methlabretriever posted:

i think that's their goal, right? The West however seems to have begun to change their stance wrt to ISIS and has begun to damage/destroy their oil infrastructure. I dunno how much that makes a difference considering The West needs ISIS to prop-up the Global Bourgeoisie's rate of profit. so i guess ISIS will probably be around for sometime

there is no transnational capitalist class

A University of Illinois at Chicago student threatened online to shoot 16 individuals at the University of Chicago — one for each time Laquan McDonald was shot — which resulted in U. of C. classes being cancelled Monday.

But when investigators searched the off-campus residence of the UIC student, no gun was found,

Urbandale posted:

re: TNCC the biggest counterexamples i can think of are the quite significant divisions between imperialist states regarding the iraq war and ukrainian civil war. imperialist rivalries between france, germany, and the us/uk seem pretty obvious to me

Not the mention the sui generis case of Japan.

Urbandale posted:

re: TNCC the biggest counterexamples i can think of are the quite significant divisions between imperialist states regarding the iraq war and ukrainian civil war. imperialist rivalries between france, germany, and the us/uk seem pretty obvious to me

hrmmm. you're right. rich people do disagree sometimes

Urbandale posted:

methlabretriever posted:

Urbandale posted:

re: TNCC the biggest counterexamples i can think of are the quite significant divisions between imperialist states regarding the iraq war and ukrainian civil war. imperialist rivalries between france, germany, and the us/uk seem pretty obvious to me

of course there's divisions. i don't think it's fully singular at this time, however as the contradictions deepen, the trend is clearly in that direction. i think the global bourgeoisie would eventually have to unite against the global proletariat lest they their class position.

that sure is an unfalsifiable argument youre touting there. what are characteristics of this group and how do they oppose both national and comprador bourgeois?

which group?

methlabretriever posted:

i think that's their goal, right? The West however seems to have begun to change their stance wrt to ISIS and has begun to damage/destroy their oil infrastructure.

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2015/11/guess-why-the-us-isnt-seriously-bombing-the-islamic-states-oil-business.html

Guess Why The U.S. Is Not (Seriously) Bombing ISIS's Oil Business

The U.S. did not start bombing the Islamic State's oil infrastructure and oil distribution system until the Russian president Putin shamed U.S. President Obama at the G20. Putin showed around satellite pictures of huge oil truck assemblies waiting in the desert to be filled. These were through 13 month of bombing left completely unmolested by U.S. air strikes. The U.S. then bombed a bit and claimed to have destroyed 116 waiting oil trucks while the Russians claimed to have destroyed over 1,000.

So far I have found four reason given to explain why the U.S. did not bomb, and does not seriously bomb, the oil truck convoys.

Civilian casualties:

The Obama administration has also balked at attacking the Islamic State’s fleet of tanker trucks — its main distribution network — fearing civilian casualties.

Environmental damage:

A former CIA director says concerns about environmental impact have prevented the White House from bombing oil wells that finance the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

“We didn’t go after oil wells, actually hitting oil wells that ISIS controls, because we didn’t want to do environmental damage, and we didn’t want to destroy that infrastructure,” Michael Morell said Tuesday on PBS’s “Charlie Rose.”

Long-term economic damage to Iraq and Syria:

In the aftermath of the attacks in Paris this month, the United States has more aggressively targeted the militants’ oil production and smuggling operations, which it had held off from doing for fear of inflicting long-term damage to the Iraqi and Syrian economies.

Regime change in Syria has precedence

Just think of it: IS has killed American nationals and yet the Pentagon has been ordered to handle the IS with kid gloves! President Barack Obama waxes eloquently about his determination to “degrade and destroy” the IS, but the Pentagon is under instructions not to disrupt the IS’ oil trade! This is cold-blooded statecraft. Obama probably knows all about the Turkish elite’s flourishing business, but then, he has uses for Erdogan, too. Simply put, the regime change agenda in Syria got precedence over cutting off the IS’s funding sources.

Three of the above four reasons were given by the Obama administration or its proxies, one by an astute observer, Guess which of those reasons is the real one.

