Rob: Is there a cartography of this transnational state?
WR: There is definitely a cartography is the argument here is not that the particular nation states or space is irrelevant, not at all. There are very powerful nation states or countries in the global system, especially of course the United States with the biggest military machine in the world. And then of course Europe and Japan and there's the BRICs countries and those BRICs countries are not at all opposed to--
Rob: But you're talking geographically, I'm not, I guess I'm using the cartography as a metaphor. In the tech world, there are hundreds of thousands of different charts showing digital relationships and connections between different groups and organizations and interests. Is there some kind of a, I mean. How many of these organizations are there and are there any maps of how they're connected to each other?
WR: I don't know if it's published somewhere on a website the maps out how they're connected to each other but their connections are very easy to see. They're very very easy. For instance the World Bank and the International Monetary, this is going to give you an example of a cartography of sort of flow charts and relations to each other. Greece, as many listeners are probably aware, Greece has been going through these upheavals basically Greece is being strangulated by the European Union. Unbelievable austerity imposed on Greece. I don't need to go into detail in that, so who is behind this in Greece is the famous troika. The troika is the international monetary fund, it's the European Union, the European Central Bank, but in there as well as the World Bank in there as well as Wall Street and the US treasury, and in there as well are giant global investors including the giant banks that are represented and work with these trans and super national organizations.
If you want to have a flow chart you put let's say a box on a piece of paper or a circle on a piece of paper for each of these institutions or organizations, you find that they overlap with each other in terms of directors and officials and technocrats, you would find that they coordinate their policies or their lending, or the imposition of economic conditions or the negotiation of free trade agreements. So it's really an incestuous dense network, there's somewhat of a division of labor but, it's not hard to discover at all. In fact, it's not even hard to conceive and understand once you look at how, I mean again, I use the example of the trans-pacific partnership. But you can take the example of Greece, you can take the example of structural adjustments imposed on a country in Africa. Anywhere you look around the world these things we're protesting against you can find when you start looking. What are the institutions and organizations and their interconnections involved behind these things we're struggling against. And it's not hard to see this cartography to which you are referring. I mean, I think the key point here is that we have a complete, you know an ever more overlap and mutual integration of economic elites that control the global corporations and banking systems. And the political elites that control national governments and the super national and transnational organizations.
Rob: Okay, so I wanted to go back to another line that you refer to that I think is really interesting and important. You said, "We need to develop transnational and global consciousness." Now, interesting for me. I've been working with this idea of bottom up. I call the show Bottom Up Radio, I'm writing a book about bottom up. And what hit me in this last year, I've been working on the book for about seven years, is the idea that we need to develop what I call connection consciousness, that we're all connected to all the different systems in the world. And I think it kind of relates to global consciousness and transnational consciousness but I know you're talking about something else but I think that there's a relationship there too so talk more about what's involved in developing transnational and global consciousness.
WR: Well, I don't think it's unrelated at all, I think the notion of a connection consciousness I haven't read your draft book yet but I think it's closely related to what I'm referring to as global consciousness. Let me actually tackle the notion of a global, a transnational consciousness by giving a hands on example and linking that, if I may, to what we were going to get back to a few minutes ago. I was pointing out that there's protest just breaking out in Chicago with regard to the murder of the 17 year old black teenager and I had commented that the escalation of police violence and racism in the United States is intimately linked to global capitalism and that will help us elucidate what I mean by transnational consciousness. So in the United States, as elsewhere in the world, we see that there's massive working people that are divided sometimes along ethnic lines, sometimes along racial, sometimes along cultural lines. The United States, historically, the black population has been, occupied post slavery, the lowest rungs of the US working class. Sort of the bottom sector of the US working class. Super exploited, super controlled, subject to racialized controls. But integrated into the corporate order as the lowest most super exploited workers. But the problem for capitalist, for elites, and the privileged, was that African Americans of the United States are citizens and organized mass for civil rights movements and then black liberation movements and fundamentally challenge those that subordination, and had citizenship rights so blacks could vote in elections and very limited existence gain some political power and so forth.
By the 1970s and 1980s African Americans representing the most militant sectors of the US working class, organizing radical trade unions. You remember in the 1970s we had the league of black revolutionary workers and so forth. When no longer good employees, good workers for capital, rowdy, uppity, challenging the capitalist system, leading the whole working class, demanding rights and liberation. And so employers, capitalist, began to remove the African American working class from integration into the US economy at the same time as the US economy is globalizing, trans-nationalizing as part of globalization. And instead started replacing black workers with immigrate latino workers, some asian workers, but largely immigrate latino workers from Mexico and from Central America as well as elsewhere in Latin America. This has the advantage for US employers, that immigrants who are undocumented can be deported if they organize trade unions if they demand any of their rights and of course immigrants who are undocumented don't have citizenship rights can't vote in elections, cannot, are very vulnerable in terms of defending labor rights, and don't have civil and political rights and so forth. So you see this massive changeover in which the African American population has been pushed from the most super exploited sector of the working class into structurally marginalize, structurally unemployed. While the Latino immigrant community from Latin America has become the new super exploited sector inside the US working class.
Now start connecting the dots here, and this is what you mean by connection consciousness I would assume. Now, how do you then deal tens of millions of African Americans who have been pushed into structural marginality, well you create a prison industrial complex and the system of mass incarceration which we know very well how that's taken place. So you lock up people who have been structurally marginalize through fake wars on drugs and fake wars on drugs. Now how is this tied to globalization? Well in numerous ways, how is it possible that some twelve million Latin American immigrant workers have come into the United States in the last few decades because the global economy has facilitated the movement of capital and displace these people from the countryside in Mexico, from the countryside in Central America and turn them into transnational migrants. And so you have this new transnational immigrant workforce. And inside the United States again you have the mass prison industrial complex locking up disproportionately black people but also Latinos and you have this new transnational immigrant Latin American workforce. One super-exploited, one marginalized and locked up.
So let me just finish-- I think this is very important to see this because these are our daily struggles that everyone is familiar with but these globalized connects I'm referring too are not so, are not as clear. Now you also have in the United States, if you want to again look at the racial and ethnic divide in the United States, the in general, and this is a generalization, white workers have historically been more privileged than black or Latino workers because of the racialized nature of US capitalism and the racialized nature of the exploitation of the workforce. And so white workers particularly in the 20th century saw a rise in their living standards and stable jobs in the auto industry and I mean the post World War two economic boom, relative to blacks and others and became sort of what some people call the labor aristocracy. A significant sector, the so called middle class, it's not a middle class, it's a working class with high salaries and job stability. And so with globalization, capital can move anywhere around the globe, it can de-industrialize the United States, it can push down wages everywhere. And so that's exactly what it's been doing. So these white workers experience increased destabilization of their own economic stability. They experience increased insecurity and uncertainty and casualization of their work, working part time, working for lower wages, working for contract work, or for that matter, unemployed. And so how do the white workers respond to this without a class consciousness and also with a transnational consciousness. They respond by sort of appealing to elites.
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