> My guess is that we know what against what we are fighting.
Alas, coherent analyses of the US Bubble Economy, the Japanese keiretsu and Eurocapitalism are few and far between. If we know what we're fighting against, we should be able to figure out where the system is going, right? So how many Leftists predicted the East Asian crisis, or the Russian collapse, or the success of the euro? (I sure didn't.) Doesn't this suggest we need to do some homework here?
> I would be wary of holding up multinationals as any type of example from
> which to learn.
Why not? Are they all completely evil or something? They're at least 35% of the global economy, after all. Why shouldn't they exhibit at least as much diversity as the nation-states they've replaced?
> Multinationals operate on a strict hierarchy that promotes some of the
> worst sorts of behavior.
Some do, the smarter ones don't -- they're run as networks, where decision-making is parceled out among many, many people, and where suppliers and customers also have a limited say in things. Nokia and Sony give their people pretty good benefits packages, and firms like Hewlett-Packard and Sun pride themselves on their ability to listen to their people and to allow them to unleash their creativity. Some of the corporate rhetoric is just smoke, sure, but HP's managerial structures are indeed much more decentered, loosely-organized, and free-floating than US Steel at its height.
-- Dennis