Wojtek Sokolowski:
> Au contraire - what I'm saing is that one need to adopt a realistic
> strategy, one aimed at changing the existing instituions, instead of
> pie-in-the-sky idealism of erasing centuries of institutional history and
> starting anwe from a blank slate.
>
> I pretty much reject the concept of systemic determinism i.e. everything
> being pre-determined by the logic of a "system", favored by some
> idealistically oriented leftists. I am inclined to seea set of various
> institutions with partially diverging and partially overlapping goals,
> wherere there is plenty of room fo diffrent arrangements favoring different
> goals and different interests. That under certain historical conditions
> those institutions work more to the advantage of one set of interests than
> to another is, for the most part, an outcome of a power struggle rather
> than pre-determined by the "logic of the system." Thre is nothing that
> prevents the same institutions of working for a different set of
> institutions under a different set of historical conditions, when the
> balance of power changes.
>
> Hence the potentially startegy is to start with the existing set of
> institutions and change the balance so they work more to "our" interest,
> rather than wipe the slate clean and start anew, which is a pure nonsense.
> If there is a pothole in a bridge, you don't demolish the bridge, you just
> fix the pohole, no? In plain English, make the public institutions, such as
> national governments, corporations, WTO, IMF, WB etc. etc. work for the
> interest of the working class people rather than call for their abolition.
> An I do not care whether those institutions are labeled "bourgeois" or
> whatever by people for whom ideas and labels are more important than
> material resources.
It's not the label. It's what it means. If some people have power over others, and that power is institutionalized, to what extent can you improve the institution? Hard cop or soft cop, you've still got a cop -- and the other cop is in the next room. This is not to mention to current cops' general theory, which includes a program of aggression and aggrandizement which can end only in catastrophe.
It may be inconvenient, but I don't see any alternative to dismantling the State down to the foundations. The State is not a bridge, it's a jail.
This is not to say reformism won't do some good. If a strong, persistent anti-capitalist movement develops you'll see many gyrations on the part of the ruling class to accomodate or co-opt it, some of which may be to the benefit of the ordinary people they sit on. But that's not a reason to get sucked in, it's a reason to find some other way of getting at them.