Just to come back on one or two points:
>." If there is something
>to Leslie Sklair's idea of a "transnational capitalist class" that is
>increasingly focused on producing and securing a domain of
>supranational law, then it is precisely "there" that we cannot afford
>not to focus on demanding global insitutions that respect democratic
>norms.
In addition to a transnational capitalist class which gets head hunted around the metropolitan heartlands, there is also a growing transnational intelligentsia. People with significant education in the emerging international culture, whose skills are transferable througout the capitalist world. While the intelligentsia usually serves the class in power perhaps 10% of it is temperamentally or intellectually radical. That could easily number 10 million people world wide, and they are highly likely to be internet users. We have every prospect of seizing ideological hegemony over the next ten years for truly radical democratic ideas.
> > The crunch for left-wingers is whether the best way of resisting US
> > hegemonism is to defend the rights of the nation state.
>==========
>
>No. It is to demand democratic norms of accountability in both
>national and supranational institutions and on the terrain of commerce
>[corporations] and industrial organization.
I might agree that this poses the question at a more constructive and higher level. History is moving fast and the battle lines and dilemmas at the time of the Kosovan war need to be seen in perspective. The strong section of left wing opinion that wanted to oppose US imperialism because it was imperialist per se, have witnessed Milosevic ending up detained at the Hague. It is undoubtedly manifestly unfair that Kissinger is not detained too, rather than pontificating about the end of the Peace of Westphalia but we live in a materialist world and power inequalities matter.
There are perhaps many good people on the left who may initially approach the present struggle as having similarities with the struggle against the Vietnam War. Of course there are some similarities but I think there are also important differences.
> How to cultivate an *ethos* of democracy
>that spills onto politics. Here we could take a clue from the claimed
>"victory" in the culture wars. Deepen the calls for the liberation all
>women and men irrespective of "race" and class and nationality. Not
>only equality before the law, but equality in the production of the
>law. This would mean calling political parties that cater to their
>financiers for what they are, protection rackets. We need to
>delgitimize the dominant *political parties* more than anything else,
>they only use the state as Jagdish Bhagwati puts it, "as the
>clearinghouse government approach to political economy." [Political
>Economy and International Economics, p. 155]. Torben Dyrberg goes into
>problematizing terms like "the public interest" and the like better
>than anything I've come across in a long time, as does David Held's
>critique of Joseph Schumpeter's view of the State in "Models of
>Democracy."
I do not know the range of literature to which you refer, but the connection that possibly exists with what makes sense to me is the following initially rather schematic approach. I see bourgeois democracy as based on narrow individualistic atomised bourgeois right.
Radicals and progressives however only have to emphasise rights in their actual social and often collective context, and they take on vital material aspects about access to resources, and control of the means of production to conform with social foresight.
>The NS ain't going away anytime soon, as Doug and others have pointed
>out, unless there is substantial collective action to bring it about.
>The forms of analyses, normative and otherwise, whereby people come to
>see the NS itself as a barrier to ending oppression is a process we
>should participate in vigorously and track closely.
Oddly or perhaps not so oddly, informed opinion is that Blair is going to go on the offensive in favour of joining the European currency, presumably to call the Conservative's bluff now that they so decisively lost the election despite their popularity on the euro, and perhaps because Blair has one of the best senses of how the interconnectivity of global politics means that Britain has to be a participant, and if you are Tony, most active player, in a global network. We must network even better.
>=========
>The US elite will never call for democracy as the left, saii,
>understands that concept, in the Middle East and Central Asia.
Sorry "saii"?
>Also,
>what is missing, and is a troublesome form of Western naivete, is how
>to get from Islamic theology and law which is the core of
>partiarchical oppression in many countries, to an *ethos* of
>democratic norms of equality. This means taking up Robert Cox's
>suggestion that Westerner's spend time studying Ibn Khaldun, a man
>considered a genius by many accounts,
One of the most urgent tasks is to gain a sympathetic understanding of the areas of convergence of some features of radical islam and left wing metropolitan politics. I suspect they lie in the sense in which islam may be promoted as a sort of primitive communist community. This wing of islam then needs an ideology, theory, and political strategy and tactics. And economics.
We must get to know the detail of this in order to make alliances faster than the USA can effectively network to get the ex-king of Afghanistan back on the throne.
Regards
Chris Burford