Crow posted:

methlabretriever posted:

i think that's their goal, right? The West however seems to have begun to change their stance wrt to ISIS and has begun to damage/destroy their oil infrastructure.

i know, that's an old article. they just started bombing isis` oil infrastructure recently

c_man posted:

i thought this piece did a good job describing the way in which the heads of global corporations are largely based in a very small number of countries

this is another thing, foster's work barely supports the argument that the TNCC actually exists. it is very easy to look at multinationals as pursuing their own policies, yes, but its obvious that they arent transnational themselves. where do they base their operations out of? luxembourg, australia, the us. where do they extract labor from most directly? china, indonesia, the philippines.

The privileged status of the nation form derives from the fact that, locally, that form made it possible (at least for an entire historical period) for struggles between heterogeneous classes to be controlled and for not only a "capitalist class" but the bourgeoisies proper to emerge from these—state bourgeoisies both capable of political, economic and cultural hegemony and produced by that hegemony.

If the nation is no longer capable of regulating, either through law or through politics, the actions of corporations and their ideological character, than the nation only exists in the way that other modernist categories exist in the postmodern era: as a nightmare weighing on the brains of the living. Nations still exist of course, but they are no longer capable of becoming the site of class struggle. In Greece, the people no longer want to live in the old way and the upper classes cannot carry on in the old way but this appears to make no difference to the political power of the Greek 'imagined community' within their nation-state.

Thus the question is not "are corporations still beholden to national power?" It is instead "has neoliberal capital made the concept of 'nation' obsolete?" I would say not yet, but to deny that this is a trend is to wish that the politics of the 20th century can be applied verbatim.

babyhueypnewton posted:

To say that a transnational capitalist class doesn't exist because it is territoriality rooted is to entirely to miss the point.

I didn't make this claim though, my argument is that the TNCC doesnt exist because capitalists still base their decisions around the profitability able to be garnered in individual/small groups of nationstates. if the TNCC was a thing youd have had french corporations that fit into this category supporting their counterparts in america when the iraq war was occurring. instead they boycotted and were kept completely out of the very lucrative rebuilding process.

i realize this example isnt great cuz you dont actually need something like this and even if you did they could just be comprador capitalists but in the absence of a specific example being posited as proof that it exists its the best i can come up with off the cuff

babyhueypnewton posted:

Transnationalism doesn't mean that corporations exist as floating numbers on a computer but that corporations are no longer part of the nation-state as the site of overdetermination. A nation is not simply a piece of land, nor even a legal structure, but an imagined community that structures itself through repressive and ideological functions. A nation-state not only represses people or implants false consciousness but is part of the very relations of production by regulating the reproduction of the bourgeois itself (through law, money, primitive accumulation, immigration, etc).

As Balibar says:

The privileged status of the nation form derives from the fact that, locally, that form made it possible (at least for an entire historical period) for struggles between heterogeneous classes to be controlled and for not only a "capitalist class" but the bourgeoisies proper to emerge from these—state bourgeoisies both capable of political, economic and cultural hegemony and produced by that hegemony.

i was going to strike this out of my quote for this post but i decided not to so i could say explicitly that i agree with all of this

babyhueypnewton posted:

If the nation is no longer capable of regulating, either through law or through politics, the actions of corporations and their ideological character, than the nation only exists in the way that other modernist categories exist in the postmodern era: as a nightmare weighing on the brains of the living. Nations still exist of course, but they are no longer capable of becoming the site of class struggle. In Greece, the people no longer want to live in the old way and the upper classes cannot carry on in the old way but this appears to make no difference to the political power of the Greek 'imagined community' within their nation-state.

and yet it did and does. the 'old way' wasnt maintained in greece, severe austerity was imposed to the benefit of primarily german banks at the expense of french and greek ones.this isnt a particularly new process in greece or anything, pasok has been steadily doing this for decades, but it was certainly an acceleration.

babyhueypnewton posted:

Thus the question is not "are corporations still beholden to national power?" It is instead "has neoliberal capital made the concept of 'nation' obsolete?" I would say not yet, but to deny that this is a trend is to wish that the politics of the 20th century can be applied verbatim.

wheres the trend? so far there havent been any examples posed other than trade deals (the TPP was specifically mentioned) and trade deals hardly fit the character of this class supposedly existing. corporations being able to sue countries is hardly a new phenomenon, and the primary nation under attack from the TPP is of course china, the most important enemy of the supposedly-obsolete united states. we should be hardly surprised that the US (and its pacific allies to a lesser extent) is acting as the strong-arm on behalf of largely US corporations to oppose strictly-domestic legality.

