Agreement RE: state & markets

[Patrick Bond]

On 17 Dec 99, at 0:12, Nathan Newman wrote:
> ...While jumping to the global level is obviously harder, there is a reality
> that some form of international political power is ultimately needed to take
> on the power of global capital.  The IMF, World Bank and WTO are obviously
> not the right form of that power and there may be an argument, as Patrick
> Bond notes, that the first step to building real democratic global
> institutions is to burn the present ones to the ground.  But I do believe
> that the long-term goal has to be one way or the other building a global
> democratic political structure - a global state that is democratically
> representative with full human, social and economic rights guaranteed.

Fair enough. What's long-term though? Given the conjuncture of 
1999 and the balance of forces, an immediate reconstitution of 
national sovereignty (in relation to int'l financial capital, direct 
investment and trade), towards reflation and reconstituted social 
policies domestically and, regionally, more coherent modes of 
political-economic-social-environmental integration in the interests 
of working-class and poor people, makes most sense from where I 
sit in Johannesburg right now.

 
> Whether that is the goal is one debate and how to get there if that is the
> goal is another.  But the idea that we will do better with corporations
> institutionalized only at the national level is, I think, a false hope.
> Rubert Murdoch pays amazingly low tax rates precisely because he is able to
> manipulate the conflicting laws and rules of different countries, shuffling
> profits and paper costs around.  Corporations play similar games in all
> realms of corporate finance and whipsaw countries in forcing down labor and
> environmental regulation.

Ah but this is an example of how symptoms of a problem (nation-
state entrepreneurialism) are overshadowing, in your perspective I 
think, the source of the problem (the neoliberal development 
model). Burning that problem weed out at its roots -- contemporary 
capitalist crisis and the "space-time compression" that has 
accompanied it -- is the socialist project, but the most substantive 
protective global cover over those roots is represented by the 
WashCon institutions. "Burning them down" indeed makes sense 
as an initial step, so perhaps I'll have a rest from this thread now... 

 
> So I am unconvinced by the "nix it" argument unto itself.  It may
> make sense as an initial step...
Patrick Bond
(Wits University Graduate School of Public and Development Management)
home: 51 Somerset Road, Kensington 2094, Johannesburg
office: 22 Gordon Building, Wits University Parktown Campus
mailing address: PO Box 601 WITS 2050
phones:  (h) (2711) 614-8088; (o) 488-5917; fax 484-2729
emails:  (h) pbond at wn.apc.org; (o) bondp at zeus.mgmt.wits.ac.za