> I'm looking for concrete discussion.
your definition of concreteness is actually lacking any concreteness at all.
it's premised on the fanciful question of:
> What if some leftist forces took power in a Third
> World country and were struggling to reshape its political economy to
> better meet the needs of the masses, *under the present international
> conditions (capitalist and imperialist)*?
with little regard for what you here rhetorically emphasise -- ie., "under the present international conditions (capitalist and imperialist)" -- and which i've already responded in part when i wrote in the previous post "in the current conditions, there's a profound contradiction between democratic control and a strong state, not least in the sense that a strong state means being able to impose austerity, or at the very least, a wage restraint bargain -- esp inasmuch as those economies aren't capable of drawing greater shares of a global surplus a la the US, EU and Japan. every time you emphasise the apparent need for a strong state in the 'periphery', you occlude the fact that this means undemocratic."
but, for the fun of it, let's take an example: indonesia. show me how the problems of indonesian workers stem from having a weak state or weak border controls. no, really, i'd like to hear it. i can't think of one instance where your depiction of the problem as a weak nation-state and borders makes any sense at all.
in any event, what you seem to call 'concreteness' is in fact a call for some non-existant vanguard to take state power, presuming as it does that the nation-state is a neutral (or at best, leftist, since you seem to beleive that the capitalism is exemplified by the market) instrument not a specific form of capitalist power, that any reforms are impossible without this taking of power (as if it isn't always a question of what the state is forced to do by us). it's really a crude (and by now repetitive) vaguardist routine, which assumes that other politics ought to be judged as to how sufficient they are in providing an alternative vanguard programme. strange as it might seem, i never applied for the job, not least because what is at issue is not who has their hands on the levers of state power but what, for instance, the possible scope of state action is (referred to briefly above).
in fact, for the same reasons i've warned against the integrationist pressures to sit at the table of the IMF and WTO, i would regard this preoccupation with 'leftists taking state power' as itself a problem. what it does lead to, time and again, is a decomposition and demobilisation of those movements which are capable of pressing for reforms and/or transforming reforms and the crises they induce (because reforms in our interests will invite the weapons of capitalist crisis; cf. kalecki and bologna) into crises for capital and not for us.
Angela _________