Monbiot

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Tue May 1 12:39:20 PDT 2001


[posted from non-sub'd address]

From: "Patrick Bond" <Patrick.Bond at brain.sn.apc.org> Date: Tue, 1 May 2001 21:38:41 +0000


> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com
> From: Chris Burford <cburford at gn.apc.org>
> Monbiot suggests
> >If we are to reverse world trade treaties, however, first we must seek to
> >democratise global decision-making. Perhaps we should envisage a world
> >parliament, rather like the European parliament, governing the activities
> >of global agencies.
> Clearly the developing global movement against global capitalism faces some
> difficult debates ahead.
> <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

Agreed that Monbiot is very impressive and genuinely nice. But I had some of those debates with him last Thursday over dinner at a mutual friend's house at Oxford. I vaguely recall him conceding that the "violence" at Seattle did a lot of good, in terms of getting noticed. And I even thought we'd agreed at the end of the evening that serious people cannot have illusions about reform the existing institutions of global economic domination; that the existing embryonic globo-state institutions had to be swept away before anything else was constructed internationally; and that on the tactics front we'd all prefer to be in a mass movement that was capable of carrying out formidable acts of exceptionally disruptive civil disobedience. I must have been drinking too much red wine.


> ... On an e-mail list like this one, there is of course no physical violence.
> But there can be psychological bullying. Would-be or self-proclaimed
> marxists who ridicule the idea of struggling for global reforms as by
> definition reformist, whether they be a Tobin tax, or reform of the IMF,
> are objectively arguing an anarchist position.

No. How many times do we have to go over this, comrade Chris... Some of us are arguing a position that is not anarchist, but that ridicules reformism because of prevailing power relations and because of the need to rebuild sovereignty at the nation-state scale in view of the international balance of forces.


> While talking about being revolutionary they actually have no material
> strategy for developing the world revolution in parallel in all centres of
> power in the world.

Sure we do: smash the global state. We also have a tactic: http://www.worldbankboycott.org

What's your problem with this?



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