Doug Henwood wrote:
> 1) I'm a little uncertain about the
> process by which a Jubilee South conference can claim to speak on
> behalf of 4 or 5 billion people, and mandate the "North" to do
I think Patrick Bond has himself answered this well, but I want to comment from the question asked in another thread, "Who owns the Movement?" If I recall correctly, the general thrust of posts in that thread was against the pretensions to owning the movement. But both that question and Doug's implied question here are quite wrong. Both (unconsciously?) presuppose that the "movement," like an organized (text-book democracy) nation state, has some formal way of legitimating authority. But it hasn't. The way it has always been done in the past (and this will continue as long as there is need for a resistance movement) is that varius people and groups will claim authority or "ownership" of the movement, and a subsequent process of struggle will determine which of those claims is/are legitimate. It's very messy, but there can't be any other way.
And now a prediction rather than an argument: leninists (small "l" deliberate) will prove less allergic to messy conditions then anarchists over the long haul, and the anarchists will do one of three things: (a) go off and sulk, saying oh fuck it politics aint worth it (b) cease being anarchists and become fellow-travellers or (c) form into small intenselfy disciplined anarchist groups of their own (the discipline of such groups is always tighter and more onerous than that of Leninist groups).
Carrol