>> Very well-put. Great post. Clearly the "class fraction" that stands to
>> lose the most from global neo-liberalism (like you said, the latest
>> incarnation of neo-colonialism) is the self-sufficient and semi-subsistent
>> peasantry, which is still the bulk of the population in China, South Asia,
>> sub-Saharan Africa. That's why the most radical immediate demands to be
>> made upon today's world system are [SNIP]
Carrol wrote:
>It doesn't matter what follows the are, the proposition is false. One does
>not measure the radicalness of demands by their relationship to the needs
>or practices of the system. By that criteria, the only radical demand would
>be, "Socialism Today,." The most radical demands one can make upon the
>system are those demands which while (a) being some sort of threat to
>the system's strength (b) the strongest working-class forces can be
>mobilized around. It matters not how "radical" a demand is if one cannot
>marshall the troops and generate the tactics and strategy necessary to
>fight for the demand.
>
>Gulick may of course be quite correct in his estimation. It is only that the
>arguments he gives for it are utterly irrelevant outside the classroom.
I guess I didn't sufficiently demonstrate my grounding in dialectical method. Obviously for a political demand to be a "radical need" it 1) cannot be answered by the "system" w/o exploding that "system" and 2) some agent or movement has to identify w/it and successfully galvanize social forces on behalf of it. Otherwise, as you note, it's all windmill-tilting.
There are clearly social forces in the "global South" who identify with and are pushing for the political demands I mentioned (I'm thinking of, among others, all the left-wing and non co-opted NGO's who are part of the Penang-based Third World Network). They may not even realize how radical their needs are (most movements don't, because they don't have the luxury of figuring out whether their needs are radical or not). The only reason I didn't mention them was b/c it was a short post, and I didn't anticipate being nickel-and-dimed to death.
Outta here.
John Gulick