>Still stuck in a Manichean binarism invented by the neoliberal comissars,
eh? >When was the last time you saw or heard a green, a red a red-green or
any other >critic of the Bretton Woods institutions say "yeah man I'm an
anti-globalizer >'cause that's hip."
>This is the same pathetic game the press always plays when ordinary folks
tell >the elites to fuck off. We oughta know better, than to fall into the
traps they >set.
I sez:
Ian, lest you interpret elements of my last screed as indulging the same sort of caricature of the "anti-globalization" (sic) movement, let me reassure you that my main point was this: anti-"corporate globalization" red-greens should not refrain from doing international solidarity work, but a movement emphasis could and should be settling in for the long haul to build "one, two, many" Porto Alegres here in the U.S.. An actually achieved decommodification of land and labor at home would go a long ways toward extinguishing whatever "anti- development" biases plague the opponents of corporate globalization in the South.
This, of course, is a tough chore indeed. A practical example from your neck of the woods comes to mind -- the movement to decommission the dams on the lower Snake River. Wheat farmers are very easily able to frame any such movement as a ploy by technical-professional liberals to turn the West into a playground for tree-hugging (and endangered species-loving) elites. Such protestations, however cynically seized upon by larger capitalist interests, have their grain of distorted/refracted/partial truth. There are good number of folks in the salariat who oppose state-subsidized destruction of ecosytems, and like their low-tech getaways in the outback, but whose material comfort derives from the less obviously nature-maiming dimensions of the system of "accumulation for accumulation's sake." We have our work cut out for us.
John Gulick
P.S. I have to sign for once and all (at least for the next 8 weeks -- have to finish the damn eco-Marxist dissertation on the urban environmental contradictions of capacity expansion at the Port of Oakland).