Unseasonably chilly in spring-time Johannesburg, actually. Probably not so good in Central America either today. Doesn't it bore you silly, too, when Kelly Mcguinness or whatever provides us the global-village weather chat each day on CNN?
> Patrick, I barely understand what your
> talking about, but I won't let that stop me.
Hey relax, in one of Russell Jacoby's whinges on the absent public intellectual, he used David Harvey's jargon as an emblem of all that was wrong with contemporary Left academia. We're still going for conceptual clarity -- and there's a long way to go -- before tackling the harder job of clarity of expression...
> Don't you think the Biggest
> Cigars find the best place/way, to play Midas, and then begin nudgeing the
> spotlight and massageing the rules in a variety of ways,(politics and
> public opinion) until eventually everyone is facing in the same direction
> and proclaims what is before them to be the new reality. Just a thought
> from the rube gallery.
Mmmm, that's seems as good an explanation as Gramsci ever managed. There was once a furious debate in Monthly Review, 1985 I think it was, between Harvey and the brilliant Vancouver marxist Mike Lebowitz, over exactly the ways that, in particular "places" (meaning any coherent geographical unit you can identify), Big Cigars generate (or alternatively attack) such "geopolitical" alliances -- precisely in order to direct the way in which overaccumulated capital gets shifted around, and to thus determine who takes the brunt of the inevitable devaluation.
To illustrate, we've had, in devalorised Southern Africa, about a quarter century now of unrelenting, generally violent shifts in geopolitical alliances as the waves of declining living standards, deindustrialisation, yet intensified ecological degradation, worsening conditions for women and children, and financial speculation have pummelled our already fragile economies and societies. And this was during the region's core country liberation era. A real tragedy for majority rule, for it to have come at this stage of global accumulation cycle. Thoughts of unity between the region's black opposition alliances -- once they took over their respective states -- have since become absolutely utopian in character, as the SA, Zimbabwean, Zambian, Angolan, Namibian and other major national ruling blocs all protect and defend their narrow interests at the expense of the region's citizenry.
Today, any kind of regional cooperation, not even alliances, between elite state managers appears impossible to coordinate. With various armies running off in conflicting directions, defending highly questionable private property interests, what I'm getting at is that perhaps we've got to be humble about reconstituting Left politics at global and regional scales. The last three weeks have witnessed a bit of progress within the ANC alliance for, in contrast, renewed national sovereignty.
What I'm wondering is whether, in the spirit that PEN-Lers recall from the "progressive nationalist" versus "progressive internationalist" debates of around 1994, we're seeing any hints of enlightenment about the scales at which we best conduct our various struggles.
My comrades in the NGO and social/labour movement camps remain quite dislocated on such matters... and indeed so am I.
Yours, P.