[lbo-talk] Lula's party purges leftists in Brazil

Michael Dawson -PSU mdawson at pdx.edu
Mon Dec 15 16:20:49 PST 2003



> -Thank you, but it´s sad to see we are impotent to resist the market
> fundamentalism onslaught even if the people is tired of it (a recent
> poll in many LA countries showed that only 20% of people were satisfied
> with the market economy, in "wonderful" Chile this increased to 25%).

Personally, I think the left suffers because it has no big proposals to change the institutional situation. The answer is to launch public industries to challenge the worst private ones on their own turf. Mondragon, Spain could be one model to talk about.

The odds of being able to do big change, however, sink rapidly, the poorer the population of the country is. It's the old (hopefully not fatal) catch-22: Conditions make radicalism more likely in the periphery, but they also make it exponentially harder to implement.

My own belief is that the left should be readying itself to step in with big changes when the ecological crisis can no longer be pooh-poohed. That's maybe 20 years away?

My own guess is that the people who launched this money-grubbing system are the most likely ones to start progressively altering it 20-40 years from now -- the Europeans.



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