> Why do I need POMO to understand [the afore]said IMF
> report, rather than URPE and EPI stuff?
Because you can't understand why the IMF's neoliberalism has been so successful at implementing a certain agenda without understanding pomo. Pomo is the cultural/theoretical field of multinational capitalism, it's the workshop of our class (and gender, and national, etc. etc.) identities. Why does capitalism rule? Why are the rentiers so hegemonic? How can Wall Street screw over billions of people without any apparent resistance? Because those billions are all agog over the latest cultural commodities. The flip side of IMF neoliberalism is global credit card consumerism. They're two sides of the same, shall we say, Euro-coin. URPE and EPI are fine at pointing out the economic realities of exploitation, but they don't connect these with a utopian vision of what things might be, and anyway that's not their job, is it? That's the job of the global Left micro-parties and Left artists like Michael Moore.
> The U.S. does have its own unique political and cultural landscape in
> some respect, so for purposes of illustration, why does any
> US left need POMO?
Because the US is the acme of multinational consumerism. Nowhere else on the planet does capital have such free sway (though the EU is getting close), nowhere else are politics so mass-culturalized, for lack of a better term, than here; nowhere else are the class contradictions so obviously and blatantly smoothed over by the most sophisticated media and advertising industry on the planet. You're not going to mobilize American workers with a German-style Social Democratic party, for instance; we're too diverse, and won't put up with a bunch of whitemalebluesuited bureaucrats running local culture clubs. Instead we've got to do what the German Greens are starting to do -- organize a more complex resistance movement and political grouping. And that can't happen unless we deal with the whole question of identity politics, i.e. deal seriously with the US workingclass, in all our rainbow diversity.
-- Dennis