From: dogangoecmen@aol.com
Date: Mon May 05 2008 - 04:00:23 EDT
Hi Jerry, Many thanks or the references and thoughts. I found some useful material in Marx's and Engels' papers and speeches on free trade, fraternisation of nations and so on. The starting point to think about these issues are Kant's Perpetual Peace and Metaphysics of Ethics, and Adam Smith' works and Adam Ferguson's essay on civil society.These works give a good understanding of what Hegel, Marx and Engels have to say about international relations and international political economy. I have already produced a long paper on this in Turkish and hoping to prepare also an English version soon. I found this passage from "The Festival of Nations in London" (http://www.marx.org/archive/marx/works/1845/12/01.htm) very interesting because it criticises three cocnepts at the same time which come down to us from Kant, Smith, and Saint-Simon. If one works out the background of this passage and justification that is followed in later works of Marx and Engels then it helps a lot to understand in many ways our world how it is and how and in what ways it may become: "Finally, fraternisation between nations has today, more than ever a purely social significance. The fantasies about a European Republic, perpetual peace under political organisation, have become just as ridiculous as the phrases about uniting the nations under the aegis of universal free trade, and while all such chimerical sentimentalities become completely irrelevant, the proletarians of all nations, without too much ceremony, are already really beginning to fraternise under the banner of communist democracy. And the proletarians are the only ones who are really able to do this; for the bourgeoisie in each country has its own special interests, and since these interests are the most important to it, it can never transcend nationality; and the few theoreticians achieve nothing with all their fine “principles” because they simply allow these contradictory interests — like everything else — to continue to exist and can do nothing but talk. But the proletarians in all countries have one and the same interest, one and the same enemy, and one and the same struggle. The great mass of proletarians are, by their very nature, free from national prejudices and their whole disposition and movement is essentially humanitarian, anti-nationalist. Only the proletarians can destroy nationality, only the awakening proletariat can bring about fraternisation between the different nations." By the way: on this occasion I found out that the claim that Engels developed a theory of "non-historic-nations" is nonsense. Engels nowhere uses such a term. Michael Löwy and so on who made such claims never refer to Engels. They all take it for grated that Engels used this term and put forward such a claim. Anyway this seems to be a myth. Comradely, Dogan -----Original Message----- From: Gerald Levy <jerry_levy@verizon.net> To: ope@lists.csuchico.edu Sent: Thu, 24 Apr 2008 11:18 Subject: Re: [OPE] Marx on international relations Hi Dogan: You could also read the following - and communicate with its author about its contents: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~tonys/worldmarket.html The same author has written a related paper on globalization and - according to a web site - there is a "Work in Progress" called "Towards a Marxian Theory of World Money". In solidarity, Jerry _______________________________________________ ope mailing list ope@lists.csuchico.edu https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/ope ________________________________________________________________________ AOL's new homepage has launched. Take a tour at http://info.aol.co.uk/homepage/ now. _______________________________________________ ope mailing list ope@lists.csuchico.edu https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/ope
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat May 31 2008 - 00:00:04 EDT