> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> [mailto:owner-lbo-talk at lists.panix.com]On Behalf Of Jim heartfield
> >The difference is that just as I admit that capitalist states can
> >occasionally be pressured domestically for reforms of that same
> brutality,
> >they can also occasionally take actions that on net are an improvement on
> >the general brutality that lies at the regime of global capital.
>
> I don't get this argument at all. You must have a very different
> assessment of the balance of forces at play in the world than me. For
> more than a decade national liberation and labour movements have been in
> retreat. So where is this pressure pushing imperialism to act on our
> behalf? Strangely, at the very time when these movements really were
> buoyant, imperialism was unremittingly aggressive.
Now, this may be the crux of our differences. I see a world of quite "buoyant" grassroots movements worldwide, in many aspects far more vibrant than even a decade ago. Fewer "left-aligned" movements control nation-states than at points in the past, but in some ways that is an advantage, since so many of those (as in the East Bloc and a number of allied third world states) repressed their grassroots movements and (as you noted in your post about the PDS) were an embarassment to the very idea of radical social change.
Whether we are talking about the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil, the Indonesian labor movement, the South Korean democracy movement, or the upsurge of latino power in California, there are incredibly dramatic examples of movements that have continued to grow globally. And - given the topic at hand - there is a network of human rights activists that has continued to grow throughout the last decades.
The defeat of "fast track" trade legislation in the US was matched globally by the worldwide mobilization that forced the shelving of the first round of the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI). There are mobilizations against the IMF in countries around the world.
I find the thumb-sucking pessimism of so many left activists really bizarre. Maybe it is a failure by Marxists to acknowledge movements that are not tied to party formations. Or maybe it is nostalgia for the Soviet patronage of the Cold War that gave an artificial heft (and often funds) to certain kinds of "left" voices in the world. Or maybe it is the reasonable disorientation of the wrenching economic changes occuring due to both new forms of globalization and technology.
But the reality is that we have an incredible network of activists in the world and across the United States with global labor movements far more willing to challenge global capital today (as in trade legislation) than they were a generation ago when the divisions of the Cold War made them sacrifice global class solidarity in the name of "fighting Communism."
So, yes, despite in some ways incredibly hard economic and technological conditions to operate within, I think the self-defeating pessimism of many leftists is far overblown.
And you may find my optimism on the state of the global left as bizarre as my position on Kosovo, but you may have hit the nail on the head in noting the link.
--Nathan Newman