Page 14 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

Introduction
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ing to humanize and democratize the world by establishing a single standard for hu-
manity. Through examining the dynamic interplay of social structures and human
agencies that facilitated the development of these two movements in the global and
comparative contexts, this work employs interdisciplinary, multidimensional, histori-
cal, and comparative methods, and critical approaches. As Theda Skocpol has noted:
“Findings about social revolutions need to be theoretically integrated with findings in
closely related kinds of studies. Further scholarship, both causal and interpretive, must
be done to clarify the place of ideas, culture and ideologies in the origins and course
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of social revolutions.”
Using comparative causal analysis, this book explains the movements of these two
peoples as cultural, social, and political projects that have aimed at transforming the op-
pressive and exploitative relationships between the colonizing structures of the United
States and Ethiopia and the colonized African American and Oromo societies respec-
tively. Exploring how such an approach is useful in this kind of study, Skocpol asserts,
“convincing narratives of historical processes—at least narratives of those continuities
and changes that are relevant to macroscopic social science—cannot be devised at all
without the use of systematic comparative analyses to sort out causal hypotheses and
discover new causal analogies.Without tough-minded, analytical comparisons—neces-
sarily cutting through the webs of history for the duration of a given investigation—
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we can never get straight which structures matter, or which processes count.” The
comparative problem of this book also requires critical social history that looks at so-
cietal issues from the bottom up, specifically critical discourse and the particular world
system approach that deal with long-term and world-scale social changes.
Nationalism and the Nation-State:
Born in the Era of Global Capitalism
Nationalism in this era is best understood by exploring its dialectical connection with
the nation-state and global capitalism. Global capitalism brought large-scale and long-
term structural changes beginning in the sixteenth century. Mercantilism successfully
developed into capitalism in Western Europe through the expropriation of the Euro-
pean actual producers and the resources of the indigenous Americas, international
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trade, and enslavement of some Africans. The development of capitalism, the accu-
mulation and concentration of capital or economic resources through the separation
of the actual producers from their means of production, led to racialization/ethni-
cization and socialization of labor. Exploring the nature of European feudal society
and how it was dissolved through the process of original accumulation of capital, Karl
Marx observed,“The expropriation of the agricultural producer, of the peasant, from
the soil, is the basis of the whole process. The history of expropriation, in different
countries,assumes different aspects,and runs through its various phases in different or-
ders of succession, and different periods.” 15
Colonial expansion played a significant role in the processes of capital accumula-
tion and its concentration and the emergence of the Industrial Revolution. 16 Marx
contened that further socialization of labor through expropriation of the means of
production and colonialism resulted in “the entanglement of all peoples in the net of
the world-market, and with this, the international character of the capitalist regime.” 17
These factors involved war, genocide or ethnocide, cultural destruction, the intensifi-
cation of social stratification, and racial slavery, justified by the ideologies of racism,