>>14 I promise I don't mean this as a dig at you: Since you are backing drug cartels and theocrats, do you also view the present right wing nationalist movements in the US and europe as potential revolutionary subjects? If reactionary is just a meaningless buzzword, and what you want is real movements that are actively disrupting the nation state, well clearly everything from the level of far right militias to trump's disruption of global trade are doing that, knowingly or not. They also, unlike marxist movements, have broad support from "ordinary people".
Do the modern billionaires not also conform to your ideal of a "roving and mobile population"? They are international, sailing between countries and tax havens, mingling with each other as "global citizens", with money in a million distributed off shore. What about remote workers, so called digital nomads, are they also revolutionary subjects, or does their economic position preclude them?
Although I've been arguing mostly from a marxist perspective I'm pretty far from agreeing with the marxist orthodoxy (i guess i'm begrugingly something like a post-marxist). As I understand it, you're saying that going back into history from the earliest state formations, the nomadic populations have always been in revolt against the state, and that although nomads have been suppressed in modern times, the modern state system is somehow producing a new mass of nomads who are increasingly left behind by the sedentary state. I'd be curious to know more about how you see the mechanism by which this is happening. Which theorists are you pulling from with this language about movement and speed, it sounds interesting. I'd also like to challenge something, is it possible that you are reproducing capitalist logic with an insistence on speed and efficiency and short time preference in your focus on out-speeding the state? I see a focal point of resistance in people who slow down. Lazy workers who slow the production line, the slowness of the internet outside of corpo control, the slowness of communication and travel outside of ecologically destructive technology and infrastructure. Maybe you're more just arguing for different usages of time rather than one particular tempo over another, I'm not sure if i'm reading you correctly here.
I promise I don't mean this as a dig at you:
Since you are backing drug cartels and theocrats, do you also view the present right wing nationalist movements in the US and europe as potential revolutionary subjects? If reactionary is just a meaningless buzzword, and what you want is real movements that are actively disrupting the nation state, well clearly everything from the level of far right militias to trump's disruption of global trade are doing that, knowingly or not. They also, unlike marxist movements, have broad support from "ordinary people".
Do the modern billionaires not also conform to your ideal of a "roving and mobile population"? They are international, sailing between countries and tax havens, mingling with each other as "global citizens", with money in a million distributed off shore. What about remote workers, so called digital nomads, are they also revolutionary subjects, or does their economic position preclude them?
Although I've been arguing mostly from a marxist perspective I'm pretty far from agreeing with the marxist orthodoxy (i guess i'm begrugingly something like a post-marxist). As I understand it, you're saying that going back into history from the earliest state formations, the nomadic populations have always been in revolt against the state, and that although nomads have been suppressed in modern times, the modern state system is somehow producing a new mass of nomads who are increasingly left behind by the sedentary state. I'd be curious to know more about how you see the mechanism by which this is happening. Which theorists are you pulling from with this language about movement and speed, it sounds interesting. I'd also like to challenge something, is it possible that you are reproducing capitalist logic with an insistence on speed and efficiency and short time preference in your focus on out-speeding the state? I see a focal point of resistance in people who slow down. Lazy workers who slow the production line, the slowness of the internet outside of corpo control, the slowness of communication and travel outside of ecologically destructive technology and infrastructure. Maybe you're more just arguing for different usages of time rather than one particular tempo over another, I'm not sure if i'm reading you correctly here.