Page 23 - Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization

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Fighting Against the Injustice of the State and Globalization
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and racial/ethnonational stratification. There is substantial evidence, however, as we
will see in this work,that although the working classes tend to collaborate against their
capitalist oppressors and their collaborators,the working classes of the dominating eth-
nonational groups embrace racism, ethnocentrism, and sexism and ally with their re-
spective ethnonational elites and the state against the people whom they see as
different within and outside of their countries.
Since many socialist-oriented revolutions have emerged and have failed to solve
racial/ethnonational problems, it is necessary that the assumptions about proletariat
internationalism be rejected or reformulated.As McKelvey expounds,“The claim of a
revolutionary class that its goals promote the communal interest has some validity at
first, for the revolutionary class does promote the communal interest in the sense that
it promotes a further development of the productive forces. However, once the par-
ticular interests of the revolutionary class as a dominant class have taken stage, the
dominating class begins to promote its particular interests at the expense of the par-
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ticular interests of the non-ruling classes” and groups. Modernization theorists also
believed that the subjugated ethnonational groups would disappear with the transition
of “backward”peoples to “modernity”and from “barbarism”to “civilization.”They ar-
gued that modernization would eliminate social problems by providing opportunities
for all groups. John Markakis exposes the weakness of this school by contending that
modernization “assumes that development generally has a positive effect upon all pop-
ulation groups and social classes.This assumption is called into question by the con-
cept of uneven development. . . . From this perspective, development is seen as a
discontinuous and uneven process which differentiates between regions and economic
sectors, depriving some for the benefit of others, and also discriminates among popu-
lation groups and social classes, conferring power and privilege on some at the ex-
pense of others.” 92
Assimilationist theorists assumed that racial/ethnonational identities are premodern
phenomena that would disappear with industrialization. Hugh Tinker argues, “The
liberal is an heir to the Darwinian philosophy; he believes that a process of evolution
is at work, whereby lower forms give way to higher forms. He does not deal in hun-
dreds of thousands of years, but in decades:Yet he still does insist on a time-scale for
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change:‘it will work, given time . . . given time’ is his favourite advice.” There have
been Marxists who endorsed the Darwinian philosophy of evolving from “lower
forms to higher forms.” Modernization theorists still believe that social positions are
mainly determined by meritocracy, such as education, learned skills, and personal
qualities; they fail to address the major contradictions between the colonizing and col-
onized structures that are located in political economy and cultural arenas. Exposing
the fallacy of modernization theory in the United States, Benjamin Schwartz com-
ments that “the history we hold up as a light to nations is a sanctimonious tissue of
myth and self-infatuation.We get the world wrong because we get ourselves wrong.
Taken without illusion, our history gives us no right to preach—but it should prepare
us to understand the brutal realities of nation-building, at home and abroad.” 94
Global experience demonstrates that cultural assimilation has very limited success;
wherever these processes have occurred, as in the United States, many vexing prob-
lems of racism and discrimination remain unsolved.The failure to solve the national
question (or the problem of racial/ethnonational hierarchy) already has led to the dis-
integration of the USSR,Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia.The ethnonational struggles
in Canada, the United States, Great Britain, France, and Spain demonstrate that the