fantasy and political organization

Ian Murray seamus2001 at home.com
Fri Jun 1 18:31:26 PDT 2001



> >What are the hazards, what is the "mystical" fantasy,
> >and what is the "reformed" fantasy? As an example, I
> >think of the lingering protectionism, a species of
> >Americanism, in the labor movement. Is this a
> >mystical consciousness, with its racial and
> >nationalistic overtones--a fantasy obscuring real
> >common interests and thwarting organization?
> >
> >Alec
>
> You bet!
>
> Yoshie
============== Let's not forget the power of labor's employers to go clamoring for protection and then blame it on the labor movement when it's "successful" [and yes, labor has been protectionist too, to it's shame]. However, there are plenty of US economic nationalists who are free traders; witness the entire Realist school of international relations. The CIA, NSA, DOD, FBI, State Dept., Executive branch and Congress is run by nationalists/imperialists. It could not be any other way.

Now if "the left" wants to talk about class in a manner that thoroughly deconstructs the Westphalian model, I'm all for it; let's have boundaries of governance reconfigured in consonance with ecosystem "boundaries" [watersheds etc.] all the while facing up to the fact that democracy is scale sensitive in an institutional sense. Thus, organizing and consensus building have to deal with the hysteresis of: 1-simple ig-norance on the part of those classes who are struggling to survive 60 hour work weeks and more just to keep a roof over their head and have food and safe drinking water and 2-those capitalists who, while they may share our antipathies towards nationalism of any kind, nonetheless like the state as it exists to protect property etc.

Under any international trading regime, somebody is always already protected; the question is, as always, the terms of trade and the shifting of risks, exposures, freedoms, protections etc. Even a post-Westphalian trade regime with lots of governing institutions dealing with regional and global public goods would be protecting some group[s], somewhere, sometime. It's creating ever changing terms of trade in order to get, build and sustain some semblance of egalitarian improvements into the world market that is the staggering challenge of the 21st century.

Our binarism should no longer be free trade/protectionism. Rather it's imperialism-immiseration versus trade in the service of human freedom and healthy ecosystems and subordinated to democratic multilateral institutions with lots of communicational infrastructure/complementarities [to attenuate the adversarial dynamic at the heart of the quest for advantage]. How to organize around these simple thematics.........Starting with helping the South repudiate their "debt."

Ian

"From the point of view of the world as a whole, the negative effects of US import restrictions on efficiency are...around 1/4 of 1% of US GNP.

"To take the most extreme example, the cost to taxpayers of the savings and loan bailout alone will be at least five times as large as the annual cost to US consumers of all US import restrictions." [Paul Krugman page 126 of "The Age of Diminished Expectations" revised and updated edition, 1994, MIT Press]



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