionable


I WANT YOU TO NAME NAMES


Referring to other posters as 'usernames' is pretty odd. It actually takes the dehumanisation a tad further, but is also fairly subtle.
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Re: What is a globalist? The working definition thread

Postby American Dream » Fri Feb 19, 2016 10:44 am

It doesn't include you, slad- and that's the end of the matter. Probably shouldn't have said anything but I was being honest.
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Re: What is a globalist? The working definition thread

Postby Sounder » Fri Feb 19, 2016 10:48 am

me
So then, shall we make up a list of the horrible things that the respective ‘sides’ facilitate and then use our ‘basic principles’ to weigh the relative horribleness so we may then absolve the less horrible party?



you
Nope- it's not a zero sum game. That's a false dichotomy.


I know it is, by implication I was referring to this:

In what way does any of that stop Putin from being a reactionary populist who stokes the fires of nationalism, homophobia and the like (whilst jumping in bed with ultranationalists even farther to the right) in order to help restore the reach of a crumbled empire?
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Re: What is a globalist? The working definition thread

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Fri Feb 19, 2016 11:07 am

Great riff, Stefano. I am struck by the isomorphism of "nation-states" like Iraq, France or Turkey and the external relations of globalist institutions -- the same Borg fist of uniformity stretching in different directions.

And it's true that, so long as a culture is cohesive & lucky enough to survive assimilation, their circumstances tend to quantifiably improve, especially with so much quantification going on. "After we eat you, things get better" is actually one of the current pitches vying for clients in the DC beltway these days, courtesy of Thomas PM Barnett. Decent summary here:

Barnett divides the world into ‘functioning core’, ‘non-integrating gap’ countries and ‘seam states’. The first category of ‘functioning core’ countries includes Europe and North America, Russia, China, Japan, South Korea, India, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, Brazil and Chile. These are economies which are actively integrating into the global economy. This category is subdivided into ‘old core’ Europe, the USA and Japan and ‘new core’, Brazil, Russia, China and India.

The second major category is the ‘non-integrated gap’. This is made up of the Caribbean Rim, Andean South America, Africa, parts of the Balkans, the Caucasus, Central Asia, Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The third category contains some members of the first two. This category is referred to as the ‘Seam States’, countries which surround the Gap — such as Indonesia, Thailand, Pakistan, Turkey, Greece, Algeria, Morocco, South Africa, Mexico and Brazil.

The former Pentagon general has developed the theory of the ‘Five Flows of Globalisation’ — these involve the free flow of money, security, food, energy and people.


Order is peace, order is good. And yet. Order has to be imposed before it can possibly be maintained. (As a rightfully obscure British philosopher once put it, "Power is a consensual hallucination running on a substrate of real and irreducible anarchy — that’s what fascism at its most intelligent understands, and its why fascists tend to win.")

This is reflected in Barnett's vision for a future military - divided into the "SysAdmin" function of running the empire's infrastructure and keeping the world safe for capitalism to manufacture human rights at affordable prices, and the "Leviathan" function of Killing Shit Dead when the SysAdmin runs into intractable problems, usually in the form of human beings. As with so many pundits, Barnett is essentially predicting the present, describing the divergence between Special Operations expertise and SAP networks vs. the volunteer army that picks up trash & fixes equipment on military bases around the world.

Onwards, Comrades!

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Re: What is a globalist? The working definition thread

Postby American Dream » Fri Feb 19, 2016 11:13 am

stefano » Fri Feb 19, 2016 8:50 am wrote:'Nation-state' probably wants defining, too, it gets used much too loosely. Not all states are nation-states, and the US definitely isn't. Nation-states - states in which the state is defined as the institutional expression of a certain nation, living in a certain place - were themselves the creations of central powers that everywhere erased local identities and imposed flags and languages, and centralised taxation systems, to increase the power of the capital at the expense of the provinces. It wasn't that long ago that little kids in France were beaten for speaking Provençal or Basque in school. I'll get back to this point in a minute.


It's not clear to me what you mean about the US definitely not being a nation-state. Hasn't the State there tried- and largely succeeded- to forge a trans-ethnic national identity? Certainly, I experienced lots of propaganda like that, growing up under that regime. It seems to me that the hegemonic narrative is that most should be considered "American" who have legal citizenship, with a presumption that most others who want/try to assimilate can also be "Americans".

Granted, there's lots of nuance, subtlety and paradox here- and many people legitimately complain that they are marginalized, that they aren't treated the same as others in more privileged castes and layers- but it seems to me that nationalist pretensions run deep inside the territory where the USG makes the law and assumes a monopoly on "legitimate" violence.
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Re: What is a globalist? The working definition thread

Postby Sounder » Fri Feb 19, 2016 11:24 am

You should stop running around with characters like jakell in my opinion, if you want to keep your own views on these matters more clear.


Listen fella, I don't hang with anyone, yet I find tidbits of wisdom strewn all about the place, people thinking aloud and expressing many flavors of understanding that might otherwise remain totally outside my personal wheelhouse.

For instance, jakell seems much more adept than I in not taking slander personally. And he's right, that shit is on you, not on him.

Now back to globalism.

While I don't specifically mean Assad as ‘tin pot dictator’ there is a pretzel logic to what you say here. "All good Syrian people support Assad, therefore those who don't must be bad and/or not really Syrian.


No, what I'm saying is the Syrian people have solidly rallied around Assad, because despite however 'bad' a person he may or may not be, he is the peoples best defense from annihilation. As parel posted in the Syria Surrounded thread, even the communists rally around Assad.


Now lets get back to globalism.
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