Globalization as grantmaking cause du jour

Wojtek Sokolowski sokol at jhu.edu
Wed Apr 19 11:56:02 PDT 2000


At 12:32 PM 4/19/00 -0400, Gordon wrote:
>I don't see the point of reading anything about strategy,
>then. In effect, you're saying everything is basically hopeless

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.

wojtek



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