Page 22 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

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Introduction
tural and economic development and access to state power have developed in response
a collective national consciousness to challenge the position of the colonizing struc-
81
and to restore some elements of their lost cultural, political, and economic
tures
rights.According to Amilcar Cabral,“The return to the source is of no historical sig-
nificance unless it brings not only real involvement in the struggle for independence
but also complete and absolute identification with the hopes of the masses of people,
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who contest not only the foreign culture but also foreign domination as a whole.”
The return to the source involves ethnoclass consciousness and political activism
necessary to envision the overthrow of oppressive cultural and economic conditions
and of decadent ideological systems. Bereciartu explains how “the national formation
of underdeveloped areas” is created within a nation-state, and how “under the pretext
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of a shared country, there exist in reality persons genuinely without a country.” Na-
tional or ethnonational movements have gained legitimacy because they base their
struggles on the grievances of “a collective memory” to regain their economic, polit-
84
ical,and cultural rights by rejecting subordination. The movements of the dominated
social groups “establish the possibilities for imaginative insights by providing a new
vantage point for analysis of existing social conditions and for imagining new human
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potentials.” The colonized peoples struggle against states that have suppressed cul-
tural diversity and at the same time denied structural assimilation in the names of
common citizenship and cultural universalism.“National liberation movements chal-
lenge,” Charles McKelvey contends,“in the realm of politics as well as in the realm of
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ideas, European domination” and other forms of colonialism.
Oppressed nationalism emerged in the industrialized and less industrialized parts of
the world among subjugated peoples who within countries or empires did not have
equal access or were totally denied access to state power, cultural or economic re-
sources.It emerged as a formidable ideological and cultural force against the racial/eth-
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nonational stratification of the modern world system. According to L.Adele Jinadu,
“The social, political and economic inequalities between ethnic groups, created con-
sciously by state policies, provide part of the explanation for the rise and appeal of
ethno-regional movements in contexts as diverse as Western Europe, North America,
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Asia and Africa.” The social sciences have faltered to explain systematically the strug-
gles of the subjugated peoples. Classical Marxism wrongly predicted the dissolution of
ethnocultural diversity and nationalism and their replacement by the collective con-
sciousness of class. Likewise, modernization theory wrongly assumed that socioeco-
nomic development would make ethnocultural diversity and nationalism obsolete. 89
Classical Marxists assumed that capitalism would universalize culture, politics, and
language, and divide the world into capitalist and working classes.These theorists also
assumed that the course of capitalist development would naturally or automatically
produce revolutionary social forces that would dismantle class and ethnonational hi-
erarchies and establish egalitarianism, social justice, socialist economy, and democracy.
Classical Marxists in effect accepted modernization theory’s premise that assimilation
and cultural universalism were inevitable. It is now evident that interests of working
classes of different ethnonations do not necessarily coincide due to various factors,
such as the scarcity of economic resources, uneven development, and
racialization/ethnicization of a labor force. 90 But some radical scholars, including
some Marxists, still assume that there is not any fundamental contradiction between
the working class of the dominant and dominated racial/ethnonation groups. They
believe, therefore, that socialist or social revolutions can eliminate the problems of class