Thanks for the long and comprehensive reply to my post.
You wrote:
>It is definitely the position of a lot of people in town that the FSC issue
>by the WTO is something to "cheer" about, in a cautious way, for the twofold
>reason that 1)It exposes yet another way Corps. have been manipulating the
>state to avoid paying their way and 2)it heightens intercapitalist rivalry
>and mutual contempt, exacerbating the destructuve tensions in the very
>notion of oligopolistic competition.
I respond:
I was in no way suggesting that the WTO's ruling on the FSC issue is or isn't something to "cheer" about -- although I do share your sense of sinister glee that the ruling shows that the WTO is not just the handmaiden of U.S. TNC's, and that insofar as the WTO's preeminence is part and parcel of the "Washington consensus," it has its contradictory aspects too. I was merely trying to point out that the U.S. populist left, whose perspective dominates the anti-WTO coalition, probably can't properly conceive how this ruling came about, since they think of the WTO as a tool of "stateless" "global" TNC's, instead of as a forum for mediating (and sometimes intensifying) inter- imperialist conflict. In a nutshell, I was trying to say that an understanding of inter-imperialist rivalry is absent from the populist left's "globalization" discourse (which certainly doesn't apply to you and your cohort in Seattle, since your analysis of the ruling is more knowledgeable and sophisicated than mine).
You wrote:
>Contrary to what you've read elsewhere, we did make sincere attempts to get
>beyond race/class "boundaries" in doing community outreach all summer
>leading up to N30. Did we succeed to the extent we would have like to? No,
>but to see it simply as a problem of outreach is to put other's in the role
>of passive recipient's rather than as communities every bit as capable of
>self-organizing once they've got the info.
I respond:
See my post to ChuckO. I wasn't criticizing N30 organizers for coming up short in terms of outreach. I was expressing exasperation that a middle class anarchist interviewed in the Seattle Weekly article couldn't figure out why working class/poor folks didn't attend the actions -- he made it sound as if it was all about the "internal racism" of the affinity groups, instead of a working class/poor distaste for the political priorities and styles of activism favored by middle-class anarchists. (One young black guy featured in the article kind of made of the same point, except that he framed the middle-class anarchists' priorities/style as another form of racism, which I don't necessarily agree with).
Best,
John Gulick