Edited by Urbandale (Dec. 1, 2015 20:24:31)

c_man posted:

Urbandale posted:

c_man posted:

i thought this piece did a good job describing the way in which the heads of global corporations are largely based in a very small number of countries

this is another thing, foster's work barely supports the argument that the TNCC actually exists. it is very easy to look at multinationals as pursuing their own policies, yes, but its obvious that they arent transnational themselves. where do they base their operations out of? luxembourg, australia, the us. where do they extract labor from most directly? china, indonesia, the philippines.

tbh i think the piece is largely critical of the concept of a TNCC by making that exact point and relating it to imperialism. Nike and Walmart having extensive supply chains in china doesn't make the concept of the nation state meaningless any more than the british empire ruling india did. sure it affects the operation of the states but the distinctions between them still have a great deal of importance.

yeah i agree with your reading of the piece, i just thought the intent in posting it was as support for the existence of the TNCC.

also for those at home who are finding this a pretty esoteric discussion this is a barebones but decent introduction to the concept

methlabretriever posted:

Crow posted:

methlabretriever posted:

i think that's their goal, right? The West however seems to have begun to change their stance wrt to ISIS and has begun to damage/destroy their oil infrastructure.

i know, that's an old article. they just started bombing isis` oil infrastructure recently

"I have found four reason given to explain why the U.S. did not bomb, and does not seriously bomb, the oil truck convoys.

Civilian casualties:

The Obama administration has also balked at attacking the Islamic State’s fleet of tanker trucks — its main distribution network — fearing civilian casualties.
Environmental damage:

A former CIA director says concerns about environmental impact have prevented the White House from bombing oil wells that finance the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
“We didn’t go after oil wells, actually hitting oil wells that ISIS controls, because we didn’t want to do environmental damage, and we didn’t want to destroy that infrastructure,” Michael Morell said Tuesday on PBS’s “Charlie Rose.”

Long-term economic damage to Iraq and Syria

In the aftermath of the attacks in Paris this month, the United States has more aggressively targeted the militants’ oil production and smuggling operations, which it had held off from doing for fear of inflicting long-term damage to the Iraqi and Syrian economies.
Regime change in Syria has precedence

Just think of it: IS has killed American nationals and yet the Pentagon has been ordered to handle the IS with kid gloves! President Barack Obama waxes eloquently about his determination to “degrade and destroy” the IS, but the Pentagon is under instructions not to disrupt the IS’ oil trade! This is cold-blooded statecraft. Obama probably knows all about the Turkish elite’s flourishing business, but then, he has uses for Erdogan, too. Simply put, the regime change agenda in Syria got precedence over cutting off the IS’s funding sources.
Three of the above four reasons were given by the Obama administration or its proxies, one by an astute observer, Guess which of those reasons is the real one...."

http://www.moonofalabama.org/2015/11/guess-why-the-us-isnt-seriously-bombing-the-islamic-states-oil-business.html

Israel buys most oil smuggled from ISIS territory - report

Israel has become the main buyer for oil from ISIS controlled territory, reports "al-Araby al-Jadeed."

Kurdish and Turkish smugglers are transporting oil from ISIS controlled territory in Syria and Iraq and selling it to Israel, according to several reports in the Arab and Russian media. An estimated 20,000-40,000 barrels of oil are produced daily in ISIS controlled territory generating $1-1.5 million daily profit for the terrorist organization.

The oil is extracted from Dir A-Zur in Syria and two fields in Iraq and transported to the Kurdish city of Zakhu in a triangle of land near the borders of Syria, Iraq and Turkey. Israeli and Turkish mediators come to the city and when prices are agreed, the oil is smuggled to the Turkish city of Silop marked as originating from Kurdish regions of Iraq and sold for $15-18 per barrel (WTI and Brent Crude currently sell for $41 and $45 per barrel) to the Israeli mediator, a man in his 50s with dual Greek-Israeli citizenship known as Dr. Farid. He transports the oil via several Turkish ports and then onto other ports, with Israel among the main destinations.