Jerry wrote:
"rather they supported bourgeois democratic
change and at the same time recognized the limits of that change and called
for those limits to be surpassed. That is not 100% support; it is critical
support."
What a stubborn man. If you agreed with me that we want MORE THAN bourgeois
democratic rights, you should simply have said so or stayed quiet. But you
picked an unnecessary fight and ended up making silly statements about "100%
exploitation".
"Whereas your view on this issue coincides - to a great extent - with the
geopolitical interests of the leading imperialist nations including the US,
the UK, and France."
Those nations have absolutely no interest in defining themselves and their
other rivals as imperialist.
"If your thesis is true
then all of these nations [Chad, Martinique, Honduras, Madagascar, Belize,
Saint Lucia, Kiribati, and Angola] are imperialist ... you have to attempt
to explain how even just
about all of the smallest, least economically developed, least powerful,
and poor nations of the world are imperialist."
Simple. Imperialism is a stage in the history of capitalism, characterized
by strong monopolistic tendencies, economic competition of nation-states in
the context of a world market, etc - as per the classical Marxist theory.
Therefore, all nation-states that participate in this stage of capitalist
history are imperialist. Of course, no two nation-states are exactly equal
in strength; there is a pecking order that changes over time. The states at
the bottom of the pile will be very weak compared with those at the top; but
no nation-state is so weak that is unable to compete with others to some
extent. And no national economy, however small, is free of the monopolistic
tendencies that are characteristic of imperialism. The weakest imperialist
nation-state is still imperialist, just like a chihuahua is still a dog.
That's my explanation in a nutshell, what about yours? You seem to be saying
that a nation-state needs a certain level of development to qualify as
imperialist. Well, what is that level? How do you define and measure it? You
mention Belize, but according to the UN 2010 development indicators Belize
is a 'high human development' country. By your own logic, then, it's
imperialist.
Or are you using a different set of indicators? If so, why won't you tell us
what they are? I think I know the answers to these questions. You haven't
bothered to look at how developed Chad, Martinique, Belize, Honduras, etc
actually are. You couldn't care less. How do I know? Because, if you had
tried to study the data about Martinique, you would have discovered that
Martinique is a region of France. Asking whether Martinique is imperialist
is as absurd as asking whether Texas or Barcelona are imperialist.
Paula
_______________________________________________
ope mailing list
ope@lists.csuchico.edu
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/ope
Received on Tue Mar 22 20:34:45 2011
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Thu Mar 31 2011 - 00:00:02 EDT