Prague

Rob Schaap rws at comedu.canberra.edu.au
Wed Sep 27 03:03:48 PDT 2000


Heh heh - I was missing that attitood of yours, James ...

Quoth you:


>Disconcerting absence of proletarians en masse, one might add. Why
>should Czechs support a movement that aims at arresting growth, economic
>autarky and patronising the third world. Those after all were the
>hallmarks of the Stalinism that they only recently rejected.

I reckon you've fallen for this silly simplistic gladitorial line of the media's, comrade. They might dress it up as 'pro-globalisers versus anti-globalisers', but it ain't that in reality (simply because 'globalisation' doesn't mean very much - probably because it's being deployed to mean everything). For instance, those who seek a commensurate, if not actually prior, global extension of democratically accountable or explicitly ecologically-directed institutions - or of labor itself - to go along with an institution bent on the seamless electronic peregrinations of finance (not to mention the seamless subsumption of everything and everybody in the terms of finance), do not oppose 'globalisation' at all, do they? Yet they'd be more at home in the streets than in the suit-suites within, doncha reckon?

Sure many older Czechs might discern a measure of uncritical-youth-seeking-the-return-of-the-world-they-thought-had-gone-forever ( can't blame 'em for that) but they'd be wrong, I reckon.

And anyway, 2/3 of those arrested are Czechs, so there's clearly some local sympathy.

Cheers, Rob.



